Smith: Name of game is serving others

Some of us are named for someone - usually a family member or friend, or some popular personality. The highest honor comes when someone is named for you - or some thing, which would include animals.

A lot of Georgia alumni and fans who have gone as far as making a real bulldog the family pet have named those pets for people like Vince Dooley and Larry Munson.

I never knew anybody who named their bulldog for Coach Wallace Butts, but surely there were a few bulldogs named Wally. Likely, there are some bulldogs out there named for Georgia's current coach, Mark Richt, but I have not heard of any.

At a function recently, I was introduced to a young lady who exclaimed, "Hey, my sister named her cat for you." I was taken aback but then thought, "Certainly glad she doesn't have a pit bull."

George Washington Carver, the scientist? You might think he was named for our first president, but that is not the case. A slave, Carver was owned by a man named Carver. His mother named him George. In school there was another boy with the same name so he added Washington as his middle name.

The boxer George Foreman has five sons all named George: George Jr., George III, George IV, George V and George VI. I'm curious about all that; I just don't get it.

I'm getting around to telling you about a neighbor of mine, Geoffrey Jarrard Cole, who is a Morehead-Cain scholar at the University of North Carolina. He had an unusual naming episode this summer in Peru.

An enterprising student with glowing academic credentials, Jarrard