Rhodes Baseball Team Visits Historic Sites and Meets Former President Bill Clinton by Michael Nelson, Fulmer Professor of political Science at Rhodes College

            Travel is supposed to be broadening but all too often isn’t for varsity athletes.  A weekend road trip usually involves riding the team bus to a motel just off the interstate, then going back and forth from motel to game to motel and so on.  What team members generally see of the town they’re in is the local Ryan’s, Golden Corral, or other mega-buffet.  What they see of even the home team’s campus is often little more than the playing field and visiting team’s locker room.

            Sometimes that’s all there’s time to do.  But with encouragement from Coach Jeff Cleanthes, the Rhodes baseball team has made at least one road trip-related visit to an important local site in each of the last three seasons.  As the team’s faculty associate (and, by day, a presidential scholar), I was able to work a connection and arrange for the team to visit the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock after normal hours when we played nearby Hendrix College in 2004.  The visit was an experiment: Jeff and I both wondered how much interest the team would have in touring a museum two hours after playing a doubleheader. The truth was that team members—solid students, to a man—were fascinated by what they saw.  After two hours, the museum guards actually had to round us up and tell us we really needed to go.

            In 2005 we went back to the Clinton Library.  One reason was that the team had a lot of new members who hadn’t seen it before.  The other was that I was able to arrange a few minutes with Clinton himself, who was in town for the weekend. 

            This year the initiative for a site visit came from team members.  Two juniors, pitcher Chris Catalanotto and outfielder Richard Hurd, mentioned that they were taking a history class on the civil rights movement and asked if it would be possible to visit some historic sites while the team was in Montgomery, Ala., for a weekend series against Huntingdon College.  I cleared it with Coach Cleanthes and, as a result, the team bus stopped at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. coordinated the year-long bus strike that followed Rosa Parks’s arrest for refusing to move to the back of the bus.  The church is across the street from the state capital, which was the destination of the massive voting rights march from Selma in 1965.  Chris, Richard, and I briefed the team on the significance of the sites.

            Reboarding the team bus for the six-hour drive back to Memphis, freshman outfielder Derek King told teammates that his grandmother had marched with King.  He and several other players instantly sent their parents photos of the sites that they had taken with their cell phones.

            Rhodes’s commitment to integrating athletics and academics is longstanding, but in recent years that commitment has been strengthened by the interest of the president, the provost, the athletic director, the coaches, and the faculty.  In 2002, at President Bill Troutt’s request, I chaired a task force on the future of varsity athletics at Rhodes.  One of its recommendations launched the faculty associates program.  In 2005 a Rhodes delegation headed by Troutt attended the College Sports Project’s first integration institute in St. Louis.  We came back fired up to transform the very good situation at Rhodes into an excellent one. 

In fall 2006 Rhodes launched a new annual lecture series on Sports and Society to focus on sports-related issues in a serious academic way.  This year’s speakers have included New York Times reporter Warren St. John, the author of Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Road Trip into the Heart of Fan Mania; Rhodes historian Russell Wigginton, the author of The Strange Career of the Black Athlete: African Americans and Sports; and Union College anthropologist George Gmelch, a former professional baseball player and the author of In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People. Attendance has been strong from the entire campus community, but especially among student athletes and coaches.  In addition, Provost Charlotte Borst has agreed that appointments to serve as faculty associate for a team will now come from her in consultation with Athletic Director Mike Clary, and will be valued as important academic service to the College.  Finally, Rhodes has initiated an effort in the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference to host an integration institute on our campus, for conference members, on August 12-13, 2007.

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Michael Nelson is the Fulmer Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College and the faculty associate for the Rhodes baseball team.  A former editor of The Washington Monthly, he has published numerous books and articles on the American presidency, public policy, and higher education.  He is currently writing Serious Play: A Year in the Life of the Division III Rhodes College Baseball Team for Louisiana State University Press.