Speaker touts sports as antidote to racism
By Corey Ryan
Athens NEWS Campus Reporter
May 1, 2008
Callers would phone his house to call his dad “nigger lover.” After he grew up, he became the American leader of the campaign to boycott South Africa’s sport teams. For that, two men carved the n-word into his chest.
Now, Richard Lapchick, an internationally acclaimed human-rights activist and author, tells his stories to help change his audiences’ mindsets about race.
“There’s something about sport that brings us together,” said Lapchick, who spoke Monday night in Ohio University’s Convocation Center about “Sports: A Bridge Across the Racial Divide.”
“In sport, we have what I like to call the miracle of sport,” Lapchick said. “Once you get in that huddle, it doesn’t matter if you are African American, white, Latino, Asian American, Native American, Arab American. It doesn’t matter if you’re Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, Sheik, Jew, Hindu Muslim. It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor. The team can’t win if you don’t pull together. Imagine if we brought that into the rest of our lives?”
Lapchick, founder and CEO of the National Consortium for Academics and Sports, didn’t talk about the 13 books he has written or how he is a regular columnist for the SportsBusiness Journal and ESPN.com. Before he spoke, a video flashed on the two Convo screens to his left and right confirming his impressive credentials. That video featured accolades from the likes of NBA Commissioner David Stern, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and the widow of legendary sports journalist Dick Schaap. This pretty much confirmed why Lapchick has been named “One of the 100 Most Powerful People in Sport.”
His devout Catholic father, Joe, was the Hall-of-Fame center on the original Boston Celtics team in 1923 before turning to a Hall-of-Fame coaching career at St. John’s and the New York Knicks. Lapchick recalled the phone calls poured into his house after the Knicks signed Nathanial “Sweetwater” Clifton, the first ever African American to sign an NBA contract.
“Will this end?” Lapchick asked, referring to racism. “If it will end, how will it end? And what can each of us do to help make it end?”
It hadn’t ended for Lapchick, who said his son was once beaten along with two African-American friends in Boston by a group of white teenagers. When his daughter was in sixth grade, he said students in her class were suspended for compiling a “hit list” that only included the school’s two African-American teachers.
The most violent, racially motivated attack Lapchick talked about involved himself. After a press conference at Vanderbilt, he said he found out from Schaap that Davis Cup sponsors were pulling out in favor of the South African sport boycott he was leading. He went home thinking this was the first time he felt he had accomplished something.
He was working late one night later at his office in the Virginia Wesleyan library, he said, when he heard a knock. Thinking it was campus security, he answered to two masked men who knocked him unconscious and carved “nigger” into his stomach with scissors. He said he suffered internal injuries as well.
After three days in the hospital, he found out that a national newspaper had run a front-page story that included leaked testimony from police suggesting that Lapchick’s wounds were self-inflicted.
He said he was then asked to take a lie-detector test, refused, and faced public ridicule for doing so.
Lapchick said at that point he knew how it might feel to be a sexually assaulted woman.
When he realized his failure to take a lie-detector test took the focus away from South Africa, he said he knew he had to take a test. So he hired an FBI operative to give him a lie-detector test and saw a New York City medical examiner. Both backed his claim that he had been attacked.
Lapchick now defends civil rights as an expert on the racial conscious of sport. But he said he wants to pass the torch.
His experiences dominated his presentation. But how he connected that story with his audience validated his visit to Athens.
“We need you to stay involved because what you can do for the country,” Lapchick said. “I had a sense and feeling as I read about Ohio, as I read about your athletic program, as I read about your history, that there is a sense of family here.”
Lapchick’s speech was sponsored by OU’s Department of Athletics, Office of Multicultural Programs, Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost, Office of Institutional Equity and University College.
Comments
Please log in to post a comment.
