By John Frierson
Staff Writer

Loran Smith still remembers his best time in the mile: 4:22. He still remembers running barefoot on a track back in high school in Wrightsville, Ga. At 87 years old, Smith remembers plenty — more than most of us will ever know.

“I don’t feel any different,” Smith said of getting older. “I guess my sleep habits and my age remind me that the birthdays are really counting up.”

As of Sept. 1, Smith is technically (and temporarily) retired from the UGA Athletic Association. The man who arrived at the University of Georgia in the fall of 1956, who has had about a dozen jobs in and around the athletic department in the many decades since, the first being a student worker for the legendary Dan Magill in the Sports Information office, he’s not really going anywhere.

Smith still has much that he wants to do, from writing columns and books to fundraising to his radio show, “Sports Conversations with Loran Smith,” that’s broadcast all over the state on Saturdays ahead of Georgia football games. And he will continue to do so, though on a slightly more limited basis.

“If Dan Magill is the greatest Bulldog ever, Loran’s pretty close behind,” said former longtime head of Georgia’s Sports Communications department, Claude Felton, whose official title was Loran Smith Senior Associate Athletic Director. Felton retired in January 2024, after 45 years on the job, and soon after returned to work in the athletic department in a more limited role.

In 2021, Smith celebrated 50 years as a member of the Georgia football radio crew. He was the first sideline reporter the Bulldogs ever had, the smooth-voiced complement to Larry Munson’s iconic gravelly delivery.

Growing up on a cotton farm, Smith learned about hard work at a very young age. He didn’t dream of a writing or radio career, or even of running track for Georgia. They all came about organically. The writing really started after a trip to Washington, D.C., and New York at the end of his senior year of high school. Smith, who was headed to UGA to study agriculture, wound up writing about the trip for the local paper, The Wrightsville Headlight. “We all called it the Taillight,” Smith joked.

“Once I wrote that three-part series, and it got a lot of attention, the girl I was dating at the time, she said, ‘What are you doing going to Georgia and studying farm stuff? That stuff you wrote for the paper is great,'” Smith recalled. “That’s when I began to think about journalism.”

Smith had run track in high school and was a solid runner, but he didn’t arrive in Athens thinking he would walk into Forrest “Spec” Towns’ office and ask for a shot at running for the Bulldogs. “I didn’t know anything about running the mile. I’d run a bunch of them in high school, some barefoot, and Spec and I really hit it off,” Smith said.

The walk-on was the track team MVP in 1959, after his junior year, and a team captain as a senior. Smith may be as nice and engaging as anyone in the state, but he does have a competitive side. He’s still ticked off about a race at LSU, during which the runners were “bunched up like race horses” and he got pushed off the track.

“That really, really bugged me,” he said. “That was my inexperience showing.”

Some of Smith’s first major journalism experiences came in the summer of 1960, when he was an intern for the Associated Press in Atlanta. “I learned the facts of life from those crusty old bastards,” he said with a smile. “The people in the office there weren’t going to cut me any slack.”

Few people in sports or anywhere have had Smith’s experiences over the past 60 years. He’s covered or attended every major Georgia event, he’s developed a close connection with Augusta National Golf Club and written numerous books about The Masters, he’s been to Wimbledon, the French Open, and so many of golf’s Open Championships that he’s developed close friendships with people all over the world.

In 1997, Smith was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame, with whom he had worked for many years and is a former chairman. He didn’t really want to be inducted, feeling like “halls of fame are for athletes and coaches,” but over the years, he’s come to really appreciate the honor. He’s also been honored by numerous other groups, and has his name attached to a lot of things, from the top Sports Communications position at Georgia to the Loran Smith Center for Cancer Support at the Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center, and the Loran and Myrna Smith Lobby in the Indoor Athletic Facility, which celebrates Smith’s many years associated with Georgia athletics, as well as he and his wife Myrna’s many contributions to UGA.

“He and Myrna are probably the greatest host and hostesses for people coming into Athens that I know about,” Felton said. “He’s had some very famous people stay at his house on football weekends.”

Last Friday, Wrightsville’s most famous Bulldog, Herschel Walker, the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner and one of the greatest college football players ever, was inducted into Georgia’s Circle of Honor. As great as Walker was, as recognizable as he surely still is in all 159 counties in the state, few have had the impact that Smith has. 

One person especially grateful for Smith’s many decades of work sharing the stories of Bulldogs far and wide is Jason Hasty, the UGA Athletics History Specialist at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

“Loran has contributed to the University of Georgia — and the community — in so many ways through the years that it’s easy to overlook the important role he plays in preserving the history of UGA athletics,” Hasty said. “Loran is passionate about preserving the history of our athletics programs, and his wonderful gift of making friends with everyone he meets has been vital in learning the stories of generations of our coaches and athletes.

“So much of what we know about the development of athletics at the UGA and the experience of coaches and athletes is in no small part due to Loran’s efforts.”

There was only one Dan Magill. And there is only one Loran Smith. Nobody did more for the Georgia Bulldogs, and maybe the University of Georgia as a whole, than those two writers, promoters, fundraisers and so much more.

Georgia football coach Kirby Smart is someone Smith greatly admires, and not just because of his skill as a coach and the two national championships he’s brought to a fan base starving for a title. Smith is “such a big Kirby aficionado,” as he put it, because Smart loves Georgia the way Smith always has and the way Magill, who died in 2014 at age 92, did for almost a century.

“I just love Kirby Smart because Georgia is everything to him — Georgia and his family,” Smith said. “Those are the two biggest things in his life. It’s not easy to do what he has done and is doing.”

Smith is not disappearing into retirement — not at all. It’s not in his nature, for starters, and he still has books to write, fundraising he wants to do, and so much more. At the end of a 45-minute interview in his office last Thursday, it was Smith who had somewhere to be; he needed to catch the end of football practice to talk with Smart about an idea he had.

More than 60 years after running that really fast mile, the man still knows how to get around.

Assistant Sports Communications Director John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men’s Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files.