Coach Lee

I met Charles Lee when I was fourteen years old. He was the head football coach at Benjamin Russell High School in Alexander City, Alabama.

The year was 1967, and I was caught in the middle. I was caught between white people and Black people, integration and segregation, childhood and manhood, the religious and the secular, education and ignorance. I had decided to become one of a few Black kids to integrate Benjamin Russell, and Coach Lee would very soon become one of the most important people in my life.

I am not an easy person to know. Not then, not now. It takes a little effort. It takes courage, maybe even determination. I will not willingly share my innermost thoughts. I will not easily or quickly trust anyone.  Gullibility does not exist within me. I can walk away from anything and anyone. I have no fear of acting or being alone.

Coach Lee is a legendary figure in Alabama high school sports. His wrestling teams dominated the state for more than a decade. His football teams were consistent winners as well. Before retiring, he was also an athletic director, high school Principal, and selected to the Alabama High School Athletic Hall of Fame. As an incoming freshman athlete from the Black school across town, Coach Lee had a special interest in me. As the gate-keeper for the dream I had of playing varsity football at Benjamin Russell High, I had a special interest in him. Coach did not spend a lot of time with freshmen, we had our own coach and played our own games, but I noticed him watching us carefully, especially when we scrimmaged against the varsity.

My relationship with my father was non-existent, because I did not know who he was. I grew up under the impression that my step-father was my dad, which illustrates the kind of relationship I had with my mother. Obviously, today, I’m done with anyone that lies to me. However, when I was fourteen none of this was known to me. Like most children of that age, if my father couldn’t stand the sight of me, and my mother was ambivalent, it had to be my fault, right? My mother did not admit to me the truth about my parentage until I was 27 years old. Of course, by that time my real father was dead, and the psychological portrait was complete.

Coach Lee was a very organized man. Everything we did during practice had a purpose. We had a routine that became ingrained in all of us, so that by the time we were seniors, we could practice without the coaches. We always had short term and long term goals, Coach Lee inspired us, motivated us, and made us laugh. We learned to work together, he emphasized how all eleven players had a role to play on every play, and success depended on everybody doing their individual job. Coach Lee despised a quitter. To him that was the worst thing anybody could be. Every year during Spring practice he would push us to our physical and mental limits, to find out who the quitters were, so we could get rid of them before the season started in the fall. It was Coach Lee who instilled in me the importance of not dropping the ball. He made it clear that everybody on the team were working to gain possession of that ball and to move it across the goal line, and to simply drop it, and give it back to the other team was simply unacceptable.

I will always remember the way he talked to us before, during, and after games. He helped me understand the symbolic importance of wearing our uniform, representing our school, city, parents, alumni, and friends. I learned to accept that responsibility. I learned it wasn’t just about me. In later years, I realized how important it was that coach would chew us out, embarrass us even, in the locker room, but never, ever in public.

Prior to the 1969-1970 school year, I was tempted to leave Benjamin Russell High and go back to the Black school I had come from. After the tumultuous year of 1968, most of the Black people I knew were encouraging me to do that. Martin Luther King had been killed. The Black Power protests had occurred at the Olympic Games in Mexico City. The Black Panthers were prominent, Robert Kennedy had been killed, the inner cities were burning from rioting, and the Viet Nam war was raging. Some of the people that I called friends were telling me if I stayed at Russell I was an Uncle Tom. I was 16 years old, and I didn’t know what to do, so I asked Coach Lee. When I told him what was going on, he told me I should stay. He then told me something no one on my side of town knew at the time. A decision had been made to close the Black school for the 1970-1971 school year. If I left, I would have to come back after one year anyway. He then reminded me that I had shown the courage to start something in 1967, and I needed to find the courage to finish it now. He told me he knew I was not a quitter, that I had never disappointed him before, and not to start now. I stayed.

I had another memorable conversation with Coach Lee after my senior year. I had been offered a scholarship to play football at Alabama State University, an HBCU (Historically Black College/University) in Montgomery, Alabama. When I talked to Coach Lee about it he said, “Charlie, why don’t you go to Auburn”? The thought of going to Auburn had not occurred to me before that moment. That question changed my life. That question also encapsulates what Coach Lee thought of me. He made it clear to me that he thought I was as capable of success as anybody else. He made it clear that he believed in me.

Today I realize that so many of the things that Coach Lee instilled in me I have tried to instill in others. I have repeated many of the same words he said to us in Alabama to my teachers and students in Maryland. He has had a profound effect on me professionally and personally. I realize now that so many of the things he taught me and showed me were the things that every son needs to get from his father.

For some reason, I have been thinking of my football coach often lately. Coach Lee died on a Friday, May 28, 2010. I will always love him.

He was the father…… I never had.