Former golf pro, sports anchor Ducky Wall says he has “lived a blessed life”

ALBANY — If you have lived in south Georgia long enough, odds are you know of former TV sports anchor Ducky Wall, who held that role for 26 years before spending the next two decades at Darton State College.

A phone call in late 1964, to Wall, an Augusta native who was the assistant golf pro at the Augusta Country Club, changed his life forever, making him a regional celebrity and a resident of Albany.

“I’d been at the club in Augusta for about five years and was thinking about taking a job in Tennessee and the club pro, Frank Carney, said if you take that job in Tennessee you are going to get lost up there,” Wall said. “Frank said for me to wait because something big would come along one day.

“About that time a club manager by the name of John Williams called me and said ‘Ducky, they are building a brand new club in Albany named Doublegate, and they have the money to make it work. You need to apply for that head pro’s job.’”

Doublegate was built and owned by Angus Alberson, C.T. Oxford and O.D. Carlton.

“I applied for the job and they called me down and interviewed me,” Wall said. “We were one of 10 candidates for the job. About five days later, they called me and said, ‘Ducky, if you want the job, it’s yours.’”

Wall stuck around for seven years as Doublegate’s first head golf pro. In spring of 1971, Wall and then Albany Mayor Jame Gray Sr. became “very good friends,” Wall said. In addition to owning The Albany Herald, Gray’s company also owned WALB-TV. Later that year, Wall got another phone call that altered his career trajectory.

“We played a lot of golf together,” Wall said. “One day we were playing and he said, ‘If you ever get tired of this, call me and we’ll put you on television.’ I laughed and said I don’t know a thing about it. He said, ‘With your gift of gab all you need to know is when that red light comes on, you just start talking.’”

“So one day (station manager) Doug Oliver called me and asked me to come meet them down at the station. They said, Ducky, we really need a sports director. The put me in front of that damn camera and I started talking, and I never shut up after that.”

And he kept talking for nearly three decades. But aside from his gift of gab, Wall said the best thing to ever happened to him was University of Georgia running back Herschel Walker, who helped UGA win the 1980 college football national championship.

“In 1980 Georgia was on fire and south Georgia absolutely fell in love with me,” Wall said. “I promise you that in about 1982 or ‘83, I could have been mayor of Moultrie, Valdosta and Tifton at the same time. They loved the name ‘Ducky’ because it wasn’t Bill or John or Sam. It was Ducky and kids from three to 93 could remember that name.”

One of the most enduring Ducky Wall stories is a wrong-way drive down a one-way street in Jacksonville in a Winnebago right after the 1978 Georgia-Florida game.

“That story is true, but I wasn’t driving, it was Jimmy Matthews,” Wall said. “I said, ‘Damn, these are the friendliest people I’ve ever been around, look, everybody is waving and yelling at us.’”

Another adventure was watching — or rather listening — to Wall attempt to pronounce the last name of women’s tennis legend Martina Navratilova. When asked if he ever got it right, Wall smiled and admitted, “no.”

“I called that woman every name in the book except Navratilova,” he said. “I just couldn’t say it.”

Wall left TV in 1997, and was a golf instructor and jack-of-all-trades at the former Darton before retiring for good last year.

In February, Wall, now 79, suffered a health scare, undergoing open heart surgery and two other surgical procedures in the span of three months. He said he’s feeling fine, but his doctors won’t let him swing a golf club for a few more months.

“All in all,” he said, “I have lived a blessed life.”