Richard Lapchick, the social conscience of American sports, is stepping down at UCF | Commentary

Thank goodness, Richard Lapchick is stepping down at UCF.

Thank goodness, he will no longer be the director of the university’s DeVos Sport Business Management Graduate Program.

Thank goodness, he will not be in Orlando nearly as much as he has been since he moved here two decades ago.

The reason I say this isn’t because Lapchick was doing a bad job at UCF. In fact, quite the opposite. He started UCF’s trailblazing sports management graduate program 20 years ago and has made it one of the most respected, renowned programs in the world. His leadership will be sorely missed.

But I’m glad he’s leaving because he has much more important things to do than balancing budgets, approving applications, reviewing syllabuses and going to staff meetings.

Richard Lapchick needs to devote the remaining years of his remarkable life to making our world a more diverse, inclusive, racially and socially righteous place to live.

“I’m 76 and in great health, but I’ve realized that my time is shorter than it was 10 years ago,” says Lapchick, the nation’s foremost expert on sports diversity and a lifelong civil rights and social justice warrior. “In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the resulting racial reckoning, I wanted to spend all of my time on anti-racist activities.”

Thankfully, he will still be based in Orlando, he will still teach a class at UCF and will remain as the director of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) — the organization that puts out annual report cards grading college athletics and professional sports leagues on their demographics and diversity. For decades, Lapchick has shined a light on the often dark racial- and gender-hiring practices in sports.

But moving forward, Lapchick will intensify his efforts and increase the amount of time doing what he’s always done — travelling across the country and around the world speaking out against racism. He has just signed on to be represented by the prestigious Harry Walker Agency — the same storied speaking agency that represents Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Tom Brady.

Now even more people will hear some of the stories of his fascinating experiences and viewpoints I’ve been lucky enough to hear since meeting Lapchick after I moved to Orlando 20 years ago. I’ve written about these stories before, but they bear repeating as he steps down at UCF.

He told me once about the time when he was 5 years old and woke up one night after hearing some noise outside, looked out his bedroom window and saw the image of his father, New York Knicks coach Joe Lapchick, hanging in effigy from a tree. His dad had just integrated the Knicks by signing the team’s first black player — Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton.

“For several years after that, I would pick up the extension of the phone with my dad not knowing I was listening and I would hear racial epithet after racial epithet being yelled at him,” Lapchick recalled. “At 5, 6 and 7 years old, I didn’t know what a racial epithet was; I just knew a lot of people hated my father for signing a Black player.”

Lapchick also told me about the time when he was 15 and attended a basketball camp in New York City and remembers being in a group with five other white kids and a Black kid. One of the white kids repeatedly referred to the Black kid using the N-word.

“After about three days, I challenged that white kid and told him to stop it,” Lapchick remembers. “He knocked me out cold, but that started a lifelong friendship with the Black kid.”

That Black kid was Lew Alcindor, who would later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. When Kareem received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, Lapchick was one of two people Kareem invited to join him at the White House.

“As a 15-year-old white kid from an all-white community, I suddenly had a young, urban African-American lens to see what racism was doing in communities of color,” Lapchick remembers. “That’s when I decided I was going to spend my life working in the area of civil rights. I didn’t know how, but I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

The most poignant story Lapchick ever told me was right after he got his doctorate in international race relations from the University of Denver and wrote his thesis on how South Africa’s apartheid government used sports as part of its foreign policy much like Nazi Germany did in the 1930s. The thesis got published as a book and Lapchick suddenly became a leader in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement.

In 1978, after attending a protest rally to get South Africa’s tennis team banned from the Davis Cup, Lapchick, a political science professor, was working late at his office one night in the library building at Virginia Wesleyan College. He heard a knock on the door and thought it was campus security. But when he opened the door, two masked men forced their way in, overpowered Lapchick, tied him up and bloodily carved the N-word into his stomach with a pair of office scissors.

As Lapchick lay in his hospital bed at about 4 o’clock in morning with liver and kidney damage, he heard three women talking in the hallway. And one by one, three Black nurses came into the room and kissed his hand.

“I didn’t know white people cared,” one of the nurses said.

Said Lapchick when he told me the story: “When I was in the hospital, I realized that what these people did to try to stop my dad 28 years before and now what they were doing to try to stop me, they must be very worried that using sports as a platform was an effective way to fight racism. I knew then I would spend the rest of my life using sports as a platform to address various social justice issues, but especially racism.”

And so he has. Lapchick has been telling the world that Black Lives Matter long before it became an official movement. He worked on civil rights and social justice issues with his good friend Muhammad Ali before Ali died five years ago. He was invited by another good friend, Nelson Mandela, to attend Mandela’s inauguration as the first Black president of post-apartheid South Africa.

No doubt, our hometown university will miss his daily presence and leadership, but I’m glad Richard Lapchick is stepping down.

The world needs him a lot more than UCF does.

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and HD 101.1-2