As Stoops showed, this is not a time for coaches to just stick to sports
Less talk, more action.
There was a lot of talk this past week, public relations statements from various coaches and athletics departments in support of the protests over the death of George Floyd. Most had a careful, corporate feel to them.
“I don’t even read a lot of them,” Andrew Brandt, a Villanova professor and former Green Bay Packers executive told former NFL offensive lineman and current analyst Ross Tucker. “I know what they’re going to say.”
Then late Friday afternoon, who showed up on Main Street in Lexington but members of the Kentucky football team, wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts and led by their head coach, Mark Stoops. And they marched in support of the cause.
“I play things pretty tight to the vest with the media, but there’s no more of that on this issue,” Stoops told the media in front of the courthouse. “Everybody needs to get off the bench and make a difference and stand for something.”
He doesn’t stand alone. New Missouri football coach Eli Drinkwitz led his players in a march earlier last week. In Columbia on Friday, South Carolina football coach Will Muschamp led his players as part of a peaceful protest march to the governor’s mansion. Same thing happened in Knoxville with Jeremy Pruitt walking alongside his Tennessee football players as part of a “March on Knox” peaceful protest.
“This is leadership,” said Pruitt after his players gave speeches at the event. “This is doing it the right way.”
Call me naive, but sports is supposed to be about more than the numbers on the scoreboard, more than who wins and who loses. Sports are supposed to be fun, but it’s also about competition and dedication and, most of all, working together. In team sports, part of the purpose is what you can learn from athletes of all races, backgrounds and beliefs striving to achieve a common goal.
That’s why I wanted my two boys to play youth sports. Not because they were great athletes — they inherited my genes, unfortunately — or because I hoped for a college scholarship. I wanted them to be part of something in which they could learn about sacrifice, adversity and people different than themselves.
It’s what former UK football coach Bill Curry talked about in his famous metaphor “The Huddle,” something I’ve thought about a lot recently with regards to sports’ role in current events.
“In that huddle is a bunch of folks that are black, brown, white, red, yellow, liberal, conservative, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu,” Curry says. “We are slim, fat, short, tall, fast and slow. We’re analytical people and we’re impulsive people. We have some of the finest people on earth and, heaven knows, we have a few rounders.”
In the end, says Curry, “We know that sweat smells about the same on everybody’s body.”
It’s the shared experience that makes up what is supposed to be the American culture, though we’ve had to face the fact yet again that the same experience isn’t shared by everyone.
I heard Cris Collinsworth say the other day he had no idea how some of his high school teammates lived until he took them home from practice one day. Collinsworth said his father, Lincoln, a former UK basketball player, was a principal in Florida when schools desegregated. He said his father felt more comfortable in the “black church” than the “redneck church” because the latter viewed him as a “traitor.”
It’s precisely this time and place where a coach’s job is about much more than Xs and Os or contract incentives. It’s about leadership. It’s about a coach such as Stoops saying, as he did Friday, ‘Hey, I’m listening. I hear what you’re saying. I support you. I want to help.’”
And I like what Ohio University basketball coach Jeff Boals tweeted after meeting with his team: “Not all were registered to vote. They will be soon.”
It’s not the time to sit on the bench.
Late Friday night I noticed UK defensive lineman Josh Paschal retweet Stoops’ support of Black Lives Matter with a comment of his own.
Tweeted Paschal, “A real head coach!”
