BLACKSHEAR, Ga. — The victorious hero returned to his small hometown on Sunday, and he still wasn’t sure what to make of it all — the proclamation the politician read, the parade down Main Street, the giant golden key to the city (the first awarded in Blackshear).
“You come back to a town where you basically know everyone’s name and you feel like you don’t really deserve all that attention,” Stetson Bennett said. “I mean, you just won a soccer game.”
He now knows it was more than that. When Bennett, the unlikely pick on everyone’s bingo map, to start as quarterback for Georgia this season, he not only won the job, but led the Bulldogs to their first national championship in 41 years — becoming a quarterback in each of the games Named Offensive Player of the Game for teams in two college football playoff games, Bennett cemented his legacy on many levels. He went on to become one of the greatest stories in Athens and college football history, an enduring icon of the sport in Georgia and a name spoken for generations to come in Blackshear, that tiny speck in the southeast corner of the state.
“The biggest thing that’s ever happened here,” said Jacob Goble, a classmate of Bennett’s in middle school and at Pierce County High School, who worked as a security officer at the parade.
second largest?
“I can’t think of anything,” Goble said.
Shop windows and awnings turned into relative love letters. Average Joe’s Pawn and Fancee Fingers and the Huddle House.
