Team spirit: Religion gives Romar and Willingham low-key inspiration
Growing up in small-town North Carolina, Tyrone Willingham had two religions—Christianity and football—and he was careful not to neglect either one.
“College football highlights came on at about noon Sunday,” he recalls. “And at that time you didn’t have the ability to record a program. So by noon we had made our move to the back row of the church. We were ready to put our money in the collection plates and dash out the door.”
Sports and religion go hand-in-hand in America. Collegiate and professional teams have chaplains and chapel sessions. Players invoke God before games and point to him after touchdowns. Billy Graham and the Promise Keepers hold their rallies and revivals in the same stadiums where faithful fans (a word that derives from the Latin for “temple”) gather by the tens of thousands to cheer on the Angels and the Saints, even when they haven’t got a prayer.
But, as Willingham (at left above) learned early in life, religion and sports are sometimes at odds, too—and not just on Sundays. As a football coach, he must work hard to instill his values in his players. But as the coach of a large, religiously diverse team at a public university, he must keep some of those values close to the vest. He must practice what he can’t always preach.
“Clearly, religion is a part of what it means to be in athletics these days,” says James Wellman, chair of the comparative religion program at the Jackson School of lnternational Studies. On May 9, Wellman will moderate a panel including Willingham and Men’s Basketball Coach Lorenzo Romar (at right above) on “Religion in Sports: Tensions and Opportunities,” the final installment in the comparative religion program’s annual lecture series.
Coach Lorenzo Romar, center, takes the floor with his team for practice in Albuquerque, N.M. during the Sweet 16 round of the 2005 NCAA tournament.
“You see a lot of sports figures expressing their religious beliefs, and a lot of different religious groups serving and ministering to sports teams,” Wellman says. “There are Bible studies and prayers before games. I’m curious how these coaches deal with religious diversity on their teams.”
In a word, carefully. Neither Willingham nor Romar says he has ever been given explicit guidelines by the University, but both say they’re mindful of the need to tread lightly. It’s a matter of respect, they say, both for religious diversity and for the distinction between public and private arenas. “I think I have an awareness of those sensitivities regardless of whether our administration sits down with me to discuss them,” says Willingham. “I’m aware that there are certain things you cannot do at a public institution because it seems to violate the rights of the individual, and I’m careful not to let any spiritual feelings that I have threaten that balance.”
That’s not to say that the coaches must feign agnosticism every workday, or that religion is unwelcome in UW athletics. Both teams have a volunteer chaplain, former Husky football player Mike Rohrbach, ’78, who directs the Christian sports ministry Run to Win Outreach. (Rohrbach’s wife, Karen, ’78, is volunteer chaplain for women’s basketball.) Both teams offer voluntary Bible study and observe a moment of silence before games, which some players use for prayer. And Romar has also organized a weekly Bible study for members of his staff. But the coaches stress that participation in these activities is voluntary.
“I’ve definitely made it clear, what I believe. But I’ve never forced it on anyone,” says Romar, a devout Christian who spent seven years as a player and coach for Athletes in Action, the sports division of the Campus Crusade for Christ. “Everything is there for you, it’s voluntary. It’s not going to affect your playing time or the way I view you as a person at all.”
Romar believes his personal experiences as an evangelical Christian and an Athlete in Action have, in fact, heightened his awareness of religious sensitivities. He grew up in a church-going family and attended Catholic school, but didn’t think deeply about faith until his mid-20s. Following a strong but not stellar basketball career at the UW, he hustled and scrapped his way onto the roster of the 1980 Golden State Warriors, then beat even longer odds by returning to the NBA for four more seasons.
But during that time he began to feel a spiritual need that no amount of worldly success could satisfy. One day he picked up a Bible he and his wife had received as a wedding gift. “That’s when the light came on,” he says. “I had been trying to get closer to God by just being a good person. But no one will get closer to God that way, because we don’t reach his standard. When I read the scriptures, I realized I had to depend on what he had already done for me as a way for me to get closer to him.”
“Am I living, moment by moment, the way God wants me to live?”
Lorenzo Romar, UW men's basketball coach
Having heard the good news, Romar wanted to share it with everyone. “I was so excited,” he recalls. “I felt like I had discovered a cure for cancer. And I was going to tell the world about it, how great it was. But I wasn’t quite tactful at the time, and I probably turned some people off. There weren’t as many people ready to listen to what I had to say as I thought there might be.”
When Athletes in Action entered the picture, in 1985, it was perfect timing. Romar’s future in the NBA looked uncertain. He had been invited to try out for the Indiana Pacers but hadn’t been promised a contract. While waiting at the baggage claim of the Indianapolis airport, he noticed a stranger who seemed to be staring at him. It was the Athletes in Action coach, who had been tipped off about Romar’s potential availability and had come to town to recruit him. Almost immediately, Romar says, he knew it was the right fit. “I just thought, ‘This is the best. I get to play ball and tell people about Jesus. This is awesome.’”
For the next seven years he barnstormed around the country, playing friendly basketball games against college and high school teams and spreading the gospel message. At first, he got to address big crowds at halftime. Increasingly, however, as religious pluralism became a concern, schools began asking the group to withhold its sermons until after the games.
“And we would have what’s called a Superstar Competition,” Romar recalls, “where we would do a tug-of-war against the best athletes in the school, or a volleyball game or a football game. It was a lot of fun. And in between those, we would sprinkle different messages: Say no to drugs, abstinence, things of that nature. And in certain places, even in public schools, they would tell us, ‘You say whatever you want.’ Others would say, ‘Well, this is what you can’t share.’ So I learned quite a bit about what you can and can’t say in those situations.”
For Willingham, Christianity has been more of a steady presence than a sudden revelation. He doesn’t attend any one church regularly, although he visits several over the course of the year, and his theology seems to center more on good works than on faith. “What is the real purpose of religion?” he says. “I would say that it is to do good; to somehow help your fellow man. And that doesn’t say anything about any particular religion, but should speak to all religions …. I’m one of these guys who believes that God wears many faces. And he has to, because we’re all different. We all have different needs. We see things differently.”
Yet despite their differently inflected philosophies, Willingham and Romar seem to have arrived at an identical belief about the place of religion in coaching: The best way to honor one’s values is to embody them, quietly, every day.
“Neither one of them is ever preachy,” says Rohrbach, the team chaplain, “or wearing their Christianity on their sleeve or anything like that. But I think the players know where they stand, and know that their strength of character comes from their faith. The thing that strikes me about both Coach Willingham and Coach Romar is that they deal with their players in a respectful manner. That, I think, can have only one effect, which is that the players want to give their all and do their best for them.”
“Am I living, moment by moment, the way God wants me to live?” asks Romar. “Am I coaching the way God would want me to coach? Well, wait a minute, what do you mean? God tells you how to coach? No, he never talked to me about designing a play or designing a defense, but in my day-to-day dealings with people—my assistants, my bosses, my players—am I treating them with respect?”
ootball Coach Tyrone Willingham calls out the next set of drills during a 2006 practice at Husky Stadium.
Leaving the preaching to the preachers, Willingham says, is both a practical consideration—it behooves a coach not to alienate any of his players—and an ethical one. Playing football, like any other part of college, is an educational experience, and student-athletes should be given the freedom to make their own choices and learn from them. Asked if being a coach was different, in that respect, from being a parent, Willingham said no—coaching and parenting are actually quite similar.
“Why wouldn’t what’s good for our players be good for my own kids?” he says. “You want your kids to develop their own beliefs. Now obviously there are certain ages when that’s not possible—when the child is 4, 5, 6 years old. But as they approach the age of your players, I would imagine that the smart thing might be to handle it in much the same way. You want them to grow—and hopefully the example that you provide will lead them in what you think is the right direction in terms of their spiritual beliefs, but at the same time allow them to grow.”
Lorenzo Romar on life after the NBA
“I’m guarding Magic Johnson one year, and the next year I’m playing in front of maybe 600 people for Athletes in Action, guarding a player that is never, ever going to be looked at by the NBA. And some people would look at me almost in pity. They’d say, ‘So, are you enjoying what you’re doing?’ Kind of with that tone, like, ‘How have you been making it since you’ve been paralyzed?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, I am.’ ‘Well,’ they’d say, ‘at least you’re still playing.’ In other words, this is a waste of time. One coach contacted me and wanted me to be his assistant at the Division-1 level. And he said, ‘You know, you’re just running in the mud doing that thing you’re doing with Athletes in Action. That’s not going to amount to anything.’ What those people who felt sorry for me didn’t understand was, that was seven of the best years of my life. I learned as much in those seven years as I had learned in my entire life, through Bible studies, conversations, conferences, where I just learned the Bible. I just learned the Word.”
Metaphysical fitness
According to Lorenzo Romar, the UW men’s basketball coach, there are as many reasons why athletes go to chapel as there are athletes in chapel.
For some, it’s just how they were raised. Others “can’t get enough of learning about the Lord,” he says. “Then you’ve got some that are going through difficult times: last year of their contract; an injury, maybe a career-threatening injury; not playing very well. Subconsciously, they’re looking for help, so they go to chapel. I think for some others, it’s a straight rabbit’s foot. Good-luck charm. As one man said, ‘I’ve got a pair of dice, I’ve got a rabbit’s foot, and I’ve got a cross that I keep. So between the three I shouId be okay.”‘
Faith also appeals to those seeking a sense of acceptance, says Mike Rohrbach, ’78, who played but didn’t star for the UW football team in the 1970s. The constant scrutiny that student-athletes endure can be more punishing than any physical test.
“Every Husky football practice is taped, and every play is monitored and looked at—kind of an eye-in-the-sky, if you will,” says Rohrbach, who now directs the Run to Win Christian sports ministry and serves as a volunteer chaplain for both football and men’s basketball, as well as for the Sonics. “Your performance is evaluated, and sometimes it’s comforting to know that God accepts you just the way you are. It’s not based on your performance. It’s based on your trust in him.”
And just as some athletes crave relief from the pressure to succeed, Romar says, some crave relief from success itself. He believes that most athletes who use press conferences and post-game interviews to thank God for their spectacular play—as self-important as they sometimes sound—are actually trying to keep their own heads from getting too big.
“I think some people who are really strong in their faith will always give credit to God, as a way of preserving their humility,” Romar says. “There is an understanding that whatever we have, we only have it because of the Lord: I don’t ever dare take credit for what I’m doing, because I know this is of God.”