Woodlawn Read online

  On the third day of Woodlawn High’s preseason camp, a tall, blond-haired man knocked on Gerelds’s door. It was Wales Goebel, youth minister and evangelist from Birmingham, who had heard Gerelds might need his help.

  “I want to talk to your players,” Goebel said. “I want to talk to them about the Lord.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have time,” Gerelds said sternly as he looked back down at the playbook on his desk. “We have our kids in a competitive atmosphere and want to keep it that way.”

  Goebel, who had encountered his fair share of stubborn and prideful coaches during his work as a youth minister, wasn’t about to surrender so easily. Before finding his way to Gerelds’s office adjacent to the gym, Goebel had sat in his car in the parking lot outside Woodlawn High. For more than ten minutes, Goebel had prayed—not for the players he wished to address, but that God would open Gerelds’s heart so the players could hear what he had to say.

  “Let me tell you something: There are two parts of every young person,” Goebel said. “There is the physical part and the spiritual part. Based on your results, you’re obviously doing a good job with the physical part. But where I come in and where I can help is with the spiritual part. That’s why I’m here, and you need to give me thirty minutes with your players.”

  After staring at Goebel for several seconds, while undoubtedly squinting his eyes to nearly closed as he was apt to do, Gerelds reluctantly agreed to let the stranger talk to his players.

  “You can come back after supper,” Gerelds said. “You’ve got thirty minutes.”

  Goebel wasn’t quite ready to leave the young coach.

  “Coach, let me ask you something: if you died today, would you go to heaven?” The boldness and, perhaps, the gravity of Goebel’s question took Gerelds by surprise. Gerelds’s answer betrayed his tough-guy image and revealed an underlying insecurity. Perhaps we’re all insecure when we seek to find our identity anywhere other than God. His answer?

  “Um, I think I’ve been pretty good,” Gerelds said. “I work hard. Um, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone can know.”

  “I know,” Goebel said, before walking out of his office.

  At dinner, Gerelds informed his players that there would be another speaker addressing them that night. He told his players they were required to be there. After spending the past three days practicing in the sweltering Alabama heat and humidity, listening to another preacher in the non-air-conditioned gym was the last thing the players wanted to do.

  “We listened to a Methodist pastor the night before, and he wasn’t really inspiring and didn’t have a lot to say,” said Steve Martin, a junior cornerback. “So when we found out another speaker was coming the next night, everybody was kind of like, ‘Oh, great, we’ve got to do this again.’ ”

  Jerry Stearns, Woodlawn High’s defensive coordinator, was worried about what Goebel would say to the team.

  “We weren’t enthused, to say the least,” Stearns said. “I’ll be the first to say that some of us said, ‘Oh, boy. We’ve got a Jesus Freak coming tonight.’ That’s how some of those guys were looked at during that period of time. They weren’t the kind of guys that every football coach welcomed into their camp.”

  With Woodlawn High’s players sitting in one section of the wooden bleachers, Goebel’s loud, powerful voice soon filled the gym. Goebel talked about his own childhood, how he’d overcome alcoholism as a teenager, and then turned his life around after accepting Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. It didn’t take him long to get the players’ undivided attention.

  “Wales can be with you for five minutes and have you eating out of his hand,” Stearns said. “He told them funny stories about his childhood, like when he was sipping moonshine in class out of a straw from a bottle in his overalls. All of a sudden, he turns from that and goes into a serious mode. He does it so smoothly and so fast that you don’t realize he’s changing gears. The next thing you know, he’s got you wrapped up in everything he’s saying.”

  Goebel shared the story of how he nearly died when he was fifteen years old. While he was riding in a friend’s car on Highway 78, a car passing a truck in the opposite lane forced them off the road. Their car hit an embankment and flipped over onto the roof. Goebel and his two friends were trapped, and they saw flames coming from the engine. Goebel remembered crying out to God for help. A convoy of soldiers arrived at the wreck and pulled Goebel and his friends from the car.

  “My message was basically a testimony of how Jesus forgives your past sins and gives you a life of peace and direction,” Goebel said. “I told them how I was influenced by my father, which most of us are. My father was an atheist and a hard man. As a young boy without any moral compass, I drifted into a lifestyle that would have destroyed my life, as it did with so many of my friends. I was on a fast train going to hell and didn’t know how to get off. Churches were plentiful in Tallapoosa, and I’m sure they would have welcomed me. But I didn’t know that side of life. The people who went to them were not my kind.”

  More than anything, Goebel talked to the Woodlawn High players about what God’s grace did for him and what it could do for them. Like the preacher who told him about God’s plan of salvation in the Methodist church in LaGrange, Georgia, more than two decades earlier, Goebel asked the players if they knew they were going to heaven.

  “You’ve already chosen to be different than the rest of your classmates,” Goebel told them. “You’ve chosen to be a football player at Woodlawn High. You’ve chosen to make the commitment to be the best you can be, even though there will be broken bones and other injuries involved. Some of you will put in the hard work every day, but may not make the team. Some of you will never see the playing field. I know many of you have goals and aspirations of winning a city championship and going to college. I had those same aspirations. I was good enough to play basketball and phony enough to be elected president of the student body.

  “But there comes a time when it all comes to an end and that’s eternal. You will come to the end, and you’ll find that you won’t be satisfied unless you have Jesus Christ in your lives. If you dedicate your life to eternal things—just like you’ve dedicated yourselves to Coach Gerelds and Woodlawn High School—you have to allow Jesus Christ to come into your heart and life.”

  Then Goebel asked them the same question he’d considered as a young man: “If you died tonight, do you know where you would go?”

  The Woodlawn High gym was silent, and a few of the players shuffled their feet. “As I sat there pondering his words, it was like he was reading my mind,” said Reginald Greene, an African American lineman on the team.

  “I didn’t ask you if you went to church or tried to follow the Ten Commandments the best you can,” Goebel told the players. “I asked you if you knew that you would spend eternity in heaven if you died tonight.”

  “It’s exactly what I was thinking,” Greene said. “I figured it was what the rest of the team was thinking, too.”

  “I have good news,” Goebel told the players. “If you allow Jesus Christ to come into your heart and life, you will be saved and given eternal life. You have to make a commitment. If you’re going to be successful, you have to commit to it now—not later. You’ve got to commit yourself to Christ. You’ve got to give yourself to Him before He can really use you. If you’re willing to do that and want to do it, then get up and stand with me. We’re going to pray to God, and you can let Him into your heart.”

  Goebel recited Romans 10:9, which teaches, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Then Goebel invited anyone who was ready to receive God’s gift of His Son, Jesus Christ, to join Him on the gymnasium floor.

  “Wales spoke for about forty-five minutes that night and ­really presented the case for Christ,” said Hank Erwin, who was in the gym that night and would become Woodlawn High’s team chaplain. “Then he boldly gave an invitation. It was a really g
utsy statement. Nobody knew what was going to happen. The boys were really quiet.”

  Initially, only a few players climbed down from the bleachers. But then a steady stream of players joined their teammates and Goebel on the floor—white and black players alike. Out of forty-­eight players on the team, all but four became Christians that night.

  “I remember that one by one they began to get out of their seats and kneel around Wales and make a commitment to Christ,” Erwin said. “It was sort of remarkable to see the first few come down, but then it became a trickle, then a stream, and then a wave of all of the athletes coming down. It was remarkable. I think everybody was stunned.”

  Two players, Steve Martin and defensive end Brad Hendrix, didn’t accept Goebel’s invitation to become Christians because they’d already been saved. But Martin said Goebel’s testimony still had a profound impact on him.

  “I think part of it was that he shared his personal testimony,” Martin said. “People could respond to and identify with someone who wasn’t up there just hanging a blue sky, saying you ought to be a good guy or a nice guy. He talked about the simple life he led up until Christ changed his life. I think that spoke to everybody. It was very powerful to hear what he’d been through and the difference Christ made in his life.”

  Gerelds, who grew up attending church with his family, didn’t have much time for religion and wasn’t exactly sure what to make of Goebel. He was more focused on figuring out how to unify his team so it could win football games. As his players gathered around Goebel, Gerelds stood at the top of the bleachers and didn’t join them. Although Gerelds would later admit that a strange feeling stirred in his heart and that tears filled his eyes as he listened to Goebel talk about things he’d never heard about God and Jesus Christ, he was too tough to admit he needed help at the time.

  “I was not one of them,” Gerelds wrote shortly before his death. “I had too much pride to openly admit any weakness. I pretended I was saved and put up a front for the kids.”

  As Gerelds watched his players and assistant coaches weeping, hugging, and seemingly loving one another, he figured it would soon pass. As he walked down from the top row of the bleachers, he determined that an emotional, religious event would not distract him. He was tough, and he was going to be the best football coach he could possibly be. That meant no distractions and no softness. Still, what he had witnessed seemed real. He felt something inside that he’d never felt before. He planned to go on about his business and figured that the emotional impact of the evening would probably wane as the kids and coaches continued practice and started classes. Gerelds believed that the grind of real life would eventually take its toll.

  Before leaving the gym, Gerelds shook Goebel’s hand and thanked him for coming. “I don’t know if this is going to work,” Gerelds told him.

  “I don’t know if it will, either,” Goebel said. “But if God’s in it, it will work.”

  That night, Reginald Greene had a difficult time sleeping in the gym. The flying roaches that seemed to be as big as mice were enough to keep him awake, but he lay in his cot for several hours thinking about what he’d done and what it meant. It didn’t take very long for Greene and the others to notice a change in their team.

  “I saw an athletic change in me the very next day,” Greene said. “But even more important, the attitude of the team was completely different. There was a unity and friendship that hadn’t existed before—­especially between black and white players. That was really something new. Over the next few weeks, there was a transformation in the whole team—mentally, spiritually, and athletically.”

  Denny Ragland, who was a backup quarterback in 1973, also noticed a significant change in the coaches. There was less screaming and yelling and more teaching and instructing. Even something as trivial as adding ice to the water buckets didn’t go unnoticed. The previous year, the Colonels weren’t given many water breaks during practice. Now they were getting them every hour.

  “I remember being abused by coaches in my earlier years, especially as a freshman and sophomore,” Ragland said. “I had been ridiculed verbally, but it all stopped after that night. The relationships became more like they should be, with coaches coaching you and trying to improve you, rather than trying to demean you. Granted, we didn’t have the same guys coaching us that we’d had as a freshmen and sophomores, but the fact that they gave us ice in the water blew me away the first time it happened. Practices became not so much about beating people down but about preparing us and setting goals. They treated us more like human beings.”

  After the meeting in the gym, Goebel instructed his staff member Hank Erwin to return to Woodlawn High as the team’s chaplain. “Wales told me he wanted me to go back and teach them what it all means,” Erwin said. “I went back and started to figure out how to do it.”

  Initially, Gerelds and his players weren’t very receptive to Erwin’s message. They didn’t know this man who walked with a limp and stuttered when he was excited. Although Erwin was growing more confident in his faith, he still wasn’t as powerful a speaker as Goebel. During the last few days of training camp and in the final weeks of summer break, Erwin talked to Woodlawn’s players about what the Lord could do in their lives. He led Bible studies and put a renewed emphasis on the school’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter.

  Once the players started classes and began serious preparations for the 1973 season, Gerelds was surprised to see that what happened in the gym that night with Goebel was still very much a part of the day-to-day lives of his players and assistant coaches. What Gerelds thought would be a temporary feeling of love and unity hadn’t worn off. He noticed that his players did seem to care more about each other. The normal finger-pointing, blame, jealousy, and selfishness that had threatened to rip his team apart was greatly reduced as his team came closer together. The relationships between the black and white players were especially amazing.

  Two weeks before the ’73 season started, Erwin and the players decided to celebrate the kickoff with an FCA meeting at one of the player’s homes. Howie Miller, one of the B-team players, received permission from his parents to host the party at their home in the Crestwood neighborhood of Birmingham. Crestwood was an upper-middle-class section, which meant it was an all-white neighborhood at the time. A few of the players invited Gerelds to attend the party, and he wondered if any of the black players on his team would show up. He wondered if they’d feel uncomfortable or unwelcome at a house in that part of town.

  “As I drove into the Crestwood neighborhood, I wondered if any of the black kids had ever been in any of these homes before,” Gerelds wrote. “As I walked into the house, I noticed black and white boys with their arms around each other. They were laughing and talking in an honest and sincere way. They were communicating with each other like I always wanted them to do. I felt ignored, as if I was not part of the group. I seemed very unimportant to them. They had the same look on their faces as Wales had when I met him for the first time. After a short stay, I left the party and started home.”

  At that point in his life, Gerelds had never seen anyone truly give of themselves for the sake of another person. Nor had he done it himself. Suddenly, he was seeing a very real person (Christ) living His life out in the lives of sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-olds. Though his players were from a variety of backgrounds—some rich, some poor, some black, some white—they had learned that their differences didn’t matter. They loved each other.

  What Gerelds witnessed at that FCA gathering was something he’d never seen before. He saw white players and black players standing arm in arm. The players and their parents were truly enjoying one another. No one had an agenda. They were there for one another, encouraging, praying, singing, and loving each other. For a young, ambitious coach, it was peculiar—but it was even oddly inviting.

  Gerelds knew that what he’d seen was real, and he knew he didn’t have what those young men on his team had. The reality was that he didn’t have Who
they now had in their lives. As Gerelds drove home that night, he started speaking up to the sky. He confessed to God that he wasn’t sure about many things in the world, but he was sure of the difference he’d seen in the lives of the young men he’d been with over the past several weeks. Gerelds pulled his car into his driveway, went into the house, and headed straight to his bedroom. He knelt next to his bed and spoke to the God of the universe. For the first time in his life, he was certain there was a Father there who loved him. Gerelds met Jesus that night and was never the same. While he would wait until after the 1973 season to be baptized at Huffman Assembly of God Church, he knew love now, and now he knew how to love.

  “As I drove home, I began to think about what Wales had said that night,” Gerelds wrote. He went on to say:

  He spoke of being humble and coming to the Lord as a child. When I got home, I got down on my knees and asked the Lord to give me what He gave those kids. I told Him that I didn’t care about winning football games and impressing others. All I wanted was to feel like the players felt. The Lord came into my life that night and gave me what He gave the players: love. The Lord did in five seconds what I had tried to do sixteen hours a day for two years: he made a football team out of individuals.

  And the Woodlawn High School Colonels were about to find out that they’d never be the same.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE CHAPLAIN

  During Hank Erwin’s sophomore year at Troy State University in Troy, Alabama, in 1969, he fell to his knees on the floor of his dormitory room. A once promising college baseball player, Erwin wasn’t sure he could play the game he loved any longer because of the excruciating and never-ending pain in his right foot. A few months earlier, as Erwin worked a summer job at a steel mill in Fairfield, Alabama, a steel beam crushed his right foot.