GRAMBLING, Louisiana -- Tegitra Thomas is a man of God; a Baptist preacher in the piney woods of Northeast Louisiana, where he was the men's and women's golf coach at Grambling State University before state budget cuts forced the school to shut down these programs in 2010.Long before most of Grambling's football team refused to play a game against Jackson State on Oct. 19 -- most notably over the "horrible condition" of the school's athletic complex and the drain and exhaustion of taking long bus rides to far away games -- the 41-year-old Thomas was praying over the golf program at his alma mater.
Prayer, ingenuity and elbow grease were about the only virtues he could draw upon to keep a non-revenue-generating sport churning in this little town made famous by its football team's legendary coach, Eddie Robinson, who amassed 408 wins in 56 years at the head of the program.
At Grambling, where state support has decreased 57 percent since 2008, from about $31 million to $13 million in 2013, the golf program was an easy target in a culture where football is too big to fail.
When Thomas was on the Grambling golf team in the mid-1990s, his coach was John W. Jackson, a former pitcher in the Negro Leagues for the Kansas City Monarchs in the early 1950s.
CONTINUE READING
No comments:
Post a Comment