If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.Sylvester Croom has followed those words ever since his father first engrained them into his head as a young man, and as a father himself, he has tried to pass along the same message to his daughter. As a coach, he has made it a foundation for his players to build themselves upon. As a man, he’s used his father’s wisdom to annihilate barriers he only dreamed of breaking in his youth.
The Mississippi State football head coach has been an unstoppable force in turning his dreams into reality in much the same way he was on the football field as center for coach Paul “Bear” Bryant’s Crimson Tide in the early 1970s. While Croom’s talents have helped him climb the ladder of success in both his playing and coaching careers, it’s the life lessons that he’s taken with him that gave him the strength to overcome the obstacles that tried to hold him back. But given the circumstances of his upbringing, he was ready to take on anything.
As Croom sat at his desk early Tuesday morning, so early the sun hadn’t peaked up over his office in the Bryan Building just yet, he reflected on his youth and recounted the instances in his life that made him the man he is today, starting with his childhood during a socially volatile time in an equally unstable place.
“I grew up in the South at a different time, and the times and experiences have made a great impression on my life,” Croom said. “I had a great family life; my mom and dad had a profound effect on [it].”
His dad, Sylvester Sr., was a former All-American college athlete turned minister and high school football coach in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and his mom was a schoolteacher. Croom credits a tight-knit family life for molding his identity and giving him the strength to face inevitable adversity.
“All of my values, the basic core of who I am, came from my immediate family,” he said. “Social life in the South was totally different; it was a segregated society, a ‘separate but equal’ society. My family motivated me in how to deal with that situation, and of course it shaped me. I grew up in a home where we were taught that we were as good as anybody, to respect all people but to also conduct ourselves in a way where we commanded respect.”
Croom said he embraced the people in his life, in part by seeing the way his father interacted with people through his ministry.
“The fact that my father was a minister, I think that had a great deal with the way I learned to communicate with people. I learned to value people because he did. People were important to him … all types of people.”
Croom visited many homes with his father, places in Tuscaloosa’s African-American community where he met people living in a variety of conditions. When integration began at the start of his ninth grade year, he was exposed to a new set of peers and was met with both positive and negative reactions from them.
“I was in the first group of students at Tuscaloosa Junior High to go to integrated schools,” he said. “The first day, a young white guy spit a spitball in my face as soon as I walked in the door. I just looked at him because I wasn’t going to hit him. Before we went there, we were coached that no matter what happened, we were not to respond in a violent way, regardless of what anybody said. If somebody laid hands on you, you had to walk away. In order for [integration] to succeed we could not respond in a violent way.”
But Croom had his own form of payback.
“I’ll never forget going to practice that day … that same young man was on the football team. To this day he doesn’t know that he got his butt kicked every day. I went out of my way to hit him and to this day he still doesn’t know that that spitball is what got him that butt-whoopin’ on a daily basis,” Croom said with a grin on his face.
His expression then slipped back into solemnity. He recalled good and bad experiences he faced during integration. There were two instances that first year he said he’ll never forget. The first instance involved a group project for his Spanish class in which students paired up with one another, but Croom was singled out.
“I didn’t get anybody to do the project with me,” he said. “My Spanish teacher understood and didn’t grade me down.”
The next instance left a mark on Croom’s conscience he said he’ll never shake.
“That same year Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] was killed and still, years later, this bothers me,” Croom said. “That was a tragic time, and a couple of days before Dr. King’s funeral, all the black students were called into assembly by the principal, just the black students, and we were told that if we skipped school on the day of Dr. King’s funeral we would not be able – even if our parents gave us permission to be out that day – to make up any class work that was going to be done that day. Now you could be out of school any other time that year, but for whatever reason the city administrators decided that, and I know it wasn’t the principal’s fault because he was a wonderful man.”
The situation put several things into perspective for Croom. He took into account his priorities and his parents’ words, which were clearer than ever.
“That changed my attitude about some things because a lot of us had no intentions to miss. I never missed a day of school almost in my life except for sickness one time, and going to school every day was important to me,” he said. “But I’ll never forget the idea that they were going to tell me that I can’t miss school and my parents say I can. I told every student that was in that assembly, ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m not coming. You don’t tell me I can’t do something, especially when my parents say I can.’ So I missed. Of course, I was one of those guys always trying to get straight As, but the thing I remember when we came back is that we’d had an algebra exam that day, and I flunked it.”
Croom stood up for what he believed in and followed his parents’ guidance, and in the meantime he was completely aware of the consequences. What he wasn’t aware of was the courage one of his teachers would exhibit the next day.
“I’ll never forget this: When [the teacher] passed out the grades she called my name and she called out my [semester] grade. She said: ‘You got a C, and it was wrong for you to get this C.’ That meant a lot to me for her to have the guts to stand up in that room and say that it was wrong because during that time it was tough, and there were blacks and whites who made a great deal of sacrifice, who went against family and friends to do the right thing. That’s hard.”
Croom paused, thinking about the sacrifices made by the people of that time.
“I think about Viola Liuzzo and her family, Medgar Evers and all those people who died during that time to change the way society was,” he said. “There was a great deal of sacrifice which created a reality that even dreams couldn’t see. This day that so many take for granted, the way we live now, there was a price that was paid. There was a price in blood that was paid for this reality to come true.”
Croom’s passion while recalling such sacrifices echoes his zeal on the field. His appreciation is doubtless, his focus doesn’t break. Despite the hardships, Croom reflects on the greatness that came out of the turmoil.
“It was a great time because the generation I lived in, black and white, has a great deal to be proud of because we were part of the change,” he said. “The people my age here in the South were forced to go to integrated schools and there were a lot of things in transition, a lot of old myths that had to be destroyed, a lot of social mores that went by the wayside, and we had a great deal to do with that. That’s why our schools are integrated, and [different races] socialize together far more than even we ever thought would probably happen in our lifetime.”
As he looked at the trophy case to the right of his desk, he credited the time of transition with helping him achieve what he once thought might be unachievable.
“The change has opened the door for me to be in this position,” he said. “At that time you had dreams, but it’s hard for people who didn’t live during that time to totally understand. You dream about being the best you can be, you dream about things that can happen in your life, but you don’t really think it’s going to be a reality. But we were taught at home to always keep that dream, keep that hope alive. In the back of your mind you’re always thinking that’s it’s probably not realistic, but you keep pressing anyway.”
And Croom never stopped pressing forward. As he excelled in his studies, he also improved athletically on the football field. Despite playing for losing teams in high school, he stuck with the game but was beginning to lose hope as he approached his senior year.
“It was a miserable experience – in fact it was so miserable that my senior year I had no plans on playing football ever again … none whatsoever,” he said. “I had made up my mind I was never going to play again because the losing affected me that bad. I deal with it a whole lot better now than I did then, and I don’t deal with it very well now. I mean I used to be sick, physically sick, for at least a week. I couldn’t shake loose the football games. It got so bad I literally didn’t want to play again, but I wouldn’t quit.”
Not quitting proved to be beneficial for Croom, because after finishing high school he went straight on to play for Bryant at the University of Alabama. He was finally on a winning team, which he said helped to further mold him as a person. He set out to follow in the footsteps, literally, of previous centers for the Crimson Tide.
“They usually gave out a blocking trophy in the SEC called the Jacobs Blocking Trophy,” Croom said. “Well, an offensive lineman from Alabama won that thing every year for I don’t know how many years, so I set my goals. I was going to win Jacobs Blocking, I had to keep that tradition going. I wanted to be the best center that had ever been there, but it started out with me just wanting to be on the winning team.”
Croom won the Jacobs Blocking Trophy in 1974 along with being named an All-American player. Those individual honors were just a small part of a big picture in Croom’s mind. To him it was all about the team, a feeling he says isn’t prevalent in many college athletes these days.
“Now players get lost. They want to be the All-American first,” he said. “I’d rather be on a winning team and nobody know my name. That’s the way you build championships. The funny thing about it, if you’re on the winning team, they’re going to know everybody’s name. That’s what people don’t understand. I made All-American. Hey, I wasn’t the best center in the country, probably not, I was pretty good though, but the fact that we were playing on TV, the fact that I was playing at the University of Alabama, the fact that we were in bowl games every year … we [were winners]. When your team wins, there’s enough glory to go around for everybody. That’s a hard thing to get taught, it’s that attitude of team concept, of putting the team first, and when you get that done you can achieve far more than you could ever achieve by yourself.”
“Once that’s understood, you’re going to win and you’re going to beat some teams that you’re not supposed to beat because you are a team, not a collection of individuals,” Croom said.
Editor’s Note: This is the first part of a two-part series. Part two will run in Tuesday’s edition.