Excepting those once-yearly occasions when it turns to a certain aging sports writer (blush, blush) to misinform it on the best NCAA tournament bracket picks (Arizona? Really?), the Chattanooga Quarterback Club usually delivers a slam dunk with its speakers each Monday at Finley Stadium.
High-profile coaches such as Pat Summitt, athletes such as Gerald Riggs Sr. and Rick Honeycutt, and media types such as Eli Gold all have entertained the club in the past with both wit and wisdom during the weekly lunches.
But rarely has a more important speaker been asked to address the club than Andrew Maraniss, who arrives in town Monday to promote his book, "Strong Inside -- Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South."
For those old enough to remember the turbulent 1960s, Wallace was the Southeastern Conference's first scholarshipped black basketball player, the Nashville Pearl standout starring on Vanderbilt's varsity teams in the winters of 1968, '69 and '70.
To give a glimpse of the deeply disturbing path he traveled, we'll turn to the book's page 162, Maraniss describing the visitors' locker room at Mississippi State that Wallace and fellow black player Godfrey Dillard entered before their freshman team game on Feb. 27, 1967.
Wrote Maraniss: "They took stock of their surroundings and believed that what they saw and what they smelled were directed squarely at them, a pair of unwanted guests: toilets overflowing with excrement, towels scattered everywhere across a dirty floor."
Once dressed, the pair was welcomed to State's New Gym with the N-word and shouts of, "We're going to kill you! We're going to lynch you! Why didn't you go to (predominantly black) Jackson State where you belong?"
Said Wallace in the book: "Not that high-class bigotry is worthy of praise, but these guys at Mississippi State were just low-class, crude, ignorant rednecks."
But in one of those "Twilight Zone" moments that makes you wonder about a master plan, Wallace's Pearl High team had won Tennessee's first integrated state championship over Memphis Treadwell on the same March 19, 1966, night that Texas Western's all-black starting five beat all-white Kentucky in the NCAA title game.
Perhaps because of that, Wallace somehow stuck it out for three seasons past that night in Starkville, graduating with an engineering degree in 1970 and later becoming a lawyer at the United States Department of Justice. He is now a professor at American University's Washington College of Law, where he specializes in environmental law, corporate law and finance.
For those reasons and more, when Maraniss went searching for a term paper topic in a Black History class during his sophomore year at Vanderbilt in 1989, he chose Wallace as his subject, paying particular attention to that freshman road trip at Mississippi State 22 years earlier.
"I'd interviewed Perry for the term paper," recalled Maraniss, who later served as Vanderbilt's sports information director for men's basketball before becoming the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays' first media relations director.
"In 2006 I decided to approach him about writing the book. Surprisingly, he remembered me. He told me, 'You 'quote-unquote' got it.'"
It took eight years from that conversation to get the book to print, however, its creation no doubt slowed by Maraniss's day job at Nashville's McNeely Pigot and Fox Public Relations firm, as well as the onset of parenthood for him and Alison. Daughter Eliza and son Charlie arrived during the creative process.
"I researched it for four years, interviewing over 80 people," Maraniss said. "Then it took four years to write it."
All you need to know about the quality of the finished product comes from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, who said of the book, "In a magnificently reported, nuanced, but raw story of basketball and racism in the South, Andrew Maraniss tells the story of Perry Wallace's struggle, loneliness, perseverance and eventual self-realization. A rare story about physical and intellectual courage that is both shocking and triumphant."
Maraniss had his own Pulitzer winner to help him polish his first book. His father David won journalism's most prestigious honor in 1993 for his coverage of the first Bill Clinton presidential campaign. He later shared a Pulitzer with other Washington Post reporters for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings.
"But my mother (Linda) did most of the editing," young Maraniss said. "My dad would give me advice if I asked, but he mostly kept his distance."
The 468-page book has remained on the New York Times list of best-selling sports books for months. It has sent Maraniss to book signings as far away as New York City, Austin, Texas, and Tucson, Ariz. It has earned him an appearance on ESPN commentator Keith Olbermann's talk show and placed him on a panel that included NBA greats Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, Chauncey Billups, Bob Lanier and Vince Carter, as well as Sam Moore of "Sam and Dave" fame, during Martin Luther King weekend festivities in Memphis this year.
It also has deepened his respect for Wallace, whom he calls "the smartest, kindest, most sensitive person anyone could ever meet. It really pains you to know how people once treated him only because of the color of his skin."
But now that his first book is such a resounding success, Maraniss is struggling with what to do for an encore.
"If anybody in Chattanooga has an idea for a book," he chuckled over the phone late Wednesday night, "tell them to come by and let me know."
(Note: The Quarterback Club charges $4 admission, or $10 including lunch, in the Stadium Club on the 20th Street side of Finley Stadium.)
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.