Book: If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground

Overview

Lewis Grizzard’s If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground is a spirited, plainspoken memoir about ambition, place, and the pull of home. The title is a vow as much as a punch line: after chasing big-city success and getting chewed up by it, he swears fidelity to Georgia, the soil, the sounds, and the sensibilities that made his voice. Equal parts backstage newspaper chronicle and front-porch storytelling, the book traces how a small-town boy from Moreland found himself running a major sports section up North, lost his bearings, and rediscovered who he was by going back where he started.

The Story

Grizzard sketches his rise from University of Georgia newsroom prodigy to wunderkind executive sports editor at the Chicago Sun-Times while still in his early twenties. The promotion is a rocket ride: deadlines stacked like cordwood, big egos in a hard-bitten newsroom, and a city where the winters seem to last nine months and the vowels come clipped. He captures the bustle and chest-thumping bravado of Chicago sports, front offices, columnists, and fans who don’t mind telling you you’re wrong, then turns the lens on himself, a Southerner trying to sound like he belongs but missing the cadence of home.

The dissonance is cultural and personal. He battles staff politics, union flare-ups, and the constant pressure to manufacture tomorrow’s back page while keeping a fractious stable of writers in line. The job tests his marriages, his health, and his humor. Bit by bit, he realizes that success divorced from place can feel like failure. The fish-out-of-water set pieces land with warmth and bite: ordering grits that never arrive, trying to explain SEC football zeal to people who think Saturday is for raking leaves, learning that a newsroom can be loud without ever sounding like your people.

His return to Georgia is both retreat and revelation. Back at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he finds a column, and an audience, that fit. He writes about mothers and barbecue, football and front porches, dogs and doctors, and the fragile business of staying human in public. The vow to nail his feet down isn’t provincial defiance; it’s a declaration that voice is rooted in place. From there, the book widens into the rhythms of a syndicated life: airports and banquet halls, jokes told for supper, and the miracle of feeling seen by readers who sound like your neighbors.

Themes

Belonging sits at the center. Grizzard treats the North, South divide as comic fuel, but never as a sneer; he’s poking at the way place shapes manners, tastes, and the music of speech. Ambition is examined with hard-earned tenderness: the cost of chasing titles, the myth that geography can fix identity, the solace of going back. There’s also an insider’s tour of old-school newspapers, cigar smoke, copy desks, and the last loud age before laptops, rendered with a reporter’s eye for friction and a humorist’s ear for timing.

Style and Tone

The prose is quick-stepping and conversational, swinging between tall tale and confession. Grizzard’s humor is self-deprecating, often aimed at his own missteps, which lets the sentiment land without syrup. He can be barbed, but he is rarely cruel; the jokes are levers for memory, not cudgels.

Legacy

The book reads as a signature statement of who Grizzard was and why he mattered: a columnist who made regional particulars feel universal, and a storyteller who understood that home is not a zip code but a way of hearing the world.