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Saturday, August 26, 2006
Richt wins with faith, character
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Athens — To be a football coach, you don’t have to have a chaw in your jaw, a whistle around your neck and the salty vocabulary of a mule driver. Or wear a pair of canvas knickers and a sweatshirt and walk around in cleated shoes. Nor do you have to be as ethically inclined as Mark Richt. But it appears to have worked pretty well for him. Even so, when a lady named Sharon K. Stoll came around offering a program called “Winning With Character,” he agreed to have it installed for his Georgia football players.
Not that he felt Georgia needed it, but it sounded as if anybody could use it, including the whole student body. It had a theme, about helping players “reflect on who they are and to provide a forum to discuss how they should make decisions.” A member of the athletics staff, Bobby Langford, recommended it to Richt, and now Georgia is one of six major college programs where the course is ongoing. In fact, in its fifth year here, though just to be rather calloused about the thing, I doubt Richt needs any outside influence other than the One he deals with on a daily basis, his Lord and Savior, in his words.
Richt’s ascension to the faith he now represents was a long haul, from the time he found out he was not going to be the University of Miami’s starting quarterback. Jim Kelly was. “I was crushed,” he said. “Then I began to realize what a shallow human I was, and what was left of me wasn’t very appealing.”
Down through the years he wrestled with his conscience, trying to get a grip on just what Christianity is, worried about what his friends might think if he went public, so to speak. “I still wanted to do what I wanted to do, not what God wanted me to do.”
You’ve read of the penalties imposed on some of the Georgia players: suspensions and, in some cases, dismissal. Not always were the penalized players from underprivileged homes, but from both sides of the track. One was a minister’s son, and another continued his wayward life into the NFL.
“Things are going to happen, and it hurts to impose some of the disciplinary things, but it’s like correcting your children,” Richt said. “You discipline them because you love them.” And the truth is, he didn’t necessarily feel that Georgia football needed Ms. Stoll’s program, but if it might help, give it a try. It was his view that Georgia was already trying to “win with character.”
“Can morals be taught?” he was asked.
His reply was swift. “Of course morals can be taught. It’s something we work at daily. That’s what we try to do at Georgia, to help develop the mind, body and spirit. You do all that, you build a better team.”
Back to Richt and his own personal wrestle with himself. “I was not without my own personal experiences. I’d been a hell-raiser. Then I began to think about giving my life some purpose. I really wasn’t sure just what Christianity was. I thought you had to be perfect, and I wasn’t ready for that. I thought maybe if I followed the Ten Commandments I’d go straight to heaven.”
When he was an assistant at Florida State, the message came through in violent form. One of the football players was shot dead, a tackle named Pablo Lopez. It was a grim Bobby Bowden who called a staff meeting the next morning and looked his coaches in the eyes, then delivered the shivering challenge:
“If that had been you last night, where would you be spending eternity?” he said.
That was it. “I’d been wavering, wondering all that time, but that was the culmination,” Richt said. “It was time to give my life to Christ.”
You wonder if such a commitment has its disadvantages in his line of work. Handicapped in recruiting? Do you do anything it takes to get ahead? How does it affect what a college football coach has to do to land the hot prospect, to win the big game? Where do sin and honor above all collide?
He doesn’t need Sharon K. Stoll to be his guide. It’s Mark Richt’s design to “win with character” every day of his life.
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