Something about sports.

“There is something about sports.” So went Richard Lapchick’s message to a group of over 100 people at the Georgia Center’s Master Hall on Tuesday, April 20. The words served as a sort of theme or motto for his lecture. “You can’t win if you don’t play as a team,” he said. “Imagine if you could project that concept of the huddle to [everything else].”

Richard Lapchick was tabbed to give the 2010 Clifford Lewis Scholar Lecture, an event sponsored by the UGA College of Education’s department of kinesiology. The lecture, in honor of the late associate dean and physical education professor Clifford Lewis, focused on two subjects of Lapchick’s expertise: race and sport.

From the segregation of basketball players in the mid-twentieth century to the current discrepancies of race in sports management, Lapchick, an author, professor, and racial pioneer, talked about how he has seen sports change in his lifetime. The son of former Boston Celtics basketball player and New York Knicks coach Joe Lapchick, the younger Lapchick spent his whole life immersed in sports and racial inequality.

As a child, Lapchick saw his father berated by racists for signing Nathaniel “Sweetwater” Clifton, the NBA’s first African American signee. Years later, Lapchick would face a public, racial fight of his own. In 1978, the civil rights activist helped to lead a sports boycott of South Africa. While protesting the country’s Davis Cup team’s scheduled game in Tennessee, Lapchick was severely beaten and cut for his cause.

22-year-old University of Georgia student Josh Patterson said it was easy to see why Lapchick was chosen to give this year’s Clifford Lewis Scholar Lecture: “I am excited to hear about what he has to say about sports being a common ground between races because I feel like athletes have potential to do a lot of good for race relations.”

Lapchick began his lecture, titled “Sport: A Bridge Across the Racial Divide,” by congratulating the University of Georgia for hiring the first African American athletic director in the Southeastern Conference, adding, “Hopefully that change is not reversible.”

His opening gave the audience an idea as to what the rest of Lapchick’s lecture would entail: a frank discussion of race, sports, responsibility, and accountability.

Having paid for his cause in blood before, Lapchick provided the students and faculty on hand with a rare commitment towards both sports and race. From Eddie Robinson to the Virginia Tech campus shootings to the New Orleans Saints winning the recent Super Bowl, Lapchick touched on situation after situation in which sports helped to bring a community back together, despite differences in race, religion, gender, and socioeconomic class.

Lapchick, who started the nationally ranked DeVos Sport Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida, also spoke of the importance of leadership and standing up for justice, a principle he believed could slowly change the world.

“You never change just one person’s life. It’s a circle of growth… That’s the power we all have,” he said, pausing before adding, “If we use it.”

If he did nothing else in his lecture, Lapchick at least left his audience wondering one thing: “Maybe there really is something about sports.”