Upon Further Review

Thanks to modern technology that allows us to zip newspaper pages in electronic form across the mountain for its eventual printing, the night Waynesboro beat Turner Ashby up in Bridgewater we had an early deadline. We got the paper out and went home.

By the time I reached Greenville, I had a voice mail on my cell phone. (Hey, I drive with the music loud which makes it tough to hear a phone that is always on vibrate). It was from Jim Critzer and it wasn’t a nice message.

I’ll spare you the gory details and won’t quote the vinegar-lipped coach verbatim, but it went something along the lines that he couldn’t get a hold of anybody in the office, he let me know how he felt about it and then let me know what he felt about me and, though I don’t quite remember, probably included where I could put my cell phone. End of story.

Tried calling him back that night, but only got his machine. He called me back the next morning and only apologized for the tone of his voice mail, not for the message itself.

“I just thought these kids deserved some credit for what they did,“ he told me the next day, with a cooler head and a much sweeter tone. “I take care of my guy.“

There you go folks. He took care of his guys.

Critzer, who resigned from his post as the Little Giants skipper on Wednesday, did things his way. No doubt about that. He got fired up at me countless times during my sports editor days when one of the writers working for me walked up to his players after a loss and started to interview them.

“Buddy,“ he told me (he tended to call me Buddy, well, when he called me something I could print), “[the reporters] have got to ask me if they can talk to the guys.“

Fair enough. We did what he asked and his answer was always a quick, “Sure. Go ahead.“ He just wanted to know. That’s all. Can’t fault a man for that.

Critzer never closed a single practice and would look at me from under his sunglasses, shake his head and smile whenever I would just show up at the KC, sit in the metal bleachers and watch the team work for a few minutes, all the while jotting down notes for an eventual column or blog post. But he protected his players like a bulldog. After four years you soon found out, as assistant coach Gary Weatherholtz put it, Critzer’s back was a lot worse than his bite.

But, man, that bark was loud. And when you’re a sports columnist, he sometimes kept you up all night with his barking. We managed to have a good sports editor-coach relationship. We talked usually more than once a week during the season. Most of the time was spent talking about his team and state baseball in general (he did, after all, pick Powhatan to win the whole thing if his team couldn’t’ beat them), we did spend some time just BSing about the world we live in and life in general. Sometimes we chatted about the struggles of youth, something he genuinely took a keen interest in because, well when you’re a high school coach, you’re dealing with youth every day.

And that’s what made Critzer a sports writer’s dream. When you cover preps, for the most part, quotes are vanilla. Coaches, too worried about what parents and administrators will think, sometimes seem afraid to give you any more than a “Well, we tried hard,“ after a loss. Nah, with Critzer you got what you would expect to get a MLB manager. With Critzer you didn’t have to be a glorified ad salesman in Staunton dreaming up controversy to get more Web hits. (You know, like some “sports writer” did to a high school senior named Devon Brown.) Critzer got you the Web hits, you know, because what he said was always worth its weight in gold and, more likely, TNT.

If his boys stunk, he would say they stunk. If they played like crap, he would say, “We played like crap.“

Critzer took a beating from parents in this city his first year on the job for doing just that, despite leading the Little Giants to a Region II berth. He never seemed to mind one bit, only expressing his frustration over it once—in that first year—when he confided in me that he really thought about giving it up then.

Good thing he didn’t. Right Waynesboro?

And another thing: Really? Terry Waters was fired from Fort Defiance? When did this happen. Oh, I don’t know about two weeks ago. Yeah, thanks for the news update guys.

OK, forget Tim Williams and the rest of the clowns on the City Council, but whenever the Generals’ Brandon Sizemore wants to run for Mayor of Waynesboro is fine by me. And he’d probably win a council seat in a landslide.

What, really. Terry Waters was fired by Fort Defiance? Man, what paper have I been reading?

Seriously, maybe it’s because Lawrence Nesselrodt has more class than I do (or he’s just too much of an aw-shucks country kind of guy) but if were him, every time I see the Staunton Braves lose to a team like lowly Woodstock in the Valley League, I’m laughing my butt off.

Hey, did you hear? Terry Waters was fired. Wow. Breaking news.

Hey Giantdom, you miss Jim Critzer yet? Don’t worry, you will. And, more importantly, the players he loved like his own will too.