"One of the most important assets Coach Briles has brought to Baylor is the moral character that he built into the football program."
--former Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane in the foreword to Briles' autobiography Beating Goliath: My Story of Football and Faith
I dated a Baylor girl for a while.
In the '70s, when Grant Teaff was the football coach and the Bears were almost good. I went to a couple of football games in Waco, and I remember the atmosphere was somewhat less vicious than down in Tiger Stadium under the lights. Baylor struck me as a nice place, full of nice kids who seemed mostly on board with the general tenor of the school's Baptist affiliation. The campus felt positively wholesome compared to the Caligulian madness that was an LSU Saturday night.
Maybe that was the reason we broke up.
Anyway, my couple of trips to Waco left me with the impression of a comfortable little river town that would be a great place to raise kids.
It had its history--Waco was where, a hundred years ago, a black teenager named Jesse Washington was murdered by a mob that pulled him from the courtroom after he'd pleaded guilty to the rape and murder of his boss' wife. After the verdict was read, a group of white men hustled Washington away from the police officers and down the stairs at the rear of the courthouse to where about 400 people waited in an alley. Someone threw a chain around the boy's neck, and they slashed at him with knives and dragged him toward City Hall. (According to contemporary reports, the mob was not exclusively white--the Waco Times Herald reported that "a yellow negro boy who was raised here in Waco" struck Washington on the head and yelled, "You're getting what's coming to you.")
They threw an end of the chain over the tree and forced Washington down onto a pile of dry-goods boxes and kindling soaked in coal oil, which they then set afire. They poured oil over Washington's body. They jerked him into the air by pulling down on the chain, and began to alternately raise and lower his body over the fire. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people--men, women and children--spent their lunch hour watching Jesse Washington die. The mood was reported as "celebratory."
Newspapers around the country condemned the lynching; so did the leader of Baylor University. The judge who presided over Washington's trial declared that the man had been murdered. But no one was ever arrested, there were no repercussions for city and police authorities who allowed the lynching.
In America, we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that 100 years was a long time ago and that we are made of finer moral and intellectual stuff than the people who cheered the excruciatingly slow execution of Jesse Washington. But mobs are capable of all sorts of atrocity, and we can make ourselves believe whatever we what. People wanted to believe in David Koresh--they burned just like Jesse Washington.
How is a football coach like a charismatic cult leader? Maybe they have the gift of making people believe that there are things more important than being kind and decent to one another. Maybe they are the ones who can see the big-picture path to glory, the one we ought to trust with our lives and our children.
Or maybe we ought to understand that a lot of it is on us. When you create a class of special people and exempt them from the rules by which most of us are expected to abide, when you instill a sense of entitlement in them, it shouldn't be surprising when they avail themselves of what they see as a perk. Baylor is surely not the only football school where players--revenue-generating assets--are considered more valuable than regular paying customers. Market realities demand that these assets be offered as much insulation from the real world as the institution can afford.
Baylor University had constructed a good story. It was the little Baptist school that could compete for national football glory while remaining true to its Christian mission. It understood what was important, that the success of the Bears meant little if the school abandoned its moral and philosophical principles.
I'm not shocked by the revelations of Philadelphia-based law firm Pepper Hamilton's investigation into how allegations of sexual assault were handled at Baylor. I've seen Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick's documentary about rape on college campuses, The Hunting Ground. I've followed the Jameis Winston case. I've been around long enough to know that prominent college athletes more often than not receive preferential treatment from local cops and that university hierarchies have a vested interest in keeping incidents quiet.
I further know that rape--especially rape in a campus situation--can be a difficult crime to prove. Those Duke lacrosse players turned out to be completely innocent.
And I hope we learn more about what went on at Baylor--about why it felt compelled to fire its fair-haired football coach (who claimed that the way to build a better football team was by building "better men") along with its hotshot athletic director and to strip Ken Starr--no, the irony is not lost on me--of his presidency. (Starr will stay on as chancellor and teach in the law school, but won't have any "operational" duties.)
"We're deeply sorrowful (for) these events," Baylor regents chairman Richard Willis said. "We're honestly just horrified."
And so are we. We're just not surprised.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
MovieStyle on 05/31/2016