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fan of the great Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown and Yankee sluggers, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris in baseball. He watched Brown run over half the NFL defenses to score touchdowns. He saw Mantle and Marris slug countless home runs out of Yankee Stadium and other ball parks, but he never heard any of them talk.
There was more than deafness for him to contend with. Kim was also diabetic. When he began football at Avondale, the trainer put candy bars in the medicine kit for Kim when he needed a sugarboost. Acouple of insensitive teammates sneaked those bars for an unauthorized snack. This earned them the wrath of Coach Ramsey for which they paid dearly for their miscreant deed.
With parental encouragement and personal motivation, Kim (and his brothers) learned to excel in sport. With Kim, his father taught him the art of placekicking. He walked around the yard practicing kicking. He kicked everything in sight—bottles, cans, twigs. He kicked by aiming at something, not just kicking for the sake of kicking. That enabled him to achieve a degree of accuracy that became a hallmark.
He lettered three years for the Bulldogs, the highlight coming about when his field goal won the Florida game in 1972. With the score tied 7-7, Joe McPipkin recovered a Gator fumble at the Florida 30, late in the fourth quarter. Four plays later, Kim’s 37-yard field goal gave Georgia a 10-7 victory.
In the dog pile that ensued, Kim literally thought he might be crushed to death as the entire team swarmed on top of him. He survived just like he has throughout life.
Following graduation Kim entered the coaching profession, becoming a head coach at Harris County and then Henry County, teaching young kids the importance of succeeding in competition, but also about scholarship and citizenship; the power of positive thinking and always looking on the bright side of life. At Harris County, he took over a program that had never won a game. They were 0-30 but broke even Kim’s first season. In the second season, they were 6-4, and Kim became a hero to the populace.
When he moved on to Henry County, he found it similar to what it was in Harris County. The football record was 1-29 when he arrived in McDonough, but by the second season, Kim had everybody smiling when his team won six games to bring the community out of the doldrums with the first winning season in years.
He would eventually win a region championship and was again the talk of the town. The citizens, school officials, and the kids all loved their coach.
Today, Kim is retired in Madison where he is close to his children and grandchildren. Close, too, to the hedges of Sanford Stadium in Athens where is finds himself as often as possible.
“I am a very fortunate man,” he says. The University of Georgia is fortunate that he came the Bulldogs’ way.
