MARY GARBER - PIONEER FEMALE SPORTSWRITER - MY TRIBUTE
This world lost a great human being on Sunday, September 21, 2008. I doubt that any of you know anything about the life of Mary Garber, but you should. Mary is known in the sports world as one of the "first full-time female sportswriter at a daily newspaper in the USA." She wrote for my hometown newspapers, the Winston-Salem Journal and the Twin City Sentinel from 1946 - 2002, and was a very good friend of my father and our family. Mary was the real deal as a person and role model. I want all of your daughters to know about this woman, because she is truly someone they can respect and admire. She blazed a trail for future female reporters and battled discrimination in a quiet and dignified manner.
Some of you know the legacy and accomplishments of my father. He was a big time coach, who just happened to coach at a small, all black university (Winston-Salem State University) in North Carolina. He was known as Clarence "Big House" Gaines. My father's greatest professional accomplishment was being inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. in 1982. Mary and my dad became friends as a result of her paying attention to my dad's school and their athletic programs. I consider myself a child of the segregated South. You have to experience growing up in the South during the 60's and 70's to know how rare it was for a black man to have a special friendship with a white woman. But if you think about it, it's natural they would be good friends. Mary was a lover of sports during a time in our country's history when female athletes and reporters were not taken seriously. Women, blacks and other minorities were demanding to be treated as equal citizens and fighting for their civil rights. In reading the attached articles you will learn about the obstacles she faced and how she dealt with them. I also encourage you to go to http://www.journalnow.com to hear Mary's acceptance speech after she was awarded (first woman) the 2005 AP sports editors Red Smith award. Her obituary also appears in today's Los Angeles Times. {Wonderful tribute from her colleague at the Winston-Salem Journal, Lenox Rawlings, "Mary Garber stood very tall in a man's world."}
This week my current team will be learning the "cornerstones" of John Wooden's Pyramid of Success Philosophy, Industriousness and Enthusiasm. I will teach this lesson by talking about Mary's life. She is a shining example of why you must not only work hard at what you want to do in life, but that you must have a passion and love for any endeavor that you undertake. Our game this week will be dedicated to the memory of Mary Garber. May God Bless Mary's spirit, her family, and all of those she has touched in her remarkable life.
I decided to include excerpts about Mary Garber from my father's book, "They Call Me Big House." There's even a reference of me in this excerpt.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1947, When Winston-Salem Teachers College was playing a football game, I looked up and saw this tiny white woman clutching a notebook and looking around the sidelines. When I asked her what she wanted, she surprised me by informing me that she was a reporter assigned to cover the football game. She asked for a program so she could identify the players. We didn't have any programs. We were too poor of a school to print programs. I got her a trainer, and with his help she noted the names of the Teachers and even the names of the players of the other team.
I had my doubts that this petite woman knew much about sports in general and football in particular, but if she was all that the newspaper was going to send, I would have to deal with her.
That day began a professional relationship that has lasted nearly 60 years. I don't know if Mary knew much about football then, but she sure learned how to cover it, as well as all other sports. She became a fixture at black sporting events, covering black high schools and Winston-Salem Teachers College for the Twin City Sentinel, the city's afternoon newspaper, which she had joined in 1940. She started covering black sports when all of the white sports reporters and editors returned from World War II. They reclaimed their regular beats, so she shifted to something they did not want to cover.
Through the years, Mary Garber got better at recognizing the skills of young black athletes, and there is proof that she helped make some careers. When Carl Eller, the defensive end for the Minnesota Vikings in the 1960s and 1970s, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2004, he made a point of thanking Mary for writing about him while he was in high school in Winston-Salem. That exposure helped him to get noticed by college scouts such as those at the University of Minnesota, where he played.
Mary would often hang around my office looking for a story angle. I remember talking to her one day when one of my athletes came in to ask some question. This was in the later years, when sloppy clothes and habits had invaded the campus. The male student was wearing a hat that he did not take off in my office. The student asked me something, and I replied without looking at him, saying, "I cannot hear you." The kid kept asking the same question louder and louder until he was shouting, and I kept telling him, "I cannot hear you."
Mary was looking at me as if I had lost either my mind or my hearing. The student's question was spoken in plain English, and she understood every word he was saying. Finally, I realized the young man was never going to catch on to the lesson I was trying to teach him. I finally told him that as long as he was showing me disrespect by wearing that cap in my office, I could not hear him. He removed it, and I immediately answered his question.
That student, who was not a bad kid at all, never wore that cap again in my office, and Mary never forgot the story of how I taught one person a lesson in respect that he never forgot. She wrote about that incident for the newspaper, as she did another incident that occurred at the coliseum.
We were playing our game when a kid who had obviously been drinking started making a spectacle of himself. He was a big kid, so the other spectators were afraid of him as he grew more belligerent. I went up into the stands, threw my arm around him, and just whispered in his ear that he was ruining the game for everyone and was not setting a good example for the students in the audience. I suggested he go home.
By that time, the police had arrived, but I waved them off. I made sure the young man got out of the stands without being arrested.
Whenever the newspaper wanted an update on my status over the last few years of my career, they would always ask Mary Garber to write it because she knew me so well. She knew my likes and dislikes, my
quirks, and my motivational tools. If I had buried any bodies, she would have known where they were buried.
There was one story she knew that I don't think she ever wrote about because it could have gotten me in trouble. It was a day she witnessed the power a head coach can have. That day, the junior-varsity game was running long. That game threatened to interfere with the start of the varsity game. She commented that the varsity game would start late. I shook my head, said it would start on time, and pointed to who was running the game clock. It was my son, Clarence Jr. Clarence Jr. let the game clock run through time-outs and during free throws. The second half of the game lasted about half the time it should have, but the two coaches never noticed or never objected. They must have thought time was flying.
Mary kept right on working into the mid-1990s, as I did. She and I consider ourselves brother and sister, thanks to our decades of working in sports.
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