By golly, they did it. The Gainesville Red Elephants can finally lay claim to being state football champions. And it wasn’t even close. The Class AAAAA title came via a 49-13 thumping of Ware County this past Saturday at the Georgia Dome. This, after having gotten to the state finals six other times only to come out the bridesmaid.

The team’s success — and let us not forget the hard work of Coach Bruce Miller and his staff — is a testimonial to never quitting, never giving up. The championship is also a relief to me because I was beginning to think that maybe I was a jinx. Let me explain.

Many years ago, two friends and I began a company called Sports Specials. Jim Wesley, Jimmy Bridges and I were colleagues at WSB Radio in Atlanta and thought it might be fun to do some freelance sports broadcasting and maybe make a few bucks as well.

Our first client was the Atlanta International Raceway. This was before national television sanitized NASCAR. It was the heyday of former moonshiners who let off steam on weekends by running flat-out around an oval track rather than through the hills of North Georgia with the law in pursuit. This was the era of Lee Petty (Richard’s father), Buck Baker (Buddy’s father) Junior Johnson, Fireball Roberts and other assorted rough characters.

I am amused today to see television reporters interviewing articulate drivers as they sit in their automobiles during a televised NASCAR race. Not like the early days.

Because I was the biggest of our group, I was assigned to interview the drivers in the pit. I was told that was because if some little guy stuck a microphone in the face of Fireball Roberts after he had blown an engine and lost a chance to win some money, he was liable to insert said microphone where the sun didn’t shine. It was like volunteering for a suicide mission.

After getting our NASCAR gig, Sports Specials branched out into high school football broadcasts. My friend, the late John Jacobs, hired us to do the Gainesville football games for WDUN. What Mr. Jacobs didn’t know and I didn’t tell him until years later was that when he brought us on board, we had never broadcast a winning game.

For two years, we had done Cherokee High School football games. They had lost every game — 0-20 over two years. It got so bad that when Gainesville came to visit Cherokee, quarterback Preston Ridlehuber, who is still one of the finest athletes I have ever seen on a football field, spent most of the night punting on first down to try and keep the score manageable.

As much as we felt for the kids in Canton, it was a relief to get to Gainesville with its storied reputation for winning under Coach Graham Hixon. Ridlehuber was at the University of Georgia by this time but the Red Elephants were still full of talent.

The quarterback was Charles Gignilliat. I remember this because broadcast crews from the other schools would invariably ask us how to pronounce his name. It was, as many of you know “Jin-latt.” If we didn’t like their attitude, however, we would tell them it was “Gig-nill-iat” and listen to them stumble over their tongues for four quarters.

The team went 11-1 and 6-3-2 while we were there. We were sure the guys would win a state championship during our tenure but, alas, it was not to be.

I left WSB to join Southern Bell and that ended the glorious days and nights of Sports Specials but not my warm feelings for the Gainesville Red Elephants. As the years rolled by, I followed the team from a distance and rooted for them vicariously. Hixon left Gainesville for Woodward Academy and, ironically, coached my son there. He was replaced by the legendary Bobby Gruhn, who took Gainesville to four state title games, unfortunately losing each of them but none by more than seven points.

Had Sports Specials jinxed the program? Had the fact that we had broadcast 20 straight losing games before arriving in Gainesville somehow poisoned the air like an insidious gas and cost the team several state championships? When Peach County beat the Red Elephants for the title in 2009 by one point, I was sure of it. I had no choice but to sneak into City Park Stadium one night, spread some incense and utter a few mysterious chants in hopes of breaking the curse.

Fortunately, the 2012 team has taken care of that matter for me. What a relief! So, maybe I was not a jinx to Gainesville High after all. Plus, while Fireball Roberts never liked nosy reporters who wanted to know why his engine smoked like a cheap cigar, neither did he ever stick my microphone where the sun doesn’t shine. Now, I can die a happy man.

Dick Yarbrough is a North Georgia resident whose column appears Saturdays and at gainesvilletimes.com/viewpoint. Contact him at P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, GA 31139.