Kim King's Tales From The Georgia Tech Sideline

In Tales from the Georgia Tech Sideline, former Georgia Tech star quarterback Kim King shares stories from his unique half-century involvement with Yellow Jackets football. As a child growing up in Atlanta, King watched coach Bobby Dodd's great Tech teams of the 1950s play in historic Grant Field. The Jackets were the team and sporting event in town, a social event on autumn afternoons well before major league professional sports came to Atlanta in the '60s. A highly recruited high school quarterback, King went to Tech and became the star quarterback from 1965-67. "The Young Left-Hander," as late Tech radio announcer Al Ciraldo called King, led the Jackets to two bowl games, including the 1967 Orange Bowl. He was Bobby Dodd's last quarterback and one of Dodd's all-time favorite players. The Hall of Fame coach retired after the 1966 season. King's involvement with Tech football did not end with his graduation. In 1974 he joined Ciraldo in the radio booth as Tech's color commentator. King has seen and called it all for the last three decades. In the book he details Tech's struggles after Dodd's retirement; the colorful and turbulent Pepper Rodgers years; Bill Curry's painful first coaching steps back at his alma mater before restoring Tech to prominence in the mid-'80s; and the two awful seasons Bobby Ross endured before the historic 1990 breakthrough, culminating in Georgia Tech's fourth national championship. Following Bill Lewis's disastrous tenure in the early '90s, George O'Leary revived Tech football yet again before his controversial departure for Notre Dame led to Chan Gailey's arrival on The Flats. King was in frigid Boise, Idaho, last January, when P.J. Daniels ran wild in theHumanitarian Bowl once an overnight snowfall had been plowed from the field. In routing Texas-El Paso, Georgia Tech regained its status as the winningest bowl team in college football. Kim King has seen many of those bowl victories and nearly all of the last 50 years of Tech football. He shares those memories, along with his personal reminiscences of Tech players and coaches, triumphs and travails, in Tales from the Georgia Tech Sideline.