The former Georgia football great finally tells the story of why he wound up a

Want to attack every day with the latest Georgia football recruiting info? That’s the Intel. Well, this is some Intel we cracked open the time capsule for from back in 1990 with former Georgia great Andre Hastings. He was the nation’s top WR prospect back in 1990 coming out of Morrow High School.

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Andre Hastings is now in the Georgia High School Football Hall of Fame. He received that honor on Saturday night after his eight seasons in the NFL, a brilliant college career at Notre Dame playing for Lou Holtz and an All-American career at Morrow High School.

(Scratches head.)

Yeah, we know. That’s not the way the ripples of time went down for Hastings. That’s what was to be, though.

Up until it was not.

Hastings was set to play for the Fighting Irish at the very 11th hour in 1990 with a college decision that found national coverage some 32 years ago in the pages of Sports Illustrated.

He WOULD have chosen FSU if they had simply let him wear the No. 1 jersey. That number was taken and that was that. Bobby Bowden’s great FSU teams of the 1990s would have to line up without a player that SI had predicted would be an NFL All-Pro in 1995 when he was still a junior in high school.

The Morrow High star was the only one of the top 25 high school players in the nation left unsigned going into March. Imagine what a story that would be these days.

When he wasn’t at school or working his part-time job making $4 per hour in the hardware department at the Sears in Southlake Mall, he was taking long-distance calls from the elite of college football.

Those were the days of the 1-800 or 1-900 hotlines that dropped all the latest recruiting intel. Those information sources are now found over message boards and social media and then they point to the internet these days.

That No. 1 jersey wasn’t the only thing. He requested his dorm room to have a private bathroom. He wanted to have the right to spat his cleats with tape everywhere except the toes and the heels.

There was a conga line of other equipment demands: 1) He wanted to wear his towel tucked a certain way; 2) Hastings sought to wear an RB-style facemask with different bars than most receivers; 3) He had requests for A specific helmet, shoes and thigh pads, too.

And he even spoke up about how he didn’t really love football.

He proved to be worth it in high school and college. He caught 15 of his 41 high school touchdowns as a senior. That earned him the USA Today National Offensive Player of the Year honor.

Hastings would go on to be a two-time ALL-SEC receiver in 1991 and 1992 and was a third-round NFL Draft pick. He had eliminated Georgia late in the process only to restore the Bulldogs because of location.

When he was finally set to decide, there were those doubts again. Georgia wasn’t on his mind.

“As I walked down to make my announcement, she grabbed my hand and arm,”…