Inside The Chart: Hall of Frame

Hall of Frame: The untold story of the All-American posters that became an indelible, artistic part of Georgia Tech’s history

Inside The Chart | By Andy Demetra (The Voice of the Yellow Jackets)

Let us go back to a simpler time, before Photoshop and A.I. slop, when “engagement” still referred to couples and not clicks, and stats couldn’t be sprayed instantly onto social media, and art took time and planning, and Georgia Tech’s media relations department had to get creative when touting offensive lineman John Davis as an Outland Trophy and Lombardi Award candidate.

A year earlier, Atlanta Journal-Constitution sportswriter Dave Kindred dubbed Davis “The Refrigerator Mover” after he shut down Clemson All-American William “The Refrigerator” Perry in an upset of the No. 13 Tigers at Grant Field. Having proven he could move refrigerators, the Yellow Jackets now wanted to move the needle with their 6-foot-3, 300-pound junior center, whom they believed deserved billing as one of the top linemen in America.

Which explains how one stuffy summer day in 1985, the Ellijay, Ga., native found himself in a ramshackle wooden building outside Atlanta, surrounded by dinged-up, decommissioned appliances, glowering next to a hand truck.

“I don't even know what they had in mind. They never really even told me. They just said, hey, hop in the car and we're going to take you somewhere,” he said.

Davis didn’t win the Outland or Lombardi that year, but he did start a trend. For more than a decade, themed posters became an annual marketing tool of Georgia Tech’s media relations department, mailed to nearly 1,000 local and national media members in hopes of courting their vote for postseason awards.

“We felt it kind of gave us a chance. Georgia Tech, when we started, was not on anybody's map,” said Mike Finn, Tech’s former associate athletic director for communications.

The posters blended pop art and promotion, a snapshot (literally) of a golden age in Georgia Tech sports. Over the years they featured players in boats, boxing rings and deejay booths, sitting on bricks and scales, smiling in wizard robes and sneering in biker jackets. They were never sold to the public, though a fair number have landed in the hands of enterprising Georgia Tech fans, where they’ve achieved a sort of cult status.

Tom Hammonds still keeps his poster framed in his game room. Jerry Mays’ poster hangs in his mother’s house. Kenny Anderson texted a picture of his poster to a friend the day before getting contacted for an interview. One of the key figures behind the campaigns still gets emotional when talking about them. And yet, a whole generation of Tech fans and letterwinners have no idea of their existence.

Art is subjective. Styles come and go. Whether you find them cool or kitschy, almost 40 years later, the Yellow Jackets’ All-American posters still evoke plenty of nostalgia from those who participated in them - and managed a legacy that not even the savviest Photoshopper could re-create today. 

***

FRANK ZANG IS outnumbered.

He insists the photographers deserve the credit. At the very least, he considers them a group effort. But those involved all point to Zang as the creative force behind Georgia Tech’s All-American posters, from coordinating schedules to collecting props to overseeing photo shoots.

He arrived at Tech in 1984 from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina, to work for Finn as an assistant sports information director. He was 25 and called it his “first real job.”

Zang didn’t have an art background per se; he graduated from UNC with a journalism degree. But he understood the power of athletics and aesthetics.

“Who didn't have a poster hanging up in their bedroom? I’m an Ohio boy. I had Paul Warfield and Archie Griffin posters in my room. Posters were special,” he said.

By the mid-‘80’s they had also become trendy again, with the Costacos Brothers and their flashy, over-the-top portrayals of pro athletes becoming push-pinned fixtures in suburban bedrooms everywhere. That made them a natural fit for promoting Georgia Tech’s All-American candidates.

“To have a bigger-than-life poster of yourself, or one that was created, was a great way to call attention to the accomplishments of a player,” Zang noted.

He and Finn agree that the media relations team never had a standard process for coming up with a theme. Once they decided on a concept, though - and after getting the all-important sign-off from Georgia Tech’s coaches - they contracted with photographers Rich Addicks and Joey Ivansco of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to put their ideas into action.

Both used a Hasselblad, a Swedish camera famously used to photograph the first Moon landing in 1969. Its square format and shallower depth of field also made it perfect for the maiden mission of shooting a Georgia Tech poster.

A Hasselblad, Addicks explained, “was kind of what you needed to pull off a shot as artistic and thematic as what we’ve described. You can shoot medium format because it has more information, so it’s a little sharper. They can blow it up and it still looks great.”

Addicks had driven all over Atlanta while on assignment for the AJC and had developed a keen sense of the area’s backroads. When asked to do Davis’ “Refrigerator Mover” shoot, he took a half-day off from work to scout for a location.

He believes he drove south of Atlanta. Davis thinks they wound up in a remote spot near Jefferson or Commerce, 60 miles northeast. Either way, Addicks says he discovered their backdrop by accident.

“I was driving around for a place that had a bunch of old, abandoned refrigerators and stuff. Just by happenstance, I drove past this place. I’m like, that’s perfect,” he said.

Davis described the building as a country-style grocery store, with a weather-beaten, open-air shed that was crowded with orphaned refrigerators. Addicks stood him in the foreground, then dressed up the space with various Georgia Tech bric-a-brac: his No. 65 jersey and gold football pants, some helmets and footballs, a pair of shoulder pads, a pennant. A “Beware of Dog” sign was nailed to a post; he alertly doctored it to read “Beware of Davis.” He doesn’t remember how he got it, but he also coyly hung a William Perry poster behind the refrigerators.

Davis wore a black Georgia Tech tank top tucked into gray sweatpants. Depending on your perspective, his final expression fell somewhere between indifferent and mildly perturbed.

“You can ask (then-Georgia Tech head coach) Bill Curry this. I don’t take directions very well – or I didn’t at the time,” Davis admitted.

He enjoyed the experience, though, and the perks that may or may not have come with it.

“There was probably a six-pack of cold beer in the car on the way back,” he joked. “For 30 or 45 minutes’ worth of work, I thought the pay was pretty good.”

In the prehistoric days before digital cameras, Addicks didn’t know if they had a usable shot until after they developed their film, a wait that could occasionally be nerve-wracking. He eventually found a photo that he and Georgia Tech liked, which became the basis for their poster.

Davis loved the photo too, though when he saw himself standing amid a graveyard of refrigerators, he had a slightly different impression.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘Man, I'm really small,’” he laughed.

He couldn’t do anything about the depth perception, but he did change the perception of voters. By season’s end Davis was named a first-team All-American by The Sporting News – and had unexpectedly ushered in a new period of art history on The Flats.

***

ENCOURAGED BY THE reaction to Davis’ poster – and with the Yellow Jackets pumping out All-American candidates on a near-annual basis – Georgia Tech’s media relations crew was off and clicking.

According to Finn, their media distribution list numbered almost 1,000 at the time. In addition to an 18-by-19-inch poster, they also stuffed their mailers with press releases, stats, quotes, and other materials to hype up their players’ All-American cases. The process of sending out the packets could often be more grueling than the shoots themselves.

Sometimes the posters drew inspiration from a quote or catchphrase. Free safety Riccardo Ingram sat on a pile of bricks for his 1986 photo shoot, underneath the tag line “Hits Like A Ton Of Bricks.” When head coach Bobby Ross proclaimed to the press that “pound for pound, Jerry Mays is the best,” Georgia Tech made that quote the centerpiece of a 1989 promotional poster for the senior running back.

There was the 5-foot-8 Mays, wrists taped and eye black on, posing on an industrial scale in the Yellow Jackets’ locker room.

“We went through me doing a lot of different (ways of) smiling. And then we decided not for me to smile. Back during that time, I wasn’t a guy that was just smiling all the time. I think for my personality at that particular point in time in my life, I really liked the after-product of me not having a smile,” Mays said.

Several of his teammates watched the shoot nearby, where they unwittingly validated Tech’s choice of a theme.

“I think the scale said around 171, 172 (pounds). And they were like, ‘Jerry, man, you don’t weigh anything,’” Mays recalled.

With creative carte blanche, props ran the gamut. To promote guard Travis Best and forward James Forrest in 1992-93, Georgia Tech took the sophomores to the studios of student radio station WREK-FM, where they cheesed around with microphones and headsets for a poster titled “Chartbusters: Spinning All-America Hits.” Look closely and you can spot fake Forrest and Best CD covers at the bottom of the frame.

“We had the biggest smiles back then because we loved being at Georgia Tech,” said Forrest, now Georgia Tech’s director of basketball letterwinners and engagement.

Both as a player and a poster, Forrest modeled himself after Tom Hammonds, an avid fisherman in his hometown of Crestview, Fla. Naturally, Finn approached the forward about a fishing-themed shoot to promote him for All-American honors in 1988-89. Along with Addicks, they drove to a pond in Marietta that belonged to Hammonds’ friend Buddy Black. When he wasn’t studying, practicing, or becoming the third player in Tech history to score 2,000 career points, the senior could usually be found on Black’s pond, casting for brim or largemouth bass.

Addicks lashed Black’s boat to the dock, filled it with basketballs, and had Hammonds unfurl his 6-foot-9 body in it. As Addicks snapped pictures from the dock, Hammonds smiled up at him, hands folded behind his head and a fishing rod laying across his lap.

He quickly learned about suffering for your art.  

“It was horrible, laying on the basketballs and trying to position myself between the seats on the boat. It was a painful, painful position, but it was worth it,” he laughed.

“Angling for All-America” became one of Georgia Tech’s more memorable posters.

After shooting wrapped, Hammonds stayed behind to do some fishing.

***

When they weren't tapping into players’ hobbies, Georgia Tech was tapping into the pop culture zeitgeist. In the summer of 1991, Terminator 2: Judgment Day had come out in theaters, on its way to becoming the highest-grossing movie of the year. To hype its trio of quarterback Shawn Jones, safety Ken Swilling and defensive end Marco Coleman for All-American honors, Georgia Tech had them posing on motorcycles and wearing leather jackets, shooting their best, Schwarzenegger-esque scowls.

The title at the bottom of the poster? “Terminators 3” – though Coleman had a different character in mind when he mugged for the cameras that day.

“Remember ‘Happy Days’? The Fonz? I was like, ‘Aayyy,’ because I had the leather jacket like the Fonz,” he recalled in 2023.

“I had never been on a motorcycle, really. These were nice Harleys too,” he added.

Coleman didn’t feel self-conscious, nor was he alone. Nobody recalls a player turning down a theme or costume idea; Zang knew they were asking their student-athletes to step out of their comfort zone, but noted that “it’s good to have the trust of your players. We’re in this together.”

Case in point: For a promotional poster ahead of the 1987-88 season, Georgia Tech wanted to highlight its “All-American One-Two Punch” of Hammonds and senior guard Duane Ferrell. Addicks met them at a boxing gym near campus and put them side-by-side in a ring.

Ferrell and Hammonds posed along the ropes, staring stone-faced into his Hasselblad, with boxing gloves on – and shirts off.

“They sprayed us down with the water. They actually put a little oil on us to kind of make us shine, like we were really sweating,” recalled Hammonds, who had never stepped inside a boxing ring until that day.

Along with their navy game shorts – and corresponding, 1980’s-length inseams - media members would soon receive posters that captured Ferrell and Hammonds in a surprising state of undress. Georgia Tech’s one-two punch, however, happily rolled with the punches.

“People, when they saw the poster, they would talk about my arms, and then they’d talk about Duane’s stomach. We had a lot of fun with that,” Hammonds said.

When it came to bold fashion choices, though, nobody was given a more daring one than Kenny Anderson, Georgia Tech’s otherworldly point guard, in 1991. After helping the Jackets to the Final Four the previous Spring, Tech launched an All-American campaign for the sophomore with a poster titled, appropriately, “The Wizard of Ahhhs.”

The creative team bypassed Dorothy and went full-on Gandalf instead. For Anderson’s wardrobe, Ivansco, the photographer, went to a costume shop and rented a wine- and gold-colored cloak; a floppy hat with a jaunty black feather; and a star-shaped wand studded with silver rhinestones.

Anderson had plenty of flashiness to his game. As his buzzer-beating jumper against Michigan State in that March’s Sweet Sixteen proved, he had plenty of fearlessness as well. But did the smooth, New York City point guard really want to wear something so… ridiculous?

“Oh, it was awesome,” he enthused. “I was all in.”

“I had my doubts about the feathered cap. Only Kenny could pull that off with his smile,” added Zang. The final product had Anderson, in full wizard regalia, staring into a crystal ball with an action shot of himself superimposed in it.

He soon would have other reasons to smile: Anderson finished the season a consensus first-team All-American and was picked second overall in the 1991 NBA Draft. Yet even for someone whose picture ran in the papers daily, Georgia Tech’s poster stood out.

“It was making a statement,” Anderson recalled.

“Being from New York, it was like, ‘Yeah, I’m a wizard!’”

***

The last poster, as best anyone can remember, was for Matt Harpring prior to his senior season in 1997-98. Georgia Tech has had plenty of All-American candidates since then, but the strategies to promote them have changed dramatically.

E-mails and social media blasts have replaced mass mailers. Digital graphics and hype videos reach more people and don’t require postage. Anyone can access a player’s stats online. With the right prompt, someone can generate a picture of Kenny Anderson in a wizard’s robe in minutes, then firehose that image onto X and Instagram in seconds.

The themes and staging may look corny to some. But in a world of increasingly soulless A.I. “art,” Georgia Tech’s All-American posters feel undeniably authentic. They’re a link to a halcyon period in the school’s athletics history, when men’s basketball reached nine-straight NCAA Tournaments and football began its rise to 1990 national champions. And perhaps because of that, Tech’s players don’t feel any cringe looking back at them, only pride and laughs and nostalgia.

“The young men that we worked with were just great people, and they appreciated that. They appreciated the attention,” said Finn, who oversaw the media relations department at Georgia Tech for 17 years before becoming an associate commissioner for the ACC.

 

Coleman kept his “Terminators 3” poster in his office when he served as Georgia Tech’s defensive line coach in 2023. When Tech’s basketball coaching staff gathered for a meeting in the McCamish Pavilion press conference room last winter, Forrest was tickled to see his “Chartbusters” poster framed on the wall. Davis signs autographs once a month at his east Cobb home; he still receives fan mail that contains copies of his “Refrigerator Mover” poster. A day before talking about his “Wizard of Ahhhs” poster, Anderson texted a picture of it to his longtime friend Damien Hodge, a former player at Tennessee State.

“That’s dope,” Hodge wrote back.

Others view their poster more poignantly. Jerry Mays always felt ambivalent about the “undersized running back” narrative that trailed him throughout his career. Initially, he didn’t know what to make of the “Pound For Pound The Most Productive Player In America” theme for his poster.

But he also remembered the uncertainty of his sophomore year, when he blew out his knee in Georgia Tech’s spring game and wondered if he’d ever regain his straight-line speed. He came to see his poster as a vindication of the hard work he put in to come back a faster, more explosive runner.

“Thank God I was able to do that, and (it) blessed me to be able to come back and have a great senior year,” he said. Mays earned first team all-ACC honors in 1989 and graduated as Georgia Tech’s second all-time leading rusher. That pride is also felt back home: his mother, Thelma, still keeps her son’s poster framed in her bedroom in Thomson, Ga.

The people behind the camera remember their experiences just as fondly. Addicks did portraits of Dominique Wilkins, Michael Vick, Steve Bartkowski, and other Atlanta sports stars over a 27-year career with the AJC. He still speaks highly of Georgia Tech’s athletes, calling them “wonderful to work with.” After leaving Tech in 1991, Zang worked for the U.S. Olympic Committee in Colorado Springs, served on the organizing committee for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, did university relations for Boise State, and spent a decade leading the media relations department of the Utah Jazz.

In one of his final years there, the team made superhero-themed graphics to promote its candidates for the NBA All-Star Game. Zang realized how much those prints traced a path back to the posters he made as a 25-year-old assistant at Georgia Tech.

When told how much Tech’s athletes still cherish their posters, he paused.

“That chokes me up a little bit to know that,” Zang said, his voice catching.

“It was a great time in my life. I was starting off my career. I'd go on to work the Olympics, and it's funny now. It was just - it was such a great time,” he added.

A great time that turned into something more timeless than he could have imagined. Forty years later, athlete and art are still hanging around at Georgia Tech, printed on paper and imprinted in people’s memories.