As young Jordan Spieth was running away with the Masters a couple Sundays back, Fred Northup was watching from his favorite chair, all but shouting aloud, “That’s what I’m talking about.”
It wasn’t the completeness of Spieth’s golf game that grabbed this most interested observer. It was the surprisingly gracious way the kid carried himself.
The mere 21-year-old had Northup at the seventh hole of that final round, when, after Justin Rose hit a spectacular recovery shot off hardpan, nearly jarring the thing, Spieth flashed a quick smile and a thumb’s up to his playing partner.
“That was nothing but pure sportsmanship,” Northup said. “As a role model, he’s exactly what you want. I don’t know what he’s doing for the world to make it a better place — he’s young yet — but I’m sure he’ll do a lot.”
You likely have not heard of Northup or his Atlanta-based organization, Athletes for a Better World (ABW). Its mission is quite grand: to “use sports to develop character, teamwork and citizenship,” to quote right from the website.
Or, to quote from the man himself: “The whole point of the organization is you learn these values playing sports that are transferable to life. Any business is a team. Or the family is a team. We all play on multiple teams. These values should be able to go throughout your life.”
In one form or another, ABW has been around since 1998, when Northup, a retiring Episcopal minister in Seattle, first broadly conceived it. It has been around long enough to have drawn the interest of legendary UCLA coach John Wooden well before his death five years ago. And when Northup moved his brainchild southeast to Atlanta, it likewise appealed to another statue-worthy coach, Vince Dooley. Both men have ABW awards named after them, recognizing athletes at all levels who live by the code the group promotes.
Monday night at the Atlanta History Center, Shannon Miller — the U.S.’s most decorated gymnast, part of the 1996 Olympic gold medal-winning “Magnificent Seven” team in Atlanta — receives the organization’s Wooden Citizenship Cup. She joins a roster of those honored for their service to sports and society that includes Peyton Manning, Jack Nicklaus, Dikembe Mutombo, Cal Ripken Jr. and Drew Brees.
The same evening, the ABW also will announce the winner among five nominees for the collegiate branch of the award.
Miller exemplifies the group’s ideal for the athlete, one who competed sincerely, being an uplifting model in the arena. And she did so out of it as well, as a cancer survivor and activist in the cause of fighting childhood obesity.
Athletes for a Better World was indirectly spawned by one of the more infamous cases of the ugly athlete. As Northup was preparing to retire from his ministry in early 1998, seeking a different challenge, it struck him that he wanted to do something that appealed to his love of sports.
“What you need to do,” a friend told him, “is get these athletes to behave themselves.” Just a month earlier, the NBA’s Latrell Sprewell had choked his coach, P.J. Carlesimo, during a heated disagreement.
That sharpened Northup’s focus. After moving to Atlanta, he developed a grass roots approach to developing character through sports, instruction starting at the youth, and then high school, level.
He wrote a book — “Winning More than the Game” — that cleared a path to becoming a better person through the playing of games. Sprinkled throughout it were character-building exercises that could be shared between young athletes and their coaches and parents.
All of it was built on the foundation of a mere 146 words, a “Code for Living,” authored by Northup. By design, pretty simple stuff:
A player has a responsibility to do the right things by him or herself, by the team and by society.
You play hard and you treat the rules as the soul of the game you play.
You put the team ahead of yourself.
You respect your opponent.
You project a positive image and give of yourself to others.
And, no, you don’t choke your coach.
The cynic — or would he just be a rational observer — might look around at the landscape of the loud and taunting pro or the self-absorbed college star and wonder whether Northup’s quest is a quixotic one. Can sportsmanship be saved? Will news of the honorable athlete ever outweigh that of the fallen one?
Northup proceeds on the theory that for each school posting the ABW’s code for living, for each coach (and there are hundreds) who passes along the ABW’s regularly emailed discussion points to his team, then maybe sports takes one more small step toward realizing its sweeping potential.
“Sport after sport, year after year, the kid will get it in his head: I will respect the dignity of others. I will not be abusive or dehumanizing,” Northup said.
“Then parents see that and know it means they can’t yell, ‘You’re an idiot,’ to the umpire. Coaches have five minutes a day (to implant such principles with their players). They can do that much.”
Northup grew up in a different time, in a unique environment. He played his sports — tennis and basketball were his best — at a prep school, where the headmaster obsessively taught the values of respectful competition. Yet he remains certain that the lessons from that sheltered setting still fit a rowdier world at large.
You probably do not know him or his group, but Northup badly wants you to.
“I want everybody on the street to know what the code for living is — they may not live by it, but at least they’d be able to tell you what it is. I want it to become the language of sport,” he said.
“Our original goal remains to change the culture of sport in America.”
What a dramatic change that would be: the ideals mattering as much as the final score. Can you imagine?
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