CARTERSVILLE, Ga. — The lunch hour is buzzing at the Burger King off Church Street, and while the store manager in the back is serving Guest No. 81 a Bacon Cheese Whopper Meal, Trevor Lawrence’s biggest fan has a bright blue soap bucket in one hand and a dish rag in the other.
It’s a dreary day in the hometown of Clemson’s superstar quarterback this February afternoon, though Lawrence’s No. 1 superfan doesn’t mind.
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As the scent of hot onion rings and french fries permeates the building, Edgar Moore has on a Cartersville High hoodie with black slacks, a Cartersville hat and a boyish grin so permanent that customers can’t help but hug him on their way out.
He has been working at the Burger King right across the street from the high school, his alma mater, for 29 years.
“I love it here,” he grins as he gets a fresh bucket of water for the seats. “I love the spicy chicken and the Big King XL.”
But he is most known for his connection to Cartersville, which includes his love for the Clemson quarterback.
While Lawrence has the attention of the world hot off Clemson’s drubbing of Alabama in January’s College Football Playoff championship game, back at home, the world’s biggest Lawrence fan is elated to even just be talking about him in a small-town fast food joint to anyone who will listen.
Moore is 49 years old, 30 years Lawrence’s senior.
A lifelong native of Cartersville, he was born with special needs, is a staple in town with his signature headphones and has been the water boy and football manager at the school for 34 consecutive seasons. This spring, he will celebrate his 30th high school reunion.
If Lawrence gets his poise from his dad, his down-to-earth demeanor from his mom, shares a love for detail with his artist older brother and has a soft spot for kids on behalf of his grade-school sister, it is his friendship with Edgar from which he gets his perspective.
“He’s been there forever,” Lawrence said last season, “and we all love him.”
Edgar is the one influence on Lawrence’s life whom everyone internally in Cartersville knows, but few externally do.
“Me and Trevor, we’re best friends,” Edgar says as his “boss lady”, as he calls her, delivers another customer an order of onion rings with the zesty sauce. “Me and him don’t argue. And we don’t fight. That’s why he’s my best friend.
“I’m proud, mm-hmm.”
Edgar’s love affair with Cartersville’s athletic programs started in 1984, when he was still in middle school.
Locals like to say that when Lawrence came along in the spring of 2014 as an eighth grader on the middle school team, it was then when they knew they had someone special on their hands.
But Lawrence wasn’t the first, and isn’t the only Cartersville student to get the early call-up.
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Edgar was in middle school when the high school team needed a manager, and it wasn’t long before he was hand-picked.
“One’s a star athlete,” Cartersville baseball coach, assistant football coach and former Clemson punter Kyle Tucker says of Edgar’s friendship with Lawrence. “And one’s a star employee. That’s really cool.”
Edgar started as a water boy.
As a teenager in the 1980s, it was his job to make sure the football players were well hydrated, and the more he was around, the more the community started to fall in love with his gentle, contagious spirit.
By 1985 Edgar was the basketball team’s manager, too — a job he still has today.
For 13 years, he has done baseball as well, all while working part-time at Burger King. He now runs the clock at JV games, sets up the field for Friday game days, puts out the pylons and even does a little “backup coaching,” as he likes to call it.
Because he doesn’t drive, he rides public transit to work his short shifts Monday through Thursday and basks in how friendly everyone is.
Then, he walks across the street to the school where he has the freedom to roam the hall as he pleases. He’s an institution anywhere he goes in town. Students chant his name when they see him.
They call him “E” instead of Edgar because of the smooth jump shot he developed on the hardwood back in the 1980s. His middle school P.E. teacher would watch Dr. J, then call Edgar “Dr. E” for his smooth stroke.
Eventually, he lost the “Dr.” and just became “E.” It has stuck ever since.
Lawrence first met “E” in the spring of 2014 on the football field.
The duo clicked instantly, though Edgar admits he had some questions.
“Trevor had short hair. I told him he needed to work out,” Edgar says, cracking himself up in the process. “He needed to get some meat in him. He was too small.”
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“He’s so sweet,” Lawrence’s mother, Amanda, laughs as she hears Edgar’s memory of her son. “(Look at) what sports have given to him. He’s not able to be a superstar athlete or anything like that, but it’s really given him a sense of purpose.
“I think there’s really something to be said for the compassion of the coaches and the school and the sense of community and family that the school really ingrains. I hope it never leaves.”
As time passed, Lawrence and Edgar only grew closer — two former strangers united over a common love for football.
Once Edgar got past his initial assessment of Lawrence being too small, he watched the teenager throw the football and then immediately paid Cartersville’s quarterbacks coach a visit.
“I’m like, ‘You need to start him. You need to start him,’ ” Edgar said. “He’s not a college type. He’s an NFL-type quarterback.”
Over the years, while Lawrence was known more and more for his near-perfect accuracy and poise in the pocket, Edgar was known more and more for his uncanny ability to predict eventual game scores.
Every Friday, he heads over to Tucker’s social studies classroom and predicts the score of Cartersville’s football game, Georgia’s football game, Georgia Tech’s football game, Clemson’s football game and the Falcons’ NFL matchup.
When Lawrence led Cartersville to a state championship berth in 2016, Edgar grabbed the microphone at a school-wide pep rally ahead of the game and proclaimed Cartersville would win 51-0 to a standing ovation.
Internally, people thought he was crazy.
The Purple Hurricanes then won 58-7. His margin of victory was identical.
“It’s right there,” he grins pointing to his brain. “What were y’all thinking?”
When Edgar thinks about his situation, he likes to say he should have been the actor cast in the movie “Radio.” He also compares the way he thinks to the book “Little Rainman,” a book written by a mother about her autistic son to help people understand autism more clearly.
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He loves YouTube — 1980s NBA games and The Price is Right re-runs are usually his favorites, along with soap operas like Knots Landing.
But Lawrence — and all of Cartersville — see Edgar not for his disability, but instead for the perspective he offers.
When the high school boys of Cartersville learned of Edgar’s loyalty to Burger King, they jokingly started to push his buttons by signing songs about McDonald’s on the bus or making fun of Burger King’s ingredients to see if they could get him going.
If there are two things that upset Edgar, they are not being able to call his mother if his phone is dead after a game, and people mocking Burger King.
But in Lawrence, Edgar always had an advocate. He always had someone who stood up for him.
“Trevor was always the kind of guy who would pull for the underdog and put his arm around him and because of that, I think with Edgar, Trevor always had that kind of, ‘Hey, I’m going to look out for E. That’s my buddy,’ ” Tucker said.
“Trevor was always going to be one to say, ‘Hey, I’m just going to show my love and appreciation for Edgar. Talk to him, ask him how he’s doing.’ That kind of thing. He’d totally stick up for him.”
The last time Lawrence saw his biggest cheerleader was about 10 weeks ago when Lawrence was home for a quick visit between Clemson’s ACC Championship against Pittsburgh and the Tigers’ eventual Cotton Bowl win against Notre Dame.
Edgar found him, slung his arms around him and started talking to him just like old times. Of everyone watching the Syracuse game when Lawrence went down with a head injury, it was Edgar who might have been the most concerned. He started texting Cartersville coaches to make sure his hero was going to be OK: “I wanted to know how Trevor Lawrence is,” he wrote.
“We’ve been best friends for four years,” Edgar says, snorting as he laughs. “I’m definitely his biggest fan.”
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In November he was on hand with Tucker at Clemson when Lawrence and the Tigers clobbered Louisville 77-16, an outing in which Lawrence had just 59 passing yards but two touchdowns to get the job done early.
Edgar saw Lawrence’s parents before the game, watched Lawrence walk off the field after the victory and was beaming for the rest of the afternoon.
“I’m like, ‘I need to come down there,’ ” Edgar said. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘I wish I could be on the sidelines.’ ”
As Lawrence enters spring practice this week, the beginning of a sophom*ore campaign that has Heisman Trophy potential attached to it, at any given moment, he could be pulled in any direction.
But at home, there is always Edgar — the constant figure who has always loved and will always love the flashy phenom regardless. Whether it’s on his cell phone or on his mother’s television, Edgar never misses a Clemson game, and the national championship game brought with it an entirely different set of emotions for his “Cartersville boy.”
That’s because to tell Lawrence’s story is to tell the story of Cartersville.
But to tell Cartersville’s story is to start in the Burger King — with Edgar, and with the love story between him and this town.
His shift has now ended, and on his way out, he sees a piece of dirt on the ground he wants to scrub. He picks up a napkin off the floor, too, as Guest No. 11 is given a Double Whopper with cheese — add mustard, add pickles.
One lady hugs Edgar’s neck, another man tells him to take care.
“I will!” he says back.
Then, after a quick wave to patrons going through the drive-through, it’s on over to the school, where anyone who talks to him instantly becomes the world’s most important person. The speech pathologist gives him a kiss on his way in, and Tucker’s classroom goes bananas once he busts the door open mid-lesson.
“I would dare say,” Tucker said, “without doing any type of official poll, that right now, in 2019, the two most famous people in Cartersville are Trevor Lawrence — and Edgar Moore.
“There’s something to be said about that.”
(Photo by Grace Raynor / The Athletic)
