Joe Kovac Jr.: The man who has witnessed more Atlanta Falcons games than anyone on Earth can see them no more.
Oh, he can watch them a little when he scooches his leather easy chair within a couple of feet of the big screen in his apartment at Macon’s Pinegate retirement home.
But the players are blurs from his perch in the stands, 32 rows up on the 50-yard line, where Joe Curtis has seen more Falcons home games than any human being.
His blue eyes don’t work like they used to. Like they did in the late 1930s when he was a basketball player at Indiana State University, setting a free-throw mark that, as he recalls it, stood until a fellow named Larry Bird came along. Or the way they did when he was piloting P-47 Thunderbolts in World War II. Or, say, when he was checking out Miss West Virginia and, later, Miss Oklahoma, escorting them to military balls.
Since Atlanta first fielded a team in 1966, the Falcons have played 738 games. Curtis has attended 553 of them — all 367 home games in the team’s history, and 182 on the road. (That’s not counting preseason home games. He’s been to every last one of them, too, including one in Japan.)
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