Reggie White

[TheMinister]

Reggie White: Fighting the Good Fight
by Tom Neven

He was the nemesis of quarterbacks for 14 seasons. He holds the NFL’s career record in sacks—192.5, to be exact—and was selected to play in 13 consecutive pro bowls. In 1997 he led his team, the Green Bay Packers, to its first Super Bowl victory in more than 30 years.

Reggie White knows how to compete, how to stand strong when the situation requires it. Today, he needs that fortitude and courage to stand against the forces of political correctness and moral decline in our culture—and the false accusations being made against him.

His latest test comes as a result of a speech before the Wisconsin state legislature in March 1998. During the talk, Reggie forthrightly presented the biblical position on many problems facing our world, including greed, sexual immorality, race relations, and obscene movies and music. In comparing the gay rights movement to the civil rights movement, he said, “Homosexuality is a decision. It’s not a race.” His comments created an uproar.

“I’m not going to back off what I know God has put on my heart to share. God owns a whole lot more than CBS could ever give me.”

Not at first, mind you. Members of the legislature flocked around him after the speech, eager to have their photo taken with the sports hero. But once Reggie’s words were reported in the national press, particularly his comments on homosexuality, and once homosexual activists started branding him an “extremist” and “bigot,” some of these same legislators changed their tune and publicly said they were “appalled” or “shocked” at the speech. Worth noting is that the few homosexuals in the legislature were not among those expressing shock, and Reggie says one even defended his right to say what he believed.

Still, Reggie’s honesty cost him—not just his good name, but dollars and cents, too. Several corporate sponsors dropped him, notably Campbell’s Soup. And CBS Sports, about to sign a five-year, $6 million deal with Reggie to be a football commentator, backed out. (To their credit, both Nike and Edge shaving gel stuck with him.)

Through it all, Reggie has stood firm. “I’m not going to sell out,” he says. “I’m not going to back off what I know God has put on my heart to share. God owns a whole lot more than CBS could ever give me.”




A public witness
It’s not as though Reggie did anything unexpected. He has always been very open about his faith and has taken strong public stands. The 6-foot, 5-inch, 300-pound lineman could be counted on to lead a midfield prayer meeting after every NFL game; the more TV cameras around, the better. He stated publicly that he would consider trading to Green Bay from Philadelphia if he felt God calling him there. (Green Bay coach Mike Holmgren, in an attempt to get Reggie to make the move, left a message on Reggie’s answering machine: “This is God calling.”)

Reggie traces his faith primarily to his grandmother, Mildred.His mother, Thelma, raised him in a single-parent home until he was about 8, when she met Leonard Collier, who would eventually become Reggie’s stepfather. Leonard was stationed at Fort Riley, an Army base in Kansas, and when Reggie’s mother went to spend a year there, she left Reggie with his grandmother in Chattanooga, Tenn.

“That’s where my spiritual awareness came about,” Reggie says. “My grandmother—she never forced us to go to church or anything, but it was just her commitment of going to church that got me interested. A lot of times she would walk. The church was a few miles away.”

The Rev. Bernard Ferguson, the white pastor at that all-black church, also had a large influence on Reggie. “The thing that I most remember about him is how genuine he was, how much he seemed to care about the parishioners and the kids,” Reggie says. “Every function we had, whether skating or AWANAs, he was always there. He was just a godly example. I ended up giving my life to the Lord when I was 13.”

“The Bible constantly says that we should rejoice in suffering that comes against us."

At age 17, living again with his mother and stepfather, Reggie believed God was calling him to be a preacher. But in retrospect, he wonders if the call was genuine. “It’s always amazing to me that even though I [now] feel God hadn’t called me to preach at that time, He still had His hand on me—even in the midst of me being a knucklehead.”

Being a “knucklehead” consisted primarily, Reggie says, of giving in to sexual temptation. “Throughout high school and college that was a major problem,” he says. “For the moment it was good, but afterwards it was terrible. That’s the thing that I struggled with probably more than anything. The problem was I had no mentor. I had nobody to keep me accountable, to tell me I was wrong.

“If I could go back and change it, I would change it,” Reggie says. “But I can’t. Then God gave me Sara, which was really a blessing for me, because she helped me structure things.”

Lifelong commitment
Reggie and Sara, who have been married 14 years, admit to their share of bumps in the marriage.

“But we learned a lot from our bumps,” Reggie says. “There were times that I’m sure she wanted to leave, and I wanted to leave her. But we realize that, look, this is a lifelong thing; we made a commitment to one another, and God has called us. To be honest with you, even in the midst of me thinking sometimes about divorcing, I was too scared because I was afraid of what God would think if I left my family.”

“If any married couple says they don’t fight, they’re lying,” Sara adds. “I just can’t see a perfect couple not having a disagreement, not having problems.”

Communication, she says, is key to a successful marriage—and to parenting. “We parents need to be more intimately involved with our children,” Sara says. “When a child is upstairs in his room and you are downstairs, that’s not communicating.”

She finds that car trips, no matter how short, are the best way to learn what Jeremy, 13, and Jecolia, 11, are thinking. “I find it very easy for us to talk in the car with no radio, no CD playing,” she says. “Kids open up that way.”


No backing down
Reggie says that despite the problems he’s faced since that speech in Wisconsin, he will continue to speak out. “The greatest lesson I’ve learned is that too many of us don’t want to suffer, and we let people back us down from what we believe in,” he says. “The Bible constantly says that we should rejoice in suffering that comes against us.

“I understand that if I’m not stirring the pot up, if people are not mad at me because of the way I live and the things I say, that means I’m doing something wrong.”

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[Lorelei]

Thanks for sharing it, Minister.