CRESCENT People: John Boyanoski — New Books, Statues of SC Mayors, and a Bigger State Football Rivalry than Carolina / Clemson?

Are you going to do a follow-up to Palmetto Pigskin History to kind of catch up to where we are now?

I would love to do maybe five years from now and adding five years, the last five years.  I went all the way to 2010 for the book.  There are a lot of great stories, maybe more like the color of it.  Some of the things that are just fascinating, there are so many stories I had to skip over.  So many stories, great players that highlights the kind of love affair that South Carolina has with the sport.  So, yeah, I would love to do a follow-up at some point.

Maybe transitioning to college ball?

No, there have been a lot of books written about college ball.  Obviously, Clemson vs. Carolina is a great, great rivalry.

But you’ve got smaller schools.  You’ve got the Woffords. You’ve got the PCs. You’ve got The Citadel.

There is.  Actually, if I had a book I’d love to write…I don’t know if it would sell anything…but Newberry and Presbyterian had a long-time rivalry for…they called it the Bronze Derby.  And it was a grudge match…who would win this Bronze Derby at the end of the year.  It was a fantastic thing and the games were good but the players who were coached at Newberry and Presbyterian, since they both had big education departments, a lot of those players became coaches so you see a lot of the great coaches in South Carolina high school football history all went to Newberry or Presbyterian.

It’s actually…I’ve always wanted to trace back some of these teams and it was like, who was the smartest team ever?  There was a team in the 40s at Presbyterian who had five guys who either became high school coaches or head coaches.  They all played on the same Presbyterian team. It was John McKissick, Callie Gault, Barney Sasser — whom I think was a coach at Wofford in the 70s and 80s — and there were two other guys. They were all teammates.  Moonie Player who was the long-time Lower Richland coach and also became USC’s coach, at one point.   They were all on the same team.  So it is a fascinating thing.

And then Newberry in the early ‘80s had guys like Doug Shaw, Jr., Chris Miller over at Presbyterian.  There were three or four other guys.  I think Jeff Kent played at Newberry at the same time together.  They all became very successful head coaches at the high school level, as well.

So there is a proving ground among the smaller colleges in the state.

And then those are the guys that you never hear anything about.

Exactly.  They are the ones who became coaches and took over these.

So what are you working on?

I’m working, right now, a history book on modern downtown Greenville.  A lot of people look at Greenville, and they see the transformation.  They see Main Street. They see the bridge (suspension bridge at Falls Park). They see the park, and tourists now come into Greenville and the Upstate and say, “Well, how did this happen?”

I want to write a book about that.  I’m working on it.  Struggling with it, trying to get everything in there to make it a fun and interesting book.  It’s a great story.  It just didn’t happen overnight.  It wasn’t some miracle, someone snapped their fingers and Main Street revitalized.  It took a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of vision to make Greenville better so that’s the new book I’m working on.

It’s interesting because even though the revitalization started in mid-70s, it took a long time.  I have a friend who remembered going to their prom the last year before the Poinsett shut down as a hotel.  Their prom was in the ballroom there for Greenville High.  It was so sketchy. It was like, “Why are we here?”  It was really bad and I have friends who grew up in the ‘80s in Greenville and this is the place you went when you were a hoodlum.  I had a friend who told me…I hate to keep picking on the poor Poinsett…they remember it as the big dare when you were in high school in the mid-‘80s was, “Let’s break into the Poinsett Hotel and see what happens.”  You’d break in and go up and down the building.

Now you look at it, and you can’t imagine it being not great.  I remember when I moved here. Where we worked, you didn’t cross the Main Street bridge.  You didn’t go into the West End after dark.  That was a no-man’s land.

That bridge. You didn’t cross the bridge.

I can’t remember the first time…we were coming out of work at The Greenville News and we were going to go to the Warehouse Theater and see a 10:00 show, so we stayed late. We met back up.  It was so eerily silent.  You could see people way up on the other side of Main Street, but as we got farther down the West End, there was no one there.  No lights were on.   The sidewalks were nice but there was nothing open. It was just really weird walking over there.  Now, everyone goes to the West End.  It’s part of the fabric of Greenville.

Now there’s a downtown baseball stadium there, too.

People forget that downtown was like a last option.  They wanted to put it at I-385 and I-85 at The Point.  That was a project that got green lit, and, for a long time, there was talk of just rebuilding the former Greenville Braves stadium.

Truth be told, that’s what the Braves wanted for the longest time.  It literally was like, “Hey, we need some renovations out here,” and it grew to, “We don’t want a new stadium, just renovate the one we have. We’ll be happy.” Then it took so long for them to renovate, it became, “Why don’t we get a new stadium?  Why doesn’t something happen?”  Their first choice was always renovate the existing stadium.

If my grandfather weren’t dead, the fact that Greenville turned into an American League town would kill him.

Yes, having a Red Sox affiliate…but they’ve done well.  And that’s a perfect example. People predicted it was going to be the end of the world when they tore down the old Camperdown driving bridge.  The world was going to end. The world was going to tilt off her axis, and we were going to hurl off into space.  Now, you can’t image a bridge being there.

Charleston will build monuments to Mayor Joe (Riley). Columbia will dedicate a fair number of things to Mayor Bob (Coble) and probably Mayor Steve Benjamin. How long before Greenville builds the Mayor Knox White statues?

Where do you build the Knox statue?  I remember years ago when they first broke ground on what is now Poinsett Corners.  The first time we had anything off Main Street.  I remember going to the thing. It’s all black and gold.  He’s a Wake Forest guy, and I asked, “So they did this for you?” He said, “No, no, no.”  That’s where the Knox statue goes. Poinsett Corners. Like Knox looking west. That’s the Knox statue.  I called it eight years ago, so maybe when I get rich enough, I can lead the campaign.

For Part 1, Click HERE.