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TECH GUY AT HEART
The Dr. Gene Hauck Golden Tornado scholarship is awarded to a football player who is considering a career in medicine. Allen Hauck
By Simit Shah
A
Allen Hauck didn’t attend Georgia Tech, but you’d never know it. “People always assume that I did, and most of the time I don’t correct them,” he laughed. “I almost feel like an alum from spending so much time there and knowing so many people.” His ties to the Institute started with his father Gene, who played fullback at Tech under William Alexander in the late 1920’s. The elder Hauck later attended medical school at Emory and became a prominent surgeon in Atlanta. Before he passed away in 1999, Dr. Hauck was the last remaining member of the 1928 Rose Bowl team. As a youngster, Allen Hauck got to experience Bobby Dodd’s football teams up close thanks to his father’s connections. “My dad had season tickets in the west stands, but he also got two lettermen’s tickets,” he said. “These were temporary seats down on the track, and I got to sit down there most games, usually with an Emory intern and later with my kid brother. I saw great players like (Leon) Hardeman, (Billy) Teas and George and Larry Morris. And I vaguely remember that national championship (in 1952).” “I had three heroes growing up,” he added. “One was my dad, of course. The second was Coach Dodd. My other hero was Jeb Stuart, the Confederate cavalryman who gave the Yankees fits.” Hauck attended Marist, which was a full military school at the time. He thought about following in his father’s footsteps, but he was advised to stay away from North Avenue. “I would have gone to Tech, but there were too many math courses involved,” he laughed. “Just say I was never a threat to have a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from my watch chain. “I figured I’d better go to Emory, the lesser of two evils, but only because of calculus and the like.” While his intention was to go pre-med, Hauck found an early obstacle in organic chemistry. “Yeah, there’s that math thing again.” He was then bitten by the journalism bug and started working for Emory’s and later Georgia State’s student paper. That led to a job interview at the Atlanta
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The Buzz
Constitution with sports editor Jesse Outlar. A few weeks later, he was brought on as an intern. Hauck was willing to do whatever was needed, and his role quickly grew. “I was 20 and working full-time at night at the paper,” he remembered. “I was paring down my class schedule and covering high school football. I went from there to cover just about everything else.” “Everything else” included Georgia Tech, Georgia, the U.S. Open, the Masters and more, as Hauck became a fixture on the local sports media scene for the next eight years. “I’d go over to Tech practice and sit with Coach Dodd under the tower,” he recalled. “It was just great, some of the best times of my life. Of course, people at the paper knew I was a Tech guy at heart, but that wasn’t a big deal. Heck, most of them went to Georgia.” One year, he arranged to sit with Dodd during the spring game and capture his thoughts. “I think we spent more time talking about bass fishing than we did on what was going on down on the field,” he said. “Ergo, I’m sure I turned in a less than sterling report. A couple of weeks later Coach Dodd offered me a job. I was very tempted and often wondered, what if...” Hauck would cover Tech football under Dodd, Bud Carson and Bill Fulcher and basketball under Whack Hyder. “Coach Hyder,” Hauck said. “What a great guy!” The Carson years were turbulent ones. “One day Bud was unhappy with one of my stories and took a swing at me but a couple of assistant coaches clamped down on him before he got hurt,” he remembered. Later that year he broke the story of Carson’s dismissal. “Bud called me a couple of weeks later and told me he had been hired as the Steelers’ defensive coordinator,” Hauck chuckled. “Pretty good story, huh? I guess we made up.” Hauck moved to the news side of the paper in 1972. He eventually became the news editor and was on duty for historic events. “On my first night as ‘the news editor’ Patty Hearst was captured,” he said. His more memorable front pages included Hank Aaron’s record-breaking home run, the death of Elvis Presley and Jimmy Carter’s presi-
dential victory. “After the paper went to bed on election night, we went over to Carter’s party at the World Congress Center,” he said. “There were thousands of people there, including John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. We talked for a while. Dan was nice, but Belushi, well, let’s just say he was aloof.” After he moved out of sports, he reconnected with Georgia Tech and helped keep defensive charts and perform sideline duties for 14 years. He eventually purchased season tickets in the upper west stands. Through his role at the paper, Hauck was also responsible for the meeting that led to Dodd’s autobiography. He suggested to the features editor that he send reporter Jack Wilkinson over to catch up with Dodd and write about his retirement. The two hit it off and decided to collaborate on “Dodd’s Luck,” which was published in 1988. Hauck left the AJC in 2002, and he and his wife Cathy live in Sautee Nacoochee in the north Georgia mountains near Unicoi Park and Lake Burton. Some of their patio furniture is fashioned from the old east stands wooden benches. “Tech was in the process of replacing them with aluminum ones, so a Tech coach and I went over there and chiseled through the old bolts and carted off a dozen or so,” he said. “I had two benches made. I kept one and gave the other one to my dad.” Hauck recently endowed a scholarship to honor his father. The Dr. Gene Hauck Golden Tornado scholarship will be awarded annually to a football player who is considering a career in medicine. “My dad never talked much about his football exploits but did have a lot to say about his teammates,” Hauck explained. “By the time I was a pre-teen I could just about name everyone on the 1928 Rose Bowl team. Dad was a ‘scrub’ on that team but started at fullback the next year. “He did joke, ‘There was a headline in one of the Atlanta papers – the Georgian I think – that said Hauck to Start, Tech to Lose.’ I thought it was funny back then and even funnier now.” ■