All-Athletes and Coaches Convocation
August 29, 2004

 I just love sports talk and athletic images:

                  The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.

                  They put on their pants same way we do.

                  Play the schedule one game at a time.

                  It ain’t over til its over.

                  Its all about overcoming adversity.

                  We have to get better each week.

                  Its crunch time!

I love expressions like that, and I truly believe them not only from the standpoint of athletics or a particular sport itself, but in a far broader way.  This summer’s Olympic games have given me a wonderful opportunity to overdose on sports talk.

“The winner is the one who makes the fewest mistakes.”  How many times have I heard that? How do I minimize my mistakes?  I rehearse, I practice, I test and test again.  As the gymnaist Carly Patterson reminded us, “I practiced 30 hours a week, only taking Sunday off.” Television commentator Clark Kellogg challenges us, “Till your “good” gets “better” and your “better” is “the best,” don’t ever, don’t ever, don’t ever let it rest.”

That is where we are now.  Time to start the practices, the rehearsals, the testing.  I know that each of the coaches and the athletes in all the sports here today are prepared to do just that.

But for a few minutes let me go in another direction.  This Spring and summer also brought me another one of my favorite sports…bicycling…and the Super Bowl of cycling….The Tour de France.  Cycling is possibly one of the most demanding of all sports, and certainly The Tour de France stands alone as a grueling, demanding challenge.  My heart breaks each time I see a crash, especially if Lance Armstrong goes down in the crash as he did last year 3 different times.

But the interesting thing about cycling is that the peloton, the large group of riders who usually trail the breakaway leaders, always slows down when the leader of the Tour goes down.  The rider wearing the yellow jersey is never left behind if he crashes.  Even his primary contenders will wait for him to return to the peloton.  And so the two primary challengers to Armstrong, American Tyler Hamilton and Germany’s, Jan Ulrich, slowed the entire cycling peloton until Lance Armstrong was back on his bike and in front of the peloton.  Then the leaders took off again in route to Armstrong’s 6^th consecutive tour victory.  But in winning this muscle-burning test covering over 2100 miles in 20 days, Armstrong was the beneficiary of the ultimate in sportsmanship.  It is sportsmanship that enabled this cancer-surviving competitor to be the all-round athlete most admired by the sport of cycling.

Let me tell you another story.  It is very close to home.  This summer I played in the Blowing Rock Country Club golf championship.  On the second hole of the final round of that championship, my opponent, who was on the other side of the fairway from me, suddenly looked up in disgust, then motioned me to meet him in the fairway.  I started walking toward him assuming he wanted to ask me if he could move his ball off a root or a rock or some natural hazard, and of course I would agree to that.  Not so.

He called me over to tell me that he had tried to move a little twig from behind his ball, but he did not see a leaf attached to the twig and that his ball was sitting on the leaf.  When he moved the twig the leaf moved rolling his ball forward.  He called me over to tell me he would have to take a penalty stroke because his ball moved.  And he did, and I won that match by 2 strokes and ultimately my flight championship.

I would never have known about that little twig and leaf had he not told me.  Without that display of sportsmanship I would have gone into the last hole up by only 1 stroke, and who knows what might have happened.  Sportsmanship.  It is an inspiring characteristic of golf.

Last June I attended the meeting of the President’s Council of the USA South Athletic Conference.  At one point in the meeting our Conference Commissioner distributed a report showing how many times each of the member institutions had been penalized, had technical fouls called on them (or the bench and coach), and how many yellow and red cards had been handed out.  Sitting at a conference table surrounded by the Presidents of the other institutions in our Conference, I have never been more embarrassed in my life.

Put another way, Greensboro College led the league in poor sportsmanship.  I vowed to myself I would never suffer through that kind of institutional indictment and personal embarrassment again.  Greensboro College athletes do not deserve to lead the league in those statistics.

It is ironic that I am now Chairman of the President’s Council for the USA Athletic Conference.  I am requesting that you help me keep the vow I made last year.   And I am alerting you now to the fact that I will not be supportive if our sportsmanship is as unacceptable this year as it was last year.  Believe me, I understand the psychological motivation when a coach invites a technical foul to inspire the team.  That is not my message.  There is a difference between a strategic technical or yellow card and one taken because the individual has lost control of logic and emotions.

One final story.  Last Friday’s Charlotte Observer carried a most provocative editorial.  Rarely has a superb athlete experienced a more humiliating fall than Paul Hamm.  A contender for the all-around gold medal in men’s gymnastics, he made a disastrous landing on a vault, stumbled off the padded mat, fell on his bottom and nearly crashed into the judges. His fortunes fell just as hard.  He plummeted from first to 12^th in the competition with only two of the six events remaining.

Unlike some of the physically imposing athletes in Athens this summer, Paul Hamm, at 5 feet, six inches and 140 pounds, this freckled-faced Midwesterner looks more like a spectator than a competitor.  But within him beats a champion’s heart.

After his fall, he sat for several minutes against a wall, teary-eyed and dejected.  Then he shook off his disappointment and resumed competition, determined to do his best, however futile his efforts seemed.  Miraculously, he gave his best performances ever.  Against the odds, he won the gold.

As these summer Olympics began, those of us who believe athletics builds character,  had tough sledding when the doping scandals upstaged the games themselves.  Those scandalous accusations involving American athletes shamed me nearly as much as last June’s President’s Council  meeting.  Then along comes Paul Hamm to bring to life all the locker room clichés I have loved through the years.  Cliches like “when the going gets tough, the tough get going, or “what counts is not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.”

Paul Hamm’s  triumph is a reminder that the real test in life is not whether we suffer setbacks, for we all will. The real test involves what we do next. Paul Hamm got off his seat, onto his feet and did the best he could.  His most important victory was not in the Olympic hall, but in his heart. After the fall, when winning seemed impossible, he chose not to give up, but to do his best.   A poignant reminder to us all.

I close with another favorite saying, this one from Vince Lombardi.  Of course, Lombardi focused his analogy on football, but I will include you all by inserting “sports” rather than “football” alone: “Sport is life,” to paraphrase Lombardi, “the rest is detail.”  Well, we have plenty of details to take care of this year in class and in the community.  But you folks are fortunate enough to also have your sport to keep you focused on the essence of life.  Play Ball!

Craven E. Williams
President
Greensboro College