This week's Pep Talk: "Learn from Losing"

I recently read a fascinating book about legendary college football coach Eddie Robinson. Grambling University’s head coach for 57 years, the Louisiana native’s career paralleled the Jim Crow era of segregation in the Deep South and every major event of the Civil Rights Movement.

Grambling University, and other predominately black colleges, was loaded with outstanding black athletes until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s because the more powerful athletic conferences, like the Southeastern and Southwest, still insisted on forming all-white teams. Eddie Robinson, ever the gentleman, didn’t rail against the injustice, instead encouraging his players to work hard, make healthy choices and show love and respect for one another and country and believe justice would prevail. Many called him the “Martin Luther King of football.”

Author Denny Dressman tells many great stories. One in particular exemplifies how often in life, in defeat, we learn our greatest lessons, if we choose to learn from the experience.

The scene was Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama in 1970. The University of Southern California was on the road for a season-opening tangle with Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide, pride of the Southeastern Conference. Alabama had no black players on its roster. Southern California, under Coach John McKay an equal mix of talented white and black players, routed the ‘Tide 42-21. After the game Bryant met McKay at midfield and thanked the Trojans’ coach for the humiliating defeat. Bryant knew the stinging loss would be a watershed moment for Alabama football: the next year, running back Wilbur Jackson and other black players debuted, and starred, for the Crimson Tide. The point is this: Alabama’s embarrassing defeat, with an all-white team, opened the eyes of ‘Tide faithful who needed to be awakened to the necessity of social justice.

Quite often defeat is exactly what we need to chart a new course encouraging us to become superior to our former selves – home, work and elsewhere.

The racial integration of the Southeastern and Southwest Conferences hurt Robinson’s recruiting efforts at Grambling since black student/athletes had more options and were not limited to the predominately black colleges of the Deep South. But the Hall of Fame coach never complained. He realized Grambling’s defeat, in terms of recruiting, was a victory for social justice in America.

The ability to turn defeats into victories, home, work and elsewhere, in my opinion, the most important skill we can ever learn. You know life can be cruel. We get hit with devastating blows. If Coach Robinson was alive – he died in 2007 – he’d encourage you to pick yourself up, get back in the game and learn from your mistakes and probably holler at you: “If you’re learning, you can’t be losing.”