UGA Football: Quick Chat – Josh Brooks

By John Frierson
Staff Writer

Josh Brooks is still hard at work in his job as Georgia’s Senior Deputy Athletic Director. While he’s working from home these days he’s also wearing a different hat, a chef’s hat. Brooks is savoring the chance to do as much cooking as possible for his family, making the most of this strange and unfortunate circumstance that has him and so many of us home all day long.

Brooks made a little time for a Quick Chat on Monday and talked about working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, his sports background, cooking, drawing and much more. Here’s some of what he had to say:

Frierson: What is it like having to do your job from home now?

Brooks: Luckily for me, my wife is a schoolteacher so she’s not able to go into work and she’s able to spend the majority of her time with our kids and handle the home-schooling for our family. I am participating as the lunch lady and custodian of the Brooks Home School Academy.

I’m able to close the door and make our bedroom the makeshift office, and still be active with the emails and calls and everything. I’m a very regimented-type person so I’ve tried to keep that normalcy to my day: I’m waking up at the same time and trying to exercise in the morning, eat breakfast and then be working at the same time I normally would be.

I’ve been able to do that, but what this has also provided me now is, instead of going to lunch with a friend or coworker now, I can have lunch with my family, which has been nice. The normal break during the day that I would take to go and check in with somebody that I work with, now I can check in with my family. That’s the nice part but at the same time, you miss those little interactions with people in the office that you normally have, those small conversations that you have with your fellow staff members.

Frierson: I’ve seen on social media that some people are still getting dressed up for work like they used to, so are you doing that or are you home working in shorts and a t-shirt like I am?

Brooks: I’m putting on a collared shirt but that’s where I draw the line, I won’t put on a button-down and slacks and all that stuff. I figure I can save all of my ironing abilities for the next couple of weeks. I do my own ironing most of the time, so I do not miss all that ironing I have to do for all those clothes.

Frierson: I respect that you do the ironing yourself versus taking it to the dry cleaners.

Brooks: Sadly, I’ve gotten pretty good at ironing over the years [laughs]. I can’t tell you, the key is having a good steamer.

Frierson: Did you grow up obsessed with sports back in Hammond, La., or did that come along later?

Brooks: I was always obsessed with sports, I was always the kid on the playground that would pick the teams and set the rules of the games and was always trying to organize the games. I wanted to play something and I wanted to keep score — whatever we were doing, I wanted to make it a competition.

I always knew that I wanted to do something in sports. Obviously, when you’re little you have dreams of playing professional sports and then as you get older and you realize that’s not a possibility, my dreams shifted to becoming a coach. It wasn’t until early in my career as a grad assistant (at Louisiana-Monroe) that my coach (Charlie Weatherbie) offered me a job in football operations, moving into an administrative role. That’s when I gave up the coaching dream and moved into the administrative side.

Frierson: What was your best sport growing up?

Brooks: Ooh, man, I really wasn’t a very good athlete. Football was maybe what I was best at but I also threw javelin for many years. That was actually the thing I was best at.

Frierson: How does a kid get started throwing the javelin?

Brooks: When I was in sixth or seventh grade, one of my brother’s best friends got a scholarship to throw the javelin in college. His dad was coaching him and the dad started me helping me out and taught it to me at an early age. It was kind of cool to find something that no one else was doing and to get good at it.

Even if you didn’t have the strongest arm, if you had really good form it could make up for a lack of ability. With really good form I got pretty good at it even though I never had the strongest arm.

Frierson: What is the best sporting event you’ve ever seen in person?

Brooks: That’s tough. It’s probably the Rose Bowl. I hope there is an experience that trumps that someday soon but at this point that’s the most special sporting experience of my life.

Frierson: Are surprised at just how special that game and that whole experience was and how it still resonates with so many Georgia fans?

Brooks: It just felt like a story in the making from the very beginning. What is the actual likelihood that we end up in Pasadena in that year, in the (College Football Playoff) semifinal game? We hadn’t been out there in so many years, we get a great matchup with Oklahoma, to be down in the game and come back — it was also a special year when our fans were just traveling everywhere we went, from Notre Dame to every road game, they were just showing out in huge numbers. To have that big crowd all the way across the country and for that game to end the way it did, it was amazing.

I’ll never forget, the day before the game we had an operations meeting where representatives from each school and the game officials and the television network were all there to go over everything. There was an individual in the meeting who was going through the agenda and one of the items was overtime procedures.

I remember a guy stepped up and said, we don’t have to worry about that, this game has never gone to overtime. Everybody in the room goes, wow, you just jinxed us. To be a part of that, it was just crazy, and for it to end the way it did, with the blocked kick and the touchdown run, and to be going back home, to Atlanta, for the National Championship Game, all of that was just magical.

Frierson: What’s the best meal you’ve ever eaten?

Brooks: There have been so many great meals that it’s hard for me to choose one, especially because I’m from Louisiana and have had so much good food in my life. Honestly, the thing I’m most proud of is the legacy my father left me with, his lasagna recipe that I still make today.

It’s one of those things that I grew up cooking. My father was on the bereavement committee at the church and whenever there was a death in the community or anything like that, he would make his lasagna for people. We’d make 50 pans at a time, freeze a bunch of them and then give them out to people. Over the years he taught me the recipe and it took me a while to get it down and mastered and to put my own take on it. That’s my go-to thing now and it’s probably my favorite meal that I make.

Frierson: In theory, you have more free time right now because there aren’t a million Georgia sports happening this spring, so are you able to do anything that you wouldn’t normally be able to do at this time?

Brooks: I’m usually consumed with either Georgia’s athletic events or my children’s athletic events, and every night of the week I’m either taking them to one of their events or practices or a Georgia event, so I don’t traditionally have a lot of free time after 5 o’clock.

Now that we don’t have any events and my kids don’t have any events, I can still put in a full workday and once 5 o’clock hits, I have time to do things I haven’t done in forever. In this profession you don’t usually have a lot of hobbies, so now I’ve actually gotten back into something I haven’t done in probably 20 years, which is doing some drawing. And with us being home, I’ve expanded my cooking and I’m trying to cook dinner each night which is something I don’t normally have time to do.

I’m not by any means any bit of an artist but it’s something that’s relaxing and it’s something I normally don’t have time to do.

Frierson: What do you draw?

Brooks: I’m not creating anything from scratch, whatever comes to mind I’ll Google it and try to draw my own recreation of it. I’m a big fan of Blue Dog art — George Rodrigue, who was famous for putting this blue dog in all of his paintings — and I did a version in downtown Athens, at the Georgia Theatre, and I drew the blue dog in front of it. That’s something that I’d forgotten how much I enjoy doing that.

Frierson: I saw that one on Twitter, it was good.

Brooks: It definitely has been enjoyable. Between that and cooking, I never would have had time to do that stuff before. It’s been nice to have that kind of time. Obviously, I would trade it all back if we could avoid everything that’s happening and get back to that sense of normalcy, but I’m trying to make the best of the situation.

I always liked the saying, make hay while the sun shines, so during this time it’s like, what can I do, what can I get better at or what can I do that I normally don’t have time to do? I think this has given me a new appreciation for things — we’re always moving so fast that I think we don’t stop to appreciate the little things in life, and this has given me time to do that.

How many times in my life will I be able to spend this much time with my family? I’m trying to make the most of that and really appreciate that time.

(This Q&A was lightly edited for length and clarity.)
John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men’s Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files. He’s also on Twitter: @FriersonFiles and @ITAHallofFame.