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Page 2 of 3 Having heard the good news, Romar wanted to share it with everyone. “I was so excited,” he recalls. “I felt like I had discovered a cure for cancer. And I was going to tell the world about it, how great it was. But I wasn’t quite tactful at the time, and I probably turned some people off. There weren’t as many people ready to listen to what I had to say as I thought there might be.”
When Athletes in Action entered the picture, in 1985, it was perfect timing. Romar’s future in the NBA looked uncertain. He had been invited to try out for the Indiana Pacers but hadn’t been promised a contract. While waiting at the baggage claim of the Indianapolis airport, he noticed a stranger who seemed to be staring at him. It was the Athletes in Action coach, who had been tipped off about Romar’s potential availability and had come to town to recruit him. Almost immediately, Romar says, he knew it was the right fit. “I just thought, ‘This is the best. I get to play ball and tell people about Jesus. This is awesome.’”
 For the next seven years he barnstormed around the country, playing friendly basketball games against college and high school teams and spreading the gospel message. At first, he got to address big crowds at half-time. Increasingly, however, as religious pluralism became a concern, schools began asking the group to withhold its sermons until after the games.
“And we would have what’s called a Superstar Competition,” Romar recalls, “where we would do a tug-of-war against the best athletes in the school, or a volleyball game or a football game. It was a lot of fun. And in between those, we would sprinkle different messages: Say no to drugs, abstinence, things of that nature. And in certain places, even in public schools, they would tell us, ‘You say whatever you want.’ Others would say, ‘Well, this is what you can’t share.’ So I learned quite a bit about what you can and can’t say in those situations.”
For Willingham, Christianity has been more of a steady presence than a sudden revelation. He doesn’t attend any one church regularly, although he visits several over the course of the year, and his theology seems to center more on good works than on faith. “What is the real purpose of religion?” he says. “I would say that it is to do good; to somehow help your fellow man. And that doesn’t say anything about any particular religion, but should speak to all religions. … I’m one of these guys who believes that God wears many faces. And he has to, because we’re all different. We all have different needs. We see things differently.”
Yet despite their differently inflected philosophies, Willingham and Romar seem to have arrived at an identical belief about the place of religion in coaching: The best way to honor one’s values is by embodying them, quietly, every day.
“Neither one of them is ever preachy,” says Rohrbach, the team chaplain, “or wearing their Christianity on their sleeve or anything like that. But I think the players know where they stand, and know that their strength of character comes from their faith. The thing that strikes me about both Coach Willingham and Coach Romar is that they are men of high character and integrity and they deal with their players in a respectful manner. That, I think, can have only one effect, which is that the players want to give their all and do their best for them.”
“Am I living, moment by moment, the way God wants me to live?” asks Romar. “Am I coaching the way God would want me to coach? Well, wait a minute, what do you mean? God tells you how to coach? No, he never talked to me about designing a play or designing a defense, but in my day-to-day dealings with people—my assistants, my bosses, my players—am I treating them with respect?”
Leaving the preaching to the preachers, Willingham says, is both a practical consideration—it behooves a coach not to alienate any of his players—and an ethical one. Playing football, like any other part of college, is an educational experience, and student-athletes should be given the freedom to make their own choices and learn from them. Asked if being a coach was different, in that respect, from being a parent, Willingham said no—coaching and parenting are actually quite similar.
“Why wouldn’t what’s good for our players be good for my own kids?” he says. “You want your kids to develop their own beliefs. Now obviously there are certain ages when that’s not possible—when the child is 4, 5, 6 years old. But as they approach the age of your players, I would imagine that the smart thing might be to handle it in much the same way. You want them to grow—and hopefully the example that you provide will lead them in what you think is the right direction in terms of their spiritual beliefs, but at the same time allow them to grow.” • Eric McHenry is associate editor of Columns.
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