Boner Awards 2007

Gimme a C! Gimme an H! Gimme an O! Gimme a K! Gimme an E! What’s It Spell? VANDY!Fielding their strongest team in years, Vanderbilt was poised to anoint Dudley Field with their first winning football season since 1982. And if you thought they’d pull it off, your ancestor was probably Custer’s military advisor. Proving they are truly destiny’s redheaded stepchild, the Dumbledores squandered a good start by blowing three games, in all-too-familiar fashion, against Top 25 opponents. Against Georgia, they fumbled away a chance to score the winning touchdown on the Bulldogs’ five-yard line with less than two minutes to play. Despite outplaying Kentucky, the ’Dores missed two field goals and an extra point, and were guilty of a mindless unsportsmanlike conduct penalty that allowed the Wildcats to kick a field goal at the end of the first half. The 10-point swing was decisive in Kentucky’s 7-point win. In Knoxville, Vandy wasted a 15-point lead, then missed a last-second field goal attempt to lose 25-24.

From collegiate shenanigans to corporate blunders, area institutions supplied plenty of grubby grist for the Boner mill—and that includes the Scene itself. Here are a few sticky pages from the annual report.

For Sale: One Legacy, CheapSince Georgia O’Keeffe gave cash-strapped Fisk University a hand-selected collection of artwork in 1949, the university has had a boner it just can’t shake. Fisk decided to house the collection in a gym-turned-gallery with climate control so screwy that a peeved O’Keeffe took the works away, refurbished them and returned them. But it’s Fisk’s desperate attempts to sell the most lucrative works at bargain basement prices—coupled with a public-relations flair worthy of the Nixon White House—that have landed Fisk here. University President Hazel O’Leary has tried not once, but twice, to sell O’Keeffe’s Radiator Building for about one-third of its market value. State and county officials blocked the deals, but there’s really no helping those who refuse to help themselves. O’Leary’s not even trying to conceal this boner anymore: Now she’s championing a deal with Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton to sell the entire collection and Fed-Ex it back and forth from the Fisk gym to small-town Arkansas. What, couldn’t she spell eBay?

A Whole Lotto TroubleEarlier this year the Tennessee Lottery lost its balls. In lieu of the live Ping-Pong-ball drawings it had used since its inception, lottery officials opted to begin using computerized drawings in the name of cost saving. But there were suspicious foul-ups, several of them, that meant players in certain games had no chance of winning. That made the government-backed lottery suddenly look as shady as a backroom poker machine. An $80,000 audit ensued, followed by assurances from lottery officials that the glitch had been fixed. But players are still complaining, and state lawmakers are being ballsy, suggesting that they might demand a return to the Ping-Pong system. Even Congressman Steve Cohen, a former state lawmaker who trumpeted a state lottery for years, got in on the debate. “There’s no reason to have left the Ping-Pong balls,” Cohen told the Scene in October. “Integrity is what the lottery is about. If you’ve got something good, you don’t mess with it.”

Balk Like an EgyptianThere’s nothing like a bracing dose of chemical seepage to clear the old sinuses—which means some residents along the Harpeth River near downtown Franklin may want to market their neighborhood as a spa. Last February, after much hemming and hawing, the Egyptian Lacquer Manufacturing Co. admitted that their leaky underground tanks have been dosing the Harpeth and nearby Liberty Creek with acetone, toluene and other chemicals—a hemlock cocktail that, when mixed with algae feeding on the goop, can blanket backyards with the sweet smell of Garfield’s unchanged litterbox. (Or it can make people physically sick.) After years of fruitless complaints, homeowners were relieved to have someone finally pay attention—although both Egyptian Lacquer and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation insisted that the chemicals were not at toxic levels. Gee, that’s reassuring. They did not, however, volunteer to take a sip of creek water.