Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of “Lasting Legacies,” a series examining historical aspects of the University. Tomorrow’s final installment will profile alumni who come back to campus for Homecoming.

With the crisp autumn air setting in and buzzing fans clothed in red and black, the click-clack of the Georgia Bulldogs’ football cleats is muffled — but audible. The athletes jostling in the tunnel prime themselves for the onslaught of an opponent between the hedges on the green grass of Sanford Stadium.

A stadium that originated out of a desire to eclipse in-state rival Georgia Tech’s Grant Field has grown to hold more than 92,000 fans and is adorned with one of the most celebrated and recognized symbols in all of sports.

The hallowed ring outlining the field is as an aesthetically pleasing barrier that encloses 22 players contending for their respective team’s next first down, touchdown, loss or victory.

The eminent mark of Georgia football tradition has remained in the ground for 80 years, encapsulating epic wins and heartbreaking losses all the while.

In 1929, the planting of privet Ligustrum hedges around the field proved to be the final step in completing the construction of the University’s Sanford Stadium.

“Charlie Martin was the father of the hedges,” said Dan Magill, former head coach of the Georgia men’s tennis team.

Charlie E. Martin first set foot on the University’s campus in 1908 as a student, and never really stepped away from the Bulldogs and the town of Athens.

Beginning work as a “sporting writer” for the then Athens Banner newspaper as a student, Martin primarily covered Georgia’s first All-American football player Bob McWhorter.

The Monroe County native stayed with the paper, working his way up the ranks at the daily publication before World War I set in and he was deployed overseas to France. Upon his return stateside, Martin joined the University’s athletic department as business manager, later taking on the roles of ticket manager and “publicity man.”

In his new line of work, Martin began brushing shoulders with fellow colleagues at others schools in the South and eventually befriended the business manager at the University of Alabama. As their friendship and working relationship prospered, Martin was invited to tag along to Pasadena, Calif., to watch the Crimson Tide play in the 1927 Rose Bowl against Stanford.

After laying his eyes on the rose bushes inside that stadium in California, Martin became transfixed on the idea of including the same mesmerizing fixture inside Georgia’s future stadium.

“They were already making plans to build a stadium at Georgia. [Martin] said, ‘I want a hedge of roses around the stadium when it’s built,’” Magill said. “Well, when he got ready to plant them, the horticulturists in Athens said that roses wouldn’t thrive here. They oughta get privet Ligustrum, and that’s what they planted.”

Though privet Ligustrum is looked upon as a weed in any other environment, where they were placed in Sanford Stadium made them an icon and led to the coining of a phrase synonymous with Georgia football.

“Despite the fact that it’s not the most desirable plant, nevertheless it’s a royal hedge to us and it’s a noble hedge,” said former head football coach Vince Dooley. “It’s a beautiful setting. I don’t think there’s any setting in sports any better, from a stadium standpoint, than Sanford Stadium and the field and the hedges that go around it.”

The 8-year-old version of Magill, dressed in his Christmas present — a youth football uniform — marched from his 5 Points neighborhood down to the newly finished Sanford Stadium on Oct. 12, 1929.

“I thought I’d get to play in the game. I thought they’d choose sides and I’d be the last choice, but I always wanted to play in the big game. And I put on my Christmas present and walked to the game,” Magill said. “I was ready to play.”

Despite lacking a ticket, Magill muscled his way into the newly constructed sporting arena monstrosity with a little help from his father, editor-in-chief of The Athens Banner at the time, and a fellow by the name of Charlie Martin.

“It was a sellout. My daddy said, ‘Find Mr. Martin up at the top of the hill by the main gate.’ [I found him and said], ‘Mr. Martin, let me in!’” Magill said. “Daddy said, ‘Go down to the field and you just walk around and watch the game.’”

With the stadium at full capacity and Bulldog fans packed in their seats, 18,000 seats on the north side of the stadium and 12,000 on the south side, the Bulldogs teed off the first match up in Sanford Stadium between the hedges against the powerhouse of the time period, Yale.

With governors from nine Southern states looking on as the biggest sporting event of the era unfolded, a young Magill and the rest of the crowd witnessed as Georgia broke in their new stadium in a victorious fashion

“It was a big day. We got Mighty Yale to come down and play. They were the power in the East. Of course, we upset them 15 to nothing,” Magill said. “I walked around field, I didn’t know much about what was going on.”

Since that inaugural day, a multitude of opponents have challenged Georgia between the hedges. Players have come and gone and coaches have spent their tenures at the University pacing the sidelines, tirelessly trying to log more victories and solidify their names as a part of history.

But the hedges have remained as a constant. Serving as a trap for opponents, a symbol of prestige in Bulldog Nation and a point of pride for those who now look after the hedges and keep them in immaculate condition.

“It was kind of a special battle cry that we always had, ‘We’ve got ‘em between the hedges,’ which means we’ve got ‘em at home,” Dooley said. “When I was coaching, it was always something very special to have them between the hedges.”

“There’s 95,000 people looking at the field, plus a lot of times a national TV audience. Our level of maintenance and our level of pride really goes up as far as us knowing that all these people are going to be looking at our product that day,” said Kenny Pauley, director of athletic turf and grounds management.

Pauley heads up a team of workers who tend to the needs of the various athletic fields throughout the University campus, but only two are privileged to shape and trim the famed hedges.

Along with senior turf management major Bryan Farmer, Pauley looks after the hedges on a daily basis during the season, trimming them as often as needed to keep them in tip top shape.

Although Pauley realizes the meaning the hedges hold and the tradition they represent, he is forced to look past the proverbial pedestal they are put on and handle caring for them as a normal job.

“In one turn I’m very gracious to have the opportunity to work at a place like Sanford Stadium and UGA. But in another turn, I can’t look at a field as this being hallowed sod because it all comes back to me being able to do my job effectively,” Pauley said. “To me, it’s just another patch of grass any way you look at it. Just another hedge.”

The privet Ligustrum hedges now rooted into the field, however, are not the original hedges put into the ground in 1929.

When the Olympic Games came to Atlanta in 1996, the medal matches for women’s soccer were played inside Sanford Stadium. But before this transpired, a crucial decision was made.

Due to the size differences in a football field and a soccer field, the sacred hedges were removed in order to have the correct width needed for the soccer matches.

Even though the original hedges were uprooted, clippings of those hedges were taken to grow replacements hedges in Thompson, Ga., in Dudley’s Nursery and in Hackney’s Nursery in Florida.

“It stirred quite a controversy among the football purists to take out the hedges for soccer. And besides that, it was women’s soccer, not men’s soccer … so the football purists were not very happy with that,” Dooley said.

“I found out it was a blessing in disguise because our hedges had nematodes. What you have now are the sons and daughters of the original hedge called Hedges II that we put back in after the Olympic Games were over in ’96.”

“Hedges II” are under close care and monitoring by Pauley personally as well as by a security system that protects both the hedges and the field from nighttime intruders.

“People sneak into the field to try and get on the field at night. Then the alarm goes off and they scurry through the hedge, and it just tears it up,” Pauley said.

Although a state-of-the-art security system monitors the hedges and the field overnight, a role reversal takes place during games, as the hedges play protector from overenthusiastic fans wanting just a moment to put the sole of their shoes on the time-honored sod and their hands on Georgia players.

“Plus, it serves as a barrier to keep people from running all over the field. In my whole experience, there was only one time that happened. People, students charged over the hedge. They ended up almost destroying the hedges,” Dooley said. “That’s the main reason that it’s there; it serves as protection.”

But playing the protector role puts the hedges in the direct line of fire for damage, mishandling and carelessness, especially from those who admire the privet Ligustrum the most.

“People [keep] coming back and saying, ‘Oh, this is the hedge,’ and grabbing a piece. Every little piece they take off is going to damage the hedge. The biggest pest for those hedges are people because of breaking them off. But it is what it is,” Pauley said. “We’re just here to keep them growing.”

Regardless of the beating the hedges take and the sweat Pauley pours into the manual labor that the hedges call for week in and week out, he stays true to the decorative ring around the field and notes the history that has taken place between the hedges.

“A lot of the history comes back to the football, Sanford Stadium, the hedges, but it’s the student-athletes that actually make the history,” Pauley said.

“It’s the people that are involved in it are actually making the history.”