DURHAM — The average track coach just tells his athletes to go out and run.
LeRoy Walker was way above average, which explains why his athletes kept running to dictionaries.
apogee (ap’ …ô jƒì’) n. 1. the point farthest from the earth, the moon or another planet in the orbit of a satellite or spacecraft around it. 2. the highest or farthest point.
You see, as fine of an athlete as Norman Tate was at N.C. College at Durham, now N.C. Central University, it wasn’t enough for Walker simply to tell him and his teammates just to hit the track, just to take off and fly, even though Tate could run with the best of them.
Walker believed that in order for an athlete to maximize talent, he or she had to understand how that talent was harnessed.
So off to dictionaries Tate and his fellow NCCU track athletes sprinted, feverishly flipping pages to figure out what Walker was getting at when he’d start speaking a foreign language, using words like “perigee” and “trajectory” and other terms like that.
And that’s different from modern coaches, who break down on-field production with touch-screen computers and preach the simplification of offensive and defensive schemes. These new-era ball gurus want players to stop thinking so much in favor of just reacting. It’s supposed to be the best way to take advantage of a player’s athletic ability.
But Walker was from the old school, an era when coaches laboriously taught Xs and Os on dusty chalkboards.
OK, perhaps there’s a difference in simplifying playbooks as opposed to emphasizing the complexities of the human body, but the bottom line is that Walker wasn’t into dumb jocks. No, Walker’s jocks had to have some sense, even if he had to put it in them himself.
“The biggest thing that I got was maturing as a person,” said Tate, a sprinter and jumper for NCCU in the early 1960s who competed in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
That’s what’s wrong with sports nowadays. Too much reacting. Not enough thoughtful processing. A more cerebral approach to athletics might have kept Metta World Peace’s elbow in the holster after his spectacular dunk during the heat of NBA passion.
“Coach was always that calming voice,” Tate said of Walker. “He’d just sit beside you and put his hand on your knee and say, ‘Everything is going to be all right.’
“He just had that calming effect about him.”
Tate, 70, remembered an NCCU teammate asking Walker before a track meet if he could run just one event. Walker told the guy his notion was ludicrous.
Ludicrous?
“Coach would come out with words, and we’d have to look at the dictionary,” Tate said.
ludicrous (lü-d…ô-kr…ôs) adj. so out of place or silly as to be funny; ridiculous.
“We didn’t even know what the word ludicrous meant,” Tate said.
That didn’t stop Tate and the other teammates from laughing at the lazy guy on account of Walker using foreign language to describe him. They did, however, look up the word, bolstering their vocabularies.
“He always put us in a situation where we would learn,” Tate said. “He wasn’t just preparing us to be the best track athletes, but the best citizens”
The wonder is whether Walker went back to school at New York University and did all of that studying to obtain a doctorate degree in exercise physiology and biomechanics for the sole purpose of making sure he could exhaust every ounce of talent from his athletes — for their sake, not his.
A memorial service for Walker, who died April 23 in Durham at 93, will be held today at 11 a.m. at Duke Chapel.
In other words, Walker stared down Jim Crow and kindly — Tate said Walker never cussed — told him to get out of the way.
And that’s how he was able to handle his business so well at NCCU that the folks running the Olympics made him the first black person to coach the country’s track-and-field team.
Then Walker became the first black president of the U.S. Olympic Committee.
And after coaching athletes such as Edwin Moses, the feared hurdler, and Bruce Jenner, the decathlete who had folks eating Wheaties before Michael Jordan, Walker came back to Durham and work to make sure little kids at the John Avery Boys & Girls Club had what they needed to leap life’s hurdles.
So now it makes all the sense in the world that after today’s service, Walker — born in Atlanta and blessed with international fame — will be laid to rest in Beechwood Cemetery, right down the street from where he taught all of those vocabulary lessons at NCCU.
John McCann may be reached at 919-419-6601 or jmccann@heraldsun.com.
Read more: The Durham Herald-Sun - LeRoy Walker taught life to athletes