There is a picture I have pinned on a small cork board in my office that I’ve kept for about 50 years, and when I occasionally glance at it, it makes me smile.
It captures me talking to Virginia Tech fullback Mickey Fitzgerald on media day back in August of 1977. This week you’ve seen dozens of people in Blacksburg covering this year’s media days, with a barrage of videos and stories all over social media, but back then there were maybe 5 or 6 of us in attendance, and you wandered the field and talked to whoever you wanted to.
At this moment in time, Mickey was about to become “The Incredible Hulk” after being moved from tight end to running back in Jimmy Sharpe’s offense. I was about to become a college senior, having just turned 21 a few weeks earlier.
Part of the reason I like the photo is it reminds me of a simpler time when I was just a student earning the minimum wage of $1.60 an hour, starting out on what I hoped would be a career in sports writing. Another part was the memory of Lane Stadium back when it wasn’t the huge behemoth it is now, with nothing but a chain link fence between you and the parking lot at the scoreboard end of the stadium.
And still another part is the photo provides concrete evidence that there once was a time when I had a full head of hair and all of it was jet black. I haven’t seen Mickey since that day, but he probably feels the same way.
The picture was taken by a photographer of a newspaper called the Blacksburg Sun, and his interest was to capture an image of Mickey far more than me. To this day I still have fond thoughts of that photographer for not cropping me out of the image.
The reason I bring any of this up is because of a new technological advance introduced this week by Elon Musk. On the X platform he’s created a variety of things related to Artificial Intelligence, which he’s named Grok. Grok has been around for about a year, but Elon keeps upgrading it with new features for what seems like every few weeks.
His newest is called Grok Imagine, where you can upload a still picture and Grok “imagines” what it would be like in a video. What was once a faded black and white picture now has become a six-second movie imagining how the scene actually took place on a hot August day in 1977.
It’s cool. It’s also eerie (I heard in the back of my mind the voice of a Seinfeld character saying “it moved”), and it’s not entirely accurate. Longtime Hokies will notice when the camera moves a little, it shows the middle of the scoreboard, which back then had a fierce looking Fighting Gobbler on it that made the sounds of the most regal bird in the universe during games. A machine is “imagining” what things would have looked like and obviously that machine wasn’t a season ticket holder back in 1977.
It’s also really bad with sound. Grok imagined a conversation between Mickey and I that doesn’t sound anything like us and doesn’t make any sense, so I’ve wiped away the audio.
But it does provide something for my generation that we’ve never had. People these days have always had a camera (via their phone) in their pocket so if you asked them anything about a parent or grandparent, odds are they captured a conversation or video of those who are no longer with us.
For us boomers, our memories of the past are still photos in a drawer somewhere. Grok can bring those memories to life, although I’m still not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
Now if Grok could only bring my beloved Hokie football program back to life… 😊
