D I A N A N YA D 7 1C It seems Diana Nyad 71C has a daredevil streak that can be traced all the way back to, well, Emory. As a sophomore, the star swimmer tried to parachute out the fourthfloor window of her dorm, a stunt that led to her dismissal from school. In an interview with Elle magazine last May—before her fourth unsuccessful attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida—Nyad explained: “It was going to be a feat. Something to do. I just went down to the local army and navy store to buy a parachute; I didn’t know anything. And then the parachute didn’t open. . . .” Nyad hit the reset button on college, graduating from Lake Forest in 1973. She went on to a puzzle-piece career as a journalist and writer, and later, a sports-business commentator. A lesbian who has spoken about being sexually abused as a teenager, Nyad is a frequent motivational speaker and was invited to give a TEDMED talk last year. But she’s best known as a distance swimmer who has set numerous records, most notably for the fastest swim around Manhattan (seven hours, 57 minutes) in 1975 and for the longest-ever nonstop swim without a wetsuit in 1979. “What interests me about marathon swimming is that it tests the human spirit,” she wrote in her 1978 book Other Shores. “It is a sport of extremes.”
C A R L H I A A S E N 74 C A native of Plantation, Florida, writer Carl Hiaasen 74C came to Emory after high school in 1970. He studied English literature here for two years and was described by professors as a good student. He also began to develop his trademark irreverent style as a frequent contributor of satirical humor columns to the Emory Wheel. It seems his penchant for mischief didn’t end there; according to a 2002
office hits spawning best-selling novelizations. Grimwood’s time-loop twist did eventually turn up in a different movie, though—the Harold Ramis comedy Groundhog Day, a film about a boorish TV weatherman stuck reliving February second. The film strikes many of the same chords as Replay and has won a cult following of its own. While it is frequently cited as an “inspiration,” Replay appears nowhere in the film’s credits. Ken Grimwood died (in all likelihood just the once) in . A film lover with decidedly cinematic sensibilities, he did not live to see any of his novels translated to film. Ironically, several more recent comedies have riffed on some of the themes he so effectively explored 28
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article in the Wheel, Hiaasen joined Ira Luft 74C as the only two male contestants in the 1972 “Miss Emory” contest in an effort to discredit the pageant—which Luft, in fact, won. In a 2001 interview with the University of Florida (UF) for its libraries’ oral history collection, Hiaasen described why he transferred to UF in fall 1973: “I knew I wanted to go into newspapers at the time, and Emory didn’t have a journalism program.” Indeed, Hiaasen went on to a long career with the Miami Herald, where he remains a columnist, and has written more than fifteen novels, including the Newbery Honor Award–winning children’s book Hoot. “I greatly enjoyed my time at Emory, especially my bachelor party in the basement of the Sigma Nu house,” he said in a recent email message to Emory Magazine. “Seriously, it’s a terrific school, and I wouldn’t have left except for a journalism degree.”
SCOOTER BR AUN 04C At Emory, Scott “Scooter” Braun 04C launched a career by throwing parties. Not frat parties, mind you, or dorm-basement keggers— real parties, epic parties, with lights and smoke and the edgiest music, the kind of parties where people line up outside behind velvet rope to get in. And by “people,” we mean record-label insiders, sports stars, rap artists like Usher and Ludacris—that’s the kind of crowd Braun was bringing in when he was twenty years old. Small wonder he quit Emory to go into the entertainment management business (a move that reportedly made his parents, a pair of dentists from Greenwich, Connecticut, uneasy). A few years later, Braun had started his own Atlanta company, SB Projects, when he happened upon a twelve-year-old on YouTube whose homemade music video made him stop and look again. “My gut went crazy,” Braun told Greenwich Magazine in 2010. “He had that tone in his voice, he could play multiple instruments, he could dance. I basically tracked him and his mother down in the next forty-eight hours and flew them down to Atlanta on my own dime. It was the first plane ride either had been on.” That kid, whom Braun has managed ever since, was Justin Bieber—perhaps you’ve heard of him.—P.P.P.
in , including the television series Do-Over, and the films Going on () and Seventeen Again (). Interest in the novel has also seen a recent revival. Replay seems to be hard to forget, and to resonate particularly powerfully with men of a certain age. Ben Affleck was toying with the picture in (he moved on to a different, obliquely science-fictional period project, Argo, instead). Most recently, industry scuttlebutt has Robert Zemeckis, of Back to the Future fame, eyeing the adaptation. There would be some symmetry in this: Zemeckis has a track record with history-hopping dramas—he did give the world the film version of Forrest Gump—and his most recent film, Flight, was shot here in Atlanta.
It would be nice to see Emory host such a production, should it come to fruition, since the college clearly made so indelible an impression that Grimwood’s avatar is compelled to return here, life after life, just as the book’s many fans return to Replay time and again— drawn by that compelling desire to go back to the crossroads that set the course. For many of us, college may be that crossroads. But despite its supernatural premise and occasional kookiness, Grimwood’s is at bottom a story of an ordinary human being learning how to live his life. It’s a process we all have to grapple with. Hopefully, most of us won’t need a couple hundred extra years and a whole lot of dying to get it right.
N YA D : C O U R T E S Y D I A N A N YA D ; H I A A S E N : C O U R T E S Y C A R L H I A A S E N
Atlanta, Massell is credited with establishing MARTA and cultivating opportunities for minorities in city government. In 1988, he founded the Buckhead Coalition, a private business organization, which he continues to lead.