Ed Temple had special bond with New Hope Academy

Andrew Maraniss, For The Tennessean

Coach Ed Temple had a special bond with the New Hope Academy students.

Early on the morning of Sept. 20, Stuart Tutler, headmaster at New Hope Academy in Franklin, sped north toward Nashville on his blue Suzuki motorcycle with a special delivery.

He arrived at Richland Place’s assisted living center and a quiet party was underway for a dying man. Ed Temple, perhaps the greatest coach in any sport in American history, drifted in and out of consciousness on a bittersweet 89th birthday, eating a few spoonfuls of his last piece of birthday cake.

Tutler pulled out his cellphone and called up a video. Coach Temple, his daughter Edwina, former Olympian and Tigerbelle Edith McGuire and other close friends gathered around to watch 200 New Hope children, from kindergartners to sixth-graders, sing “Happy Birthday” to their good pal one last time. By Temple’s bedside were more than 200 birthday and get-well cards from those same children. Bo Roberts, the friend who led the effort to erect a statue of Temple last year, asked the coach if he’d been watching a lot of football on his TV, which was often left on. Temple’s signature sense of humor remained keen. “A lot of football,” he said, mindful of his fluctuating consciousness, “has been watching me.”

As women’s track coach at Tennessee State University from 1953-1994 and head U.S. Olympic coach at the Olympics in 1960 and ‘64 (and assistant in 1980), Temple overcame racism, sexism and a lack of financial resources to build the greatest track program in history. His TSU teams won 34 national titles, and 40 Tigerbelles competed in the Olympic Games, winning 23 medals (13 gold). His legacy as one of the all-time coaching greats is unquestioned, but he transcended athletics. As USA Track & Field CEO Max Siegel said, “the sport and our country are forever changed because of Ed Temple.”

But it was in his special relationship with New Hope Academy, a small, private, Christian school, one with a diverse student body and racial reconciliation at the heart of its mission, where Temple experienced some of his greatest joys late in life. And it is in these students where his lessons on character, determination and equality will live on well into the 21st century.

There were long stretches in Temple’s life where he faded from the spotlight. Christie Hauck drove the pace car for several of the first Country Music Marathons in the early 2000s, and he recalled seeing a solitary old man sitting in the tent near the finish line. It was Temple, not only unrecognized by many Nashvillians but also by some of the world’s top marathoners. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, that’s the Coach Temple? People should have been bowing down and kissing his ring,” Hauck recalled, “but nobody even noticed him.” Hauck helped make the introduction to New Hope, knowing of the school’s dedication to addressing race and combating what school founder Paige Pitts calls the “roots of inequity” – race-based separation, class-oriented isolation and fear.

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Temple had to cast aside painful experiences to even visit the school for the first time, telling Tutler that he hadn’t been to Franklin since the 1960s. The people in Williamson County had been hostile toward him back then, and in more recent days, he bristled every time he drove past the Nathan Bedford Forrest monument off to the side of Interstate 65. “He didn’t like those Confederate flags,” Tutler says.

But Temple made the trip, and soon the school adopted him as mentor and grandfather, hosting a boisterous birthday party for him each of the last seven years. Lucinda Williams Adams, a Tigerbelle and Olympic gold medalist in 1960, recalled accompanying Temple to one of the parties a few years ago. As soon as she and her old coach walked in the building, the kids started screaming his name with joy. She was not surprised by the influence he had on these children; as her coach at TSU, Temple was like a father figure, she said, taking women with nothing and making them into something special, preparing them for the world.

Every single student and teacher at New Hope filed into the school’s library for the parties, and often a celebrity neighbor dropped in, too — the likes of Sheryl Crow, Kimberly Williams Paisley, Sen. Bill Frist and Congressman Jim Cooper. There was always spiritual music and cake (another reason the kids were so excited — otherwise, New Hope has a ‘no sugar’ menu) and then a question and answer session with the coach. Kids would ask about Rome, about Wilma Rudolph, about his notoriously tough practice regimens, about traveling through the Jim Crow South. Temple would sit in a comfortable chair in front of the room, surrounded by 200 eager young faces.

“It was really rejuvenating for him,” Hauck said. “I think the New Hope experience at this time in his life was gasoline for his engine.”

Older kids loved hearing the same funny stories year after year. These kids got to know the man as a friend, not an untouchable legend. “They would say, ‘It’s our friend Coach Temple’s birthday party,’ as if he was another 7-year-old,” says New Hope community relations director Cathy Irwin. “They would always ask about him like he was their best buddy.” When Tutler called the school together Sept. 23 to inform everyone that Temple had died the previous evening, he recalled a story one of his students had once told him, an explanation for death.

“A little boy shared with me that sometimes when people get real sick they go to heaven to see if God will heal them, but once they get there they love it so much they don’t want to come back,” Tutler recalled. “That’s the best definition I ever heard, so that’s what I told the students.”

The world first took notice of Temple when his Tigerbelles began dominating world competition in the 1950s, and the opportunities he created for black and female athletes will resonate for decades to come. But the lessons he taught the children at New Hope Academy will live on, too. Tutler said Temple’s life story will remain part of the New Hope curriculum, even for kindergartners. And Pitts said she believes these children will someday use the lessons they learned through their special friendship with Temple to make the world a better place.

“My hope and expectation,” she says, “is that they will not remain silent or indifferent in the face of injustice or prejudice.”

New hope, indeed.

Andrew Maraniss is the author of Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South (www.andrewmaraniss.com). Connect with Andrew on Twitter at @trublu24.