GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Where do you start when the time has come to tell the life story of a man seemingly beloved by a trio nearly impossible to please: fans, coaches and sportswriters?
A few stories, that's where.
Longtime University of Florida sports information director and historian Norm Carlson, who returned to his alma mater more than 60 years ago to lead the athletic program's public relations department, died Friday afternoon at age 90. Carlson officially retired in June 2002 but spent another decade maintaining an office at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium as the football team's official historian and a fountain of knowledge for anyone who stopped by his office with a question about the Gators.
Those who worked alongside him at the University Athletic Association referred to him as "Mr. C." The sportswriters and broadcasters he befriended over the years affectionately referred to him as "Normie." When Carlson was honored with a retirement party, he had worked 462 consecutive UF football games, earning his place next to Steve Spurrier, "Mr. Two Bits" and "We Are the Boys" in Gators football lore.
Plans for a memorial service remain incomplete at this time.
"Dad was recruited to Gainesville by Ray and Opal Graves, accepting his dream job in 1963 and never leaving,'' one of his sons, Doug Carlson, a former sportswriter at the Tampa Tribune, emailed Saturday. "He had opportunities in the NFL, in Major League Baseball and with countless other universities and bowl games because people liked him and he was good at what he did. But he was a Gator to his core and didn't care if there was more money to be made elsewhere.
"He had found his home and he was smart enough to stay with the thing that made him happiest — being part of the Gator family."
"Norm, I know you don't know the whole situation of what you're involved in, but just remember this, and you'll never have any problems working here,'' Jordan said. "There ain't a damned thing that's good for the University of Alabama that's good for Auburn."
Carlson chuckled at the story decades later.
Meanwhile, he took the message to heart and received a phone call from Gators coach Ray Graves four years later to see if Carlson had an interest in returning to UF, where he graduated after transferring from St. Louis University.
As a journalist, Carlson covered Georgia Tech for the Journal and got to know Graves, who was the defensive coordinator on Bobby Dodd's Yellow Jackets staff.
"Bobby Dodd sat up on a tower,'' Carlson said in 2013. "He would never come off that tower at practice. He would always say, 'Go over and talk to Ray about it.' I'd go down and talk to Graves after practice for a little while. I got to know him really well that way."
Shortly after Florida defeated Penn State in the 1962 Gator Bowl, Graves needed a new "publicity director," as they were called then. Carlson had only one student assistant (George Solomon, future sports editor of The Washington Post) and a part-time secretary his first year on the job.
He never left.
"One of the best things I ever did was bring Norm in,'' the late Graves once told the Gainesville Sun. "He's been family. I can't think of a time when he's had something bad to say about anybody."
Carlson's final office at UF was located on the third floor on the west side of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, the same place he first lived when he took the Gators job while his family remained in Auburn.
"This used to be dormitory space," he said in 2013. "I lived up here for two months until I got my family down."
In more than five decades with the Gators, Carlson witnessed the media landscape change drastically and oversaw an office that grew considerably. He developed a reputation as someone the media could trust, whom coaches could depend on, and someone administrators such as former UF athletic director Jeremy Foley often used as a sounding board.
"When people talk about legacy, I think people equate that to professional life and achievement,'' Foley said Saturday. "Norm's legacy, to me, was the most incredibly kind, respected and wise people I ever came across. When I became AD, I was a young buck trying to figure it all out. Norm was always there for advice and presented it in such a professional and caring manner.
"No one represented the Gator brand better than Norm. I loved him — that's not a trite statement — but I also admired the hell out of him."
The admiration stretched far and wide.
Herb Vincent is the Southeastern Conference Associate Commissioner for Communications. He was once a young sports information director at LSU when the Tigers were considering firing a head coach.
He called on Carlson for help to navigate the unpleasant situation.
"He could put problems and difficult situations into perspective in a way that made them manageable,'' Vincent recalled. "I called Norm because I was 28 years old and didn't know what the hell I was doing. He gave me his home number and said 'call me tonight.' I realized later it was because he wanted to talk to me without any interruptions at work. He spent about 90 minutes with me and walked me through everything that was going to happen. His best advice was, 'get your AD to start talking about the search for the next coach as soon as possible. Everybody will forget about the firing and will just talk about the next hiring.'
"I followed that advice on every coaching change the rest of my life. Everything he said would happen, happened. He had an impact on me in a way he never knew, and I'll always remember him with great respect and fondness."
Whether trying to manage a story like Vincent or tell one like a reporter with an insider's instincts, Carlson's professionalism and ability to connect to people registered on both sides.
Tony Barnhart, a veteran college football reporter who spent the bulk of his career with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, recalled in 2002 the advice his sports editor, the late and famed AJC columnist Furman Bisher, told Barnhart on his first trip to UF.
Perhaps the most famous story about Carlson's legendary career centers around the 1966 Heisman Trophy campaign he orchestrated for UF quarterback Steve Spurrier. The late Beano Cook credited Carlson with modernizing the Heisman hype so familiar to today's college football fans.
"Florida was not on television that year, but Carlson thought he had the best player in America in Spurrier,'' Cook wrote for ESPN.com in 2002. "Carlson began campaigning early, and Spurrier won it. From then, it just got bigger and bigger."
Spurrier was in Texas this weekend when he heard of Carlson's death. The two remained close long after Spurrier's Heisman season. During Spurrier's NFL career, he would return to Gainesville in the offseason. The Carlson family would often babysit the Spurrier children and the families grew closer when Spurrier returned to UF to become head coach in 1990.
Spurrier said Carlson played an instrumental role in his winning the Heisman Trophy.
"We had so many wonderful memories with Norm,'' Spurrier said Saturday. "As a player, he was the sports information director that everyone loved. We had tremendous respect for him. Somebody said, 'if anybody helped you with the Heisman, Norm would be first, right?' Yep, I would say Norm would be first because he was so well-respected across the country. He got me a bunch of votes."
Spurrier helped pay Carlson back in a memorable way in the late 1990s during his time as Florida's head coach. Carlson purchased a condo in Crescent Beach, where the Spurriers also owned a place. Spurrier held a fundraiser at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium to honor Carlson, who was not expecting the generosity that flowed from the group of Gators that Spurrier called on for the event.
"We raised 50 thousand dollars to pay off his mortgage. He was sort of shocked. He thought we were just going to hand him a little thank you,'' Spurrier said. "I got 50 to 60 boosters to help. It was easy raising $50,000 for Norm Carlson. That shows you what kind of guy he was and what everybody thought of him.
"It was sad to hear of his passing. Certainly, Norm had a wonderful life and is admired and respected by everyone who knew him."
In 2002, the UAA honored Carlson's contributions by unveiling the Norm Carlson Press Deck following the completion of a new press box and luxury suites at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.
Carlson became more than Florida's SID and athletic director of communications. In many ways, he was the heart of the Gators.
"To put it in perspective, I came in as a walk-on and had to earn my spurs. I certainly learned quickly who was the major factor in all the Gator football players receiving honors and recognition," former Gators receiver Lee McGriff said after hearing of Carlson's passing. "And he was always so kind and made it so comfortable to be around him.
"I was a journalism major and I knew people who did internships with Norm and he was so good and kind and thoughtful with students. Most of all, he was a decent man, but the way Norm handled the press, well, that's an era that is gone. He was the ultimate host and consummate gentleman. He made the press feel important and welcome."
Carlson took great pride in developing relationships with the media to help them do their jobs, all with an eye on creating positive coverage in an era when newspapers dominated the daily media market until television and, later, the internet turned coverage into a 24/7 business.
Carlson kept a message on his desk that helped him keep it all in perspective: Nothing is as good as it seems. Nothing is as bad as it seems. Reality is in between.
Carlson reflected on his time with the Gators in 2013, when he finally cleared out his office and headed for the East Coast of Florida to live his retirement years with his wife, Sylvia.
"It's been gratifying because we've had a lot of success," he said. "I went to school here and graduated from here. I raised a family here. It's like coming home. That's what it's meant to me. I've made a lot of friends and seen a lot of people go on and do good things in the world. It makes you feel good that you were around it."
Undoubtedly, the stories were the best part of a visit to Carlson's office. He shared many of them in 2007 when his "University of Florida Football Vault" was published.
Here is another one.
Soon after Carlson returned to UF to work for Graves, the head coach started to recruit Spurrier, a quarterback from Johnson City, Tenn.
Spurrier was just beginning to get into golf around that time. Thanks to Gators punter David Bludworth, Spurrier always played at the campus golf course on visits to Gainesville.
One more, this one involving another Gainesville legend. Carlson recalled a few years ago how he and Pepper Rodgers weren't exactly Tom Petty fans.
Carlson and Rodgers used to live on adjacent streets off Gainesville's Eighth Avenue during Rodgers' tenure as a UF assistant from 1960-64. Around the same time, Petty was just beginning to get into music and cranking up his guitar in a garage nearby.
"We lived on a dead-end circle. On the street behind us was a dead end, and Pepper lived down there,'' Carlson said. "We used to always say, 'There is this guy up here in this shed at all hours of the night playing this awful music and beating on drums.' It was Tom Petty as a teenager and what became the Heartbreakers.
"Pepper and I just couldn't get over that, 'What the hell is that guy doing?' You meet a lot of people and collect a lot of stories."
Carlson is a member of the UF Athletic Hall of Fame and the Florida Sports Hall of Fame, inducted in 1995 and the first publicist honored. He was born Sept. 7, 1933, in Omaha, Neb. He grew up in St. Louis and moved to Florida in the early 1950s when his father, who worked in the trucking business, was transferred to Jacksonville.
Norm Carlson has passed, but his stories live on.