Middle Georgian of the Year: Mercer's Underwood hailed
Jan 4, 2016 6:12:53 GMT -5
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Post by FUBeAR on Jan 4, 2016 6:12:53 GMT -5
Middle Georgian of the Year: Mercer's Underwood hailed as 'visionary' leader (Text of article below pics)
There in the afterglow of his school's finest sporting hour, Bill Underwood was resplendent. He had on dark trousers, a black Mercer University polo, and around his neck was a strand of hot-orange beads an alum had given him for luck.
It was the first day of spring 2014, and amid cheering throngs on a concourse at PNC Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, Mercer's president beamed triumphant.
Perhaps those beads Underwood wore were magic. Those who gathered there had just witnessed one of the glories of March Madness. Moments earlier, the Mercer men pulled off a head-turning upset of Duke's Blue Devils in the early rounds of the NCAA hoops tournament.
In the ecstatic swirl of victory, Underwood, at 6-foot-4 and with hair as pearly as a nylon basketball net, stood out from the crowd.
Not that he doesn't have a knack for standing out.
More than a decade ago as a law professor and then interim president at Baylor University, for a couple of years he drove a red Corvette Z06. ("I didn't like that Corvette that much," says Underwood, who now at age 59 tools around in a BMW sedan.)
At Baylor, he led a three-man investigative committee that, in the wake of a basketball player's murder, probed alleged misconduct in the school's athletic department. The episode made headlines across the country.
As a lawyer, Underwood was also part of a defense team that worked for years to successfully argue that a Texas cop killer was mentally retarded and should be spared the death penalty.
He was also one of the attorneys who, in a wrongful-death lawsuit, represented families of ATF agents who died in the Branch Davidian raid near Waco.
So in that Raleigh arena two springs ago, in that cavorting mob of Mercer orange and black, it was perhaps only natural for Mercer's president to look, well, important.
Students and random spectators kept asking if they could have their pictures taken with him. Even people rooting for other schools rushed over.
"I'll be glad to take my picture with you all," Underwood said, "but who do you think I am?"
"You're Mercer's coach," came the replies.
Mercer's real basketball coach, Bob Hoffman, who like Underwood casts an imposing figure and sports a shock of similarly gray hair, laughs at the memory.
"That," Hoffman jokes, "was his one victory."
* * *
There is more than a little truth in the phrasing of Underwood's mistaken identity that day.
He has, in a manner of speaking, been every bit Mercer's coach -- a driving and distinguished presence.
Since his arrival as Mercer's president 10 years ago, he has become the university's head cheerleader clothed in a CEO's suit and tie.
In naming Underwood its 2015 Middle Georgian of the Year, The Telegraph considered the school's accomplishments and endeavors that, under his watch, have more than altered the landscape of the campus and the city around it.
He has overseen a decade-long transformation that has brought new life to neighborhoods surrounding Tattnall Square Park at Mercer's northern edge. The College Hill Corridor and Beall's Hill projects have thrived, and Mercer has served as more than a mere geographic anchor. The school has embraced the development of loft apartments and stores and eateries, some in stretches of Macon that were once all but abandoned afterthoughts.
Mercer's football program, revived in the 2013 season after the school dropped the sport during World War II, has lent the college a newfound swagger. Its 10,000-seat stadium lords over the campus' south side and has breathed life into what was for ages a nondescript Interstate 75 interchange.
Hoffman, the hoops coach, calls Underwood "a visionary."
"He wanted to use sports as a vehicle to illuminate Mercer," Hoffman says. "He was set on stretching every imaginable inch of this campus."
When Mercer first contacted him about becoming its president, Underwood wasn't looking to leave Baylor.
Though he'd been raised in Oklahoma, Philadelphia and Michigan, he considers himself a Texan. His father was a Baptist preacher. He still has family ties to Texas, close friends.
"Baylor had had lots of turmoil through the years, much of it sports-related, and being assigned to clean up some of those messes had been challenging and stressful," Underwood says.
"I still loved it there. It really wasn't until I came over and took a look at Mercer and got a sense for what a special place it was that I was interested. And it is a special place, and it's been the most rewarding work of my career to be here. ... I love Macon. I mean, Texas is home sort of in the past, but I intend on living my remaining days in Macon."
* * *
Attorney Kirk Watson, a Texas state senator and former mayor of Austin, was a legal colleague of Underwood's out west.
He recalls Underwood as a problem solver, "just smart as hell."
"He has an impressive, inquisitive instinct," says Watson, an Allman Brothers fan who in his days as mayor used to blast the song "Whipping Post" in his office to pump himself up for city council meetings.
"And there's a seriousness about him," Watson adds, "but that seriousness is about his role. It's not about him. It's about his role and the empathy for the people he's representing. ... Everybody loved him as a professor."
When he was a college student, Underwood says he dreamed of becoming "the greatest courtroom lawyer that ever was."
He admired Abraham Lincoln and other famous lawyers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams among them. Underwood, who went to law school in Illinois, was flattered when Baylor's law school, in 1990, gave him the chance to teach and continue practicing.
A decade and a half later, though, the Mercer job presented itself.
"I think I'm an accidental president. It's not something I aspired to become. I wasn't even the dean of our law school at Baylor. I hadn't been a senior-level administrator. When they asked me to be the interim president, I did it because they asked me," Underwood says. "But I'm grateful for the opportunity that Mercer gave me. I'm grateful for the chance they took on a guy who was pretty inexperienced at this."
His predecessor at the Mercer helm, Kirby Godsey, has dinner with Underwood about once a month. Godsey says Underwood seems to have embodied the Mercer spirit from almost the moment he arrived.
"He has quickly become an insider," Godsey says. "He has studied carefully the strengths of the university and has expanded on those strengths and underscored them. He didn't bring in a culture from somewhere else. ... He's very bright and brings a thoughtful, reflective leadership. He commands respect."
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neighborhoods just south of the Mercer campus, down around the Tindall Heights housing project and the Felton Avenue area above Eisenhower Parkway were the most violent, crime-riddled pocket of Middle Georgia. Civic renewal and Mercer's influence helped turn the tide there.
"I think my predecessor, I've heard him say that you couldn't build a wall high enough. So the university was going to have to take responsibility for revitalizing the community surrounding the campus," Underwood says. "And he began that effort in earnest long before I got here, and what I've tried to do is continue those efforts."
Underwood says Godsey was correct, that you can't build a great university in a decaying community.
"We have a strong self-interest in seeing the kind of rebound and renaissance that we're seeing in Macon today," Underwood says. "I think Macon is five years away from being the hot city in the Southeast."
Underwood speaks with a measured, drawl-free, deep delivery that resembles the unflappable patois of airline captains. It is confident, businesslike, reassuring.
Addressing a gathering at the recent public unveiling of Mercer Music at Capricorn, part of a $25 million retail-office-and-loft development in downtown, Underwood mentioned how someone had told him, "This is a great vision you have for this place."
"Sometimes I wonder," he replied, "when I'm reflecting, whether these are visions or hallucinations."
More than a few folks say he has a way of cutting right to the heart of a matter.
"I'm very impatient," Underwood says, "and I'm very determined."
* * *
At the edge-of-campus Jittery Joe's coffee shop across Montpelier Avenue from his house, they know Underwood's order by heart: large non-fat cappuccino.
He's not above slipping into the school cafeteria for lunch.
His favorite view at Mercer is facing northeasterly from the life-size bronze bear statue on the brick plaza below the University Center. You can see the spires of north campus from there as they rise above the treeline and spear the horizon.
"These spires," Underwood says, "are inspiring. They represent man reaching out toward God."
Hoffman, the coach, says Underwood may be more tuned into campus life than any college president in the country.
"He's interested in everything going on on campus," Hoffman says. "Whether it's an amazing violinist or a basketball player."
Four days before Christmas with almost no one around, Underwood takes a stroll toward the library and spots three freshmen. They're all members of the women's basketball team. There's a game that night.
Underwood recognizes the women, knows that one is an engineering student and one is from Sweden.
"How are you all doing?" he says. "Who do we play tonight?"
"Jacksonville State," one answers.
"Are they good?" Underwood asks.
The players, as you might expect, shrug off replies.
Underwood asks the players how their first-semester studies went and later bids them farewell with a "Good luck, y'all."
Away from the players, Underwood, the father of a daughter and a son in their 20s, says, "One of the great rewards of this job is to be around bright, enthusiastic, positive young people. I try to take every opportunity I can to take advantage of that."
* * *
It is no surprise that Macon-Bibb County Mayor Robert Reichert has worked closely with Underwood over the years. The city, chartered in 1823, only predates the college's move to Macon by 48 years.
Reichert, a lawyer himself, speaks of Underwood's "almost unique combination of talents ... persuasive ability, logic and reason, as well as a way to influence the outcome of a situation."
The mayor says Mercer's return to football has been an "amazing success really beyond some of the wildest expectations."
He says Underwood has been an enthusiastic supporter of extending Little Richard Penniman Boulevard, which bounds the southern edge of the Mercer campus. The road will tie into the city's Second Street Corridor project as an enhanced avenue through downtown on into east Macon.
"Nobody deserves this distinction (as Middle Georgian of the Year) more than Bill Underwood -- for all that he has done and continues to do," Reichert says.
Beverly Blake, the Macon program director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, says she has come to know Underwood as a man of his word.
"He knew that for Macon to be all that it can be that Mercer has to be all that it can be," Blake says.
She says the College Hill Corridor project, which Underwood got behind, "was a real leap of faith" back in 2008.
"But he's always had faith in people with great ideas," Blake says.
"He knows what he would like accomplished, but he leaves people alone to do it in the way they think is the best way to do it."
Underwood's leadership on projects with university ties, she says, has given local go-getters hope.
"It gave people the belief in themselves that if we're gonna change things for the better, we're the ones who are gonna have to do it," Blake says.
"The thing about Bill is that he is very thoughtful and he is not given to talk just for the sake of talk. Everything he says has thought behind it and meaning behind it."
* * *
In his office a few days before Christmas, Underwood seems almost laid-back, maybe a touch restless as the holidays set in.
He has on a dress shirt and an orange tie, but no suit jacket.
Most students have gone home for the holidays.
He says the place isn't the same without them. Too quiet.
As he shows a visitor some of his keepsakes -- a Mercer football helmet, a Mercer basketball, a framed judge's ruling from his courtroom days in Texas -- he points out his lucky orange beads.
They're on a shelf along a wall opposite his desk, on prominent display.
When he recalls Mercer basketball's win over Duke, he calls it "a great day."
And not because he was mistaken for a victorious coach.
No, what he seems to like most about it is how students in high schools and other grades all around Macon were watching that day.
He still hears stories of how some were let out of class to take in the Bears' big game on television.
That alone explains some of what he, as Mercer's 18th president, has been a part of building.
"That really tells you," he says, "that you have become Middle Georgia's team."
There in the afterglow of his school's finest sporting hour, Bill Underwood was resplendent. He had on dark trousers, a black Mercer University polo, and around his neck was a strand of hot-orange beads an alum had given him for luck.
It was the first day of spring 2014, and amid cheering throngs on a concourse at PNC Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, Mercer's president beamed triumphant.
Perhaps those beads Underwood wore were magic. Those who gathered there had just witnessed one of the glories of March Madness. Moments earlier, the Mercer men pulled off a head-turning upset of Duke's Blue Devils in the early rounds of the NCAA hoops tournament.
In the ecstatic swirl of victory, Underwood, at 6-foot-4 and with hair as pearly as a nylon basketball net, stood out from the crowd.
Not that he doesn't have a knack for standing out.
More than a decade ago as a law professor and then interim president at Baylor University, for a couple of years he drove a red Corvette Z06. ("I didn't like that Corvette that much," says Underwood, who now at age 59 tools around in a BMW sedan.)
At Baylor, he led a three-man investigative committee that, in the wake of a basketball player's murder, probed alleged misconduct in the school's athletic department. The episode made headlines across the country.
As a lawyer, Underwood was also part of a defense team that worked for years to successfully argue that a Texas cop killer was mentally retarded and should be spared the death penalty.
He was also one of the attorneys who, in a wrongful-death lawsuit, represented families of ATF agents who died in the Branch Davidian raid near Waco.
So in that Raleigh arena two springs ago, in that cavorting mob of Mercer orange and black, it was perhaps only natural for Mercer's president to look, well, important.
Students and random spectators kept asking if they could have their pictures taken with him. Even people rooting for other schools rushed over.
"I'll be glad to take my picture with you all," Underwood said, "but who do you think I am?"
"You're Mercer's coach," came the replies.
Mercer's real basketball coach, Bob Hoffman, who like Underwood casts an imposing figure and sports a shock of similarly gray hair, laughs at the memory.
"That," Hoffman jokes, "was his one victory."
* * *
There is more than a little truth in the phrasing of Underwood's mistaken identity that day.
He has, in a manner of speaking, been every bit Mercer's coach -- a driving and distinguished presence.
Since his arrival as Mercer's president 10 years ago, he has become the university's head cheerleader clothed in a CEO's suit and tie.
In naming Underwood its 2015 Middle Georgian of the Year, The Telegraph considered the school's accomplishments and endeavors that, under his watch, have more than altered the landscape of the campus and the city around it.
He has overseen a decade-long transformation that has brought new life to neighborhoods surrounding Tattnall Square Park at Mercer's northern edge. The College Hill Corridor and Beall's Hill projects have thrived, and Mercer has served as more than a mere geographic anchor. The school has embraced the development of loft apartments and stores and eateries, some in stretches of Macon that were once all but abandoned afterthoughts.
Mercer's football program, revived in the 2013 season after the school dropped the sport during World War II, has lent the college a newfound swagger. Its 10,000-seat stadium lords over the campus' south side and has breathed life into what was for ages a nondescript Interstate 75 interchange.
Hoffman, the hoops coach, calls Underwood "a visionary."
"He wanted to use sports as a vehicle to illuminate Mercer," Hoffman says. "He was set on stretching every imaginable inch of this campus."
When Mercer first contacted him about becoming its president, Underwood wasn't looking to leave Baylor.
Though he'd been raised in Oklahoma, Philadelphia and Michigan, he considers himself a Texan. His father was a Baptist preacher. He still has family ties to Texas, close friends.
"Baylor had had lots of turmoil through the years, much of it sports-related, and being assigned to clean up some of those messes had been challenging and stressful," Underwood says.
"I still loved it there. It really wasn't until I came over and took a look at Mercer and got a sense for what a special place it was that I was interested. And it is a special place, and it's been the most rewarding work of my career to be here. ... I love Macon. I mean, Texas is home sort of in the past, but I intend on living my remaining days in Macon."
* * *
Attorney Kirk Watson, a Texas state senator and former mayor of Austin, was a legal colleague of Underwood's out west.
He recalls Underwood as a problem solver, "just smart as hell."
"He has an impressive, inquisitive instinct," says Watson, an Allman Brothers fan who in his days as mayor used to blast the song "Whipping Post" in his office to pump himself up for city council meetings.
"And there's a seriousness about him," Watson adds, "but that seriousness is about his role. It's not about him. It's about his role and the empathy for the people he's representing. ... Everybody loved him as a professor."
When he was a college student, Underwood says he dreamed of becoming "the greatest courtroom lawyer that ever was."
He admired Abraham Lincoln and other famous lawyers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams among them. Underwood, who went to law school in Illinois, was flattered when Baylor's law school, in 1990, gave him the chance to teach and continue practicing.
A decade and a half later, though, the Mercer job presented itself.
"I think I'm an accidental president. It's not something I aspired to become. I wasn't even the dean of our law school at Baylor. I hadn't been a senior-level administrator. When they asked me to be the interim president, I did it because they asked me," Underwood says. "But I'm grateful for the opportunity that Mercer gave me. I'm grateful for the chance they took on a guy who was pretty inexperienced at this."
His predecessor at the Mercer helm, Kirby Godsey, has dinner with Underwood about once a month. Godsey says Underwood seems to have embodied the Mercer spirit from almost the moment he arrived.
"He has quickly become an insider," Godsey says. "He has studied carefully the strengths of the university and has expanded on those strengths and underscored them. He didn't bring in a culture from somewhere else. ... He's very bright and brings a thoughtful, reflective leadership. He commands respect."
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neighborhoods just south of the Mercer campus, down around the Tindall Heights housing project and the Felton Avenue area above Eisenhower Parkway were the most violent, crime-riddled pocket of Middle Georgia. Civic renewal and Mercer's influence helped turn the tide there.
"I think my predecessor, I've heard him say that you couldn't build a wall high enough. So the university was going to have to take responsibility for revitalizing the community surrounding the campus," Underwood says. "And he began that effort in earnest long before I got here, and what I've tried to do is continue those efforts."
Underwood says Godsey was correct, that you can't build a great university in a decaying community.
"We have a strong self-interest in seeing the kind of rebound and renaissance that we're seeing in Macon today," Underwood says. "I think Macon is five years away from being the hot city in the Southeast."
Underwood speaks with a measured, drawl-free, deep delivery that resembles the unflappable patois of airline captains. It is confident, businesslike, reassuring.
Addressing a gathering at the recent public unveiling of Mercer Music at Capricorn, part of a $25 million retail-office-and-loft development in downtown, Underwood mentioned how someone had told him, "This is a great vision you have for this place."
"Sometimes I wonder," he replied, "when I'm reflecting, whether these are visions or hallucinations."
More than a few folks say he has a way of cutting right to the heart of a matter.
"I'm very impatient," Underwood says, "and I'm very determined."
* * *
At the edge-of-campus Jittery Joe's coffee shop across Montpelier Avenue from his house, they know Underwood's order by heart: large non-fat cappuccino.
He's not above slipping into the school cafeteria for lunch.
His favorite view at Mercer is facing northeasterly from the life-size bronze bear statue on the brick plaza below the University Center. You can see the spires of north campus from there as they rise above the treeline and spear the horizon.
"These spires," Underwood says, "are inspiring. They represent man reaching out toward God."
Hoffman, the coach, says Underwood may be more tuned into campus life than any college president in the country.
"He's interested in everything going on on campus," Hoffman says. "Whether it's an amazing violinist or a basketball player."
Four days before Christmas with almost no one around, Underwood takes a stroll toward the library and spots three freshmen. They're all members of the women's basketball team. There's a game that night.
Underwood recognizes the women, knows that one is an engineering student and one is from Sweden.
"How are you all doing?" he says. "Who do we play tonight?"
"Jacksonville State," one answers.
"Are they good?" Underwood asks.
The players, as you might expect, shrug off replies.
Underwood asks the players how their first-semester studies went and later bids them farewell with a "Good luck, y'all."
Away from the players, Underwood, the father of a daughter and a son in their 20s, says, "One of the great rewards of this job is to be around bright, enthusiastic, positive young people. I try to take every opportunity I can to take advantage of that."
* * *
It is no surprise that Macon-Bibb County Mayor Robert Reichert has worked closely with Underwood over the years. The city, chartered in 1823, only predates the college's move to Macon by 48 years.
Reichert, a lawyer himself, speaks of Underwood's "almost unique combination of talents ... persuasive ability, logic and reason, as well as a way to influence the outcome of a situation."
The mayor says Mercer's return to football has been an "amazing success really beyond some of the wildest expectations."
He says Underwood has been an enthusiastic supporter of extending Little Richard Penniman Boulevard, which bounds the southern edge of the Mercer campus. The road will tie into the city's Second Street Corridor project as an enhanced avenue through downtown on into east Macon.
"Nobody deserves this distinction (as Middle Georgian of the Year) more than Bill Underwood -- for all that he has done and continues to do," Reichert says.
Beverly Blake, the Macon program director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, says she has come to know Underwood as a man of his word.
"He knew that for Macon to be all that it can be that Mercer has to be all that it can be," Blake says.
She says the College Hill Corridor project, which Underwood got behind, "was a real leap of faith" back in 2008.
"But he's always had faith in people with great ideas," Blake says.
"He knows what he would like accomplished, but he leaves people alone to do it in the way they think is the best way to do it."
Underwood's leadership on projects with university ties, she says, has given local go-getters hope.
"It gave people the belief in themselves that if we're gonna change things for the better, we're the ones who are gonna have to do it," Blake says.
"The thing about Bill is that he is very thoughtful and he is not given to talk just for the sake of talk. Everything he says has thought behind it and meaning behind it."
* * *
In his office a few days before Christmas, Underwood seems almost laid-back, maybe a touch restless as the holidays set in.
He has on a dress shirt and an orange tie, but no suit jacket.
Most students have gone home for the holidays.
He says the place isn't the same without them. Too quiet.
As he shows a visitor some of his keepsakes -- a Mercer football helmet, a Mercer basketball, a framed judge's ruling from his courtroom days in Texas -- he points out his lucky orange beads.
They're on a shelf along a wall opposite his desk, on prominent display.
When he recalls Mercer basketball's win over Duke, he calls it "a great day."
And not because he was mistaken for a victorious coach.
No, what he seems to like most about it is how students in high schools and other grades all around Macon were watching that day.
He still hears stories of how some were let out of class to take in the Bears' big game on television.
That alone explains some of what he, as Mercer's 18th president, has been a part of building.
"That really tells you," he says, "that you have become Middle Georgia's team."
