Adaptation or adjustment? I really don't know. I just have to be honest, in my stance they couldn't adapt to our ways.
Whether our ways are right I don't know. I'll give you an example. In
basketball, one of the things that I had to deal with is the looseness
of attitude. I mean I was a young coach, but I expected things to be
done in a certain way. And even just some of the things, like in
basketball they'd come out and they'd be showboating, you know coming
out on the basketball court with toboggans [a kind of knitted cap] on
their heads. You know that type of thing, and I wasn't used to that. In
fact, I recall after about a month or so, I had to call a meeting … Our
practice would really degenerate at times into kind of a backyard play.
And I was trying to set offense instead of free play kinds of stuff, and
literally I had to call an early morning meeting one time and dismiss a
couple of black athletes. Whether or not I was right at the time, I felt
like I had to do that. In fact the suggestion came from Bobby Joe. Bobby
Joe was my captain, he was my co-captain. I had a white boy as the
other. They came to me after practice one day and they sensed that I was
sensing something needed to be done, and I dismissed several of the ones
I thought was kind of instigating all that and the ones I felt I could
probably do without at that time. I dismissed a couple of those kids,
but they didn't react negatively, you know take it out on me in any way.
They just accepted it, that's the way it was.
In fact, it's kind of ironic, I never will forget. One of - we had
another little black kid that was as a result of me dismissing two or
three of these other black kids all of a sudden got to play a lot more.
And after two or three weeks went by, maybe his playing time was not
quite as much. He came up to me and said "Coach, let's have another one
of them meetings. I gotta play more." I guess it was me as a young coach
trying to get a handle on things. Like I said, I dismissed some of those
guys, and even to this day though quite a few of them see me and and
they don't hold a grudge, I'm sure. In fact they've done some things for
me in my schools. They've been very supportive. They didn't even react
negatively against me at that time. That was about the middle of the
year in basketball. But basically it was the same in football. I don't
think they held it against Von Ray Harris.
In fact, he had an instance early on in football. Newbold had a guy who
was tremendous, he was a man. I mean literally. He was one of those guys
who was about 200 pounds, stocky, quick as a cat. His name was Leroy
Diamond. He was a star at Newbold. He was "all-everything" in the black
conference I guess. Leroy was one of the ones who emerged, he hung with
it. I never will forget it. We played the first varsity football game,
just barely won 7-0, just got by.