[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 173 (Friday, November 3, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S16680-S16681]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            RACIAL HARMONY IS CONTACT SPORT FOR ILLINI COACH

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, Recently, the Wall Street Journal 
had an article that deals with sports; but much more important than 
that, it deals with where we are in our society and what one 
enlightened leader, Coach Lou Tepper, is doing to bridge the gap that 
exists between people in our society.
  The leadership he is showing on this is leadership that should 
provide an example to coaches all over the country, not simply to 
coaches but to schools, churches, civic organizations, and many other 
groups.
  I ask unanimous consent that the Wall Street Journal article by 
Frederick C. Klein be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

             [From the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 13, 1995]

            Racial Harmony Is Contact Sport for Illini Coach

                        (By Frederick C. Klein)

       Champaign, IL.--By now, I think, most people have come to 
     understand that the interracial harmony they see on fields of 
     play is more apparent than real. Black and white teammates 
     may exchange high-fives or even hugs to celebrate moments of 
     triumph, but once the games are over they go their separate 
     ways, in keeping with the patterns of the society as a whole.
       Mention race relations to people in sports in any capacity, 
     and the likely response is a shrug. Few volunteer to discuss 
     the subject, and when it does come up it's quickly brushed 
     off. The unspoken but clear consensus is that teams exist to 
     win games, and what their members do on their own time is 
     their own business.
       There is, however, at least one exception to this rule. Lou 
     Tepper, the head football coach at the University of Illinois 
     in this city amid the cornfields 150 miles south of Chicago, 
     believes that as long as young men must get along on the 
     gridiron in order to succeed, it'd be a shame if they didn't 
     get to know one another better in other ways. He's made 
     racial integration a part of his program, requiring his 
     players to promise to get to know teammates of the other race 
     and putting them in situations that promote such contact.
       ``This is a university, and I'm here as an educator,'' he 
     says. ``I think there ought to be more to the sports 
     experience than what appears in the box scores.''
       Lest anyone get the impression that the earnest, 
     bespectacled Mr. Tepper is insufficiently concerned with X's 
     and O's--a high crime in big-time-college-coaching circles--
     he's quick to set them straight. His record is 21-19-1. He 
     puts in the 100-hour weeks that are standard at his level of 
     his profession, and goes around honorably bleary-eyed from 
     his scrutiny of game films. He tells a recent visitor that 
     the only reason he has time for more than a quick chat 
     about next Saturday Illinois foe is that, on the week in 
     question, there was none, his team having that Saturday 
     off.
       That said, however, he became more expansive. ``Maybe I 
     come at coaching from a different perspective than some 
     people,'' he remarked. ``Maybe I come at life that way, 
     too.''
       That life began 50 years ago in Keystone, PA., a hamlet 50 
     miles south of, and, maybe, 30 years behind, Pittsburgh. 
     Sixty-one people lived in Keystone at the time, and 31 of 
     them were his relatives. His father, whose education ended 
     with the eighth grade, was a janitor, and his family lived on 
     and worked a plot of land he calls ``too small to be a farm 
     but too big to be a garden.''
       On his first day at the area's consolidated high school, an 
     hour's bus ride from his home, he learned what it was like to 
     be an outsider. ``I found out quick I was a bumpkin,'' he 
     says. ``I talked and dressed different from the other kids. I 
     smelled different, too; that happens when you start your day 
     feeding pigs and chickens. Being an athlete helped me gain 
     acceptance, but I've never forgotten how it felt to be an 
     object of prejudice.''

[[Page S 16681]]

       Mr. Tepper says that feeling drew him close to the blacks 
     he met while attending Rutgers University on a football 
     scholarship. His determination to bridge racial gaps, fed in 
     part by his active Christianity, grew during the 24 years he 
     spent as an assistant coach at a half-dozen schools before 
     Illinois promoted him to head coach from defensive 
     coordinator in late 1991. ``My wife, Karen, and I told 
     ourselves that if I ever got a top job, we'd make it reflect 
     our views about how people should be treated,'' he says.
       Those views are contained in a ``mission statement'' that's 
     sent to everyone Illinois recruits for football. One of its 
     provisions is a ``family concept'' that asks team members to 
     treat each other with ``love and discipline.'' In case anyone 
     misses the point, Mr. Tepper tells them it especially applies 
     white-to-black and vice versa, and requires the lads to 
     pledge to do that before they sign scholarship papers. The 
     school has lost several recruits as a result. ``I've had 
     whites balk [at the pledge], but never a black,'' the coach 
     notes.
       Players quickly get the chance to prove their words. Seats 
     at all team meetings are assigned on a black-white-black-
     white basis. Room assignments for summer practice before 
     classes start, and for team road trips, are made the same 
     way. The process is facilitated by the fact that the team is 
     almost 50-50 white and black.
       Thursday team dinners in season are designated as ``Unity 
     Nights,'' and players are encouraged to eat next to ones they 
     don't know well. Players joke that this can mean that 
     defensive players sit next to members of the offense, but the 
     dinners also are occasions for interracial fraternizing.
       Some of the ties fostered in those ways have flowered in 
     others: Several whites and blacks on the team now are full-
     time roomies, and interracial team parties, the exception in 
     pre-Tepper days, have become the rule.
       Team members admit their white-black relationships are, 
     mostly, no more than skin deep; ``serious'' racial issues, 
     such as the O.J. Simpson trial, go undiscussed. ``We like to 
     keep things light,'' says Chris Koerwitz, an offensive 
     lineman from Oshkosh, Wis. But while most of the Fighting 
     Illini continue to take their ease with others of their race, 
     it's with the knowledge that it could be otherwise.
       ``You might say I was prejudiced before. I knew very few 
     black people, and accepted the negative things white people 
     say about them,'' says Paul Marshall, a defensive lineman 
     from almost-all-white Naperville, Ill. ``Here, I've seen that 
     the negatives aren't true, and that, given the chance, guys 
     want to be friendly.''
       ``Yeah, I signed coach's pledge, but I thought it was just 
     recruiting stuff. Then I got here and, right away, I had this 
     white guy for a roommate,'' says David James, a linebacker 
     from almost-all-black East St. Louis, Ill. ``It wasn't so 
     bad,'' he smiles. ``I played some rap for him and he played 
     some Van Halen for me. We still do it sometimes.''

                          ____________________