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I confess to being a football addict. I like to watch it, whether pee-wees or professionals are playing. New Year’s Day is always eagerly awaited by this scribe, because of the college bowl games that attempt to array the best against the best. Of special interest to me in 1978 was the Orange Bowl, pitting Oklahoma against Arkansas. The attention of the whole nation had been focused on Arkansas and the Orange Bowl due to an incident in one of the dormitories involving a girl. Coach Lou Holtz disciplined three key offensive starters for the incident by removing them from the Orange Bowl team. Arkansas was already rated the underdog in the contest before this event occurred. With another starter already out because of injury, and now these three additional players sidelined, the “experts” rated the game a classic mismatch, a laugher. Oklahoma was predicted to crush the Razorbacks by at least 18 points!
The week before the game was very trying for Arkansas. The three chastised players made legal maneuvers for reinstatement, stirred up sympathy among other players who threatened to boycott the game and charged that Holtz was motivated by racism. But such weighty principles as honor, morality, justice, and discipline were at stake and the school officials stood their ground. They withstood incredible pressures to win at all costs, by overlooking the unseemly conduct of their team leaders. They knew they were right and even if they lost the ball game, they would win the bigger moral victory. Wrong had been done and it had to be made right and disciplined for the sake of the boys involved, the whole team, and in a way, the whole school. In fact, the integrity of the college athletics and athletes everywhere was on the line.
Lawyers even argued that a coach doesn’t have the right to choose who will play on his team, which shows how far relativistic moral views have gone. Holtz knew that if he were not allowed to so discipline his players, that he would lose control of them, but also, he would lose both control and respect of his whole team. He also knew that if he were not allowed to determine who would play for him, that other coaches would forfeit that right. The situation cried out for discipline from every angle. It was obvious from the way the Arkansas boys played that the discipline their coach administered was a tremendous, unifying, and energizing force. In case you don’t remember, Arkansas thrashed Oklahoma 31 – 6! Discipline is still necessary; it still works!
[Note: I wrote this article for, and it was published in the January 5, 1978, edition of the Granbury Gospel, weekly bulletin of the Granbury Church of Christ, Granbury, Texas, of which I was editor.
Attribution: From thescripturecache.com; Dub McClish, owner and administrator.
