There's Just Something About Sport

“There’s just something about sport.” This line was the mantra of Dr. Richard Lapchick’s speech to a group of roughly 50 interested UGA students, professors, and fans Tuesday, April 20. The College of Education’s Department of Kinesiology welcomed Dr. Lapchick as part of the 2010 Clifford Lewis Scholar Lecture series. The audience sat at rapt attention as they listened to Dr. Lapchick, who has been nicknamed the “racial consciousness of sports”, discuss his experiences and lifelong efforts to combat racism within sports.

“My journey on the issue of race and sport started when I was five years old,” said Lapchick, the current Director of the University of Central Florida’s DeVos Sport Business Management Program and frequent ESPN contributing reporter. “There’s something about sports that makes us different.”

Lapchick is the son of the legendary Joe Lapchick, the Original Celtics center and later coach of the New York Knicks. Lapchick explained how his first exposure to the hate of racism centered on his father. Joe Lapchick, then the coach of the New York Knicks, signed the NBA’s first African-American, Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, in 1950. Lapchick recalls his five0year-old self picking up the phone on numberous occasions only to hear “nigger lover, nigger lover” in reference to his father. But his passion for civil rights truly ignited after a visit to a German concentration camp as part of a European trip to the 1960 Olympic Games. “Seeing what people would do to each other for differences in race and religion made basketball seem a little less important for the rest of my life,” muses Lapchick. Yet, once he got to Rome for the Olympics, he remembers the exhilarating feeling of seeing people of all different races, religions, ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures coming together peacefully to participate in the international games. “Sports bring people together in ways other things don’t,” he said with a smile.

Lapchick’s passion for sports runs deeper than just love for the game or a rooted family history: it’s the colorblind unity of sports that breaks down discriminating barriers. He shared with his audience his favorite part of sports: the huddle. “In the huddle,” he said, “when you’re a member of the team, it doesn't matter if you’re white, black, Latino, Catholic, you can’t win if you don’t act like a team.” He went on to talk about the renewing power of sports through the scheduled baseball game on the first Friday after the Virigina Tech shootings of 2007. “[Initially] The president [of Virginia Tech] got a lot of criticism for that [allowing the game to go on] but he knew something,” said Lapchick, going on to explain how the usually modestly attended baseball game was packed with over 1,000 fans. Lapchick praised the event, and how sports had the power to unite and heal a damaged community. “When they got there, life suddenly had renewal.”

Lapchick went on to encourage students to pick up the torch left to them by past generations and continue to promote equality in sports and the nation as a whole. “This generation is partially in control of sports. Many [student athletes] athletes are very community and religiously centered and they’re giving back to their communities in a variety of ways. Athletes really rallied to help the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.”

“You never just change one person,” he says, a lesson to remember.