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Up From The Ashes Packer Reggie White preaches that god can raise a man to the super bowl and a church from ruinsBy Johnette Howard
Knoxville, Tenn., firefighters couldn't do much when they answered the emergency call to Skyline Drive on Jan. 8, shortly after four in the morning. Inner City Church sat burning on its hilltop, and the telltale smell of kerosene hung in the air. According to published reports, in the wee hours of a Monday, someone had placed kerosene, gunpowder and at least 18 Molotov cocktails in the church, ignited the blaze and fled. They left behind graffiti on an outside wall that read, DIE NIGGER AND DIE NIGGER LOVERS. Five months later, White, an associate pastor at the church, sits inside his suburban Knoxville home on a midsummer afternoon and lets out a gust of a sigh. "Someone burned another church in North Carolina last night," he says. His phone is ringing off the hook. Today, he has already agreed to do a CNN show, a radio call-in program and four print interviews. "I'm angry," he says. "I'm fed up." As of Sunday there have been suspicious fires at more than 70 predominantly black churches across the South since 1995; a similar number of fires have been reported at white churches in the region. Many of the arsons are believed to be racially motivated, although authorities say there is no pattern to suggest that the fires are the work of any one group. To White the arsons appear to be an act of intimidation and hate, a blow meant to terrorize the black community in a way that setting fire to a black-owned bank or car dealership never could. As Nelson Rivers, southeast regional director of the NAACP, puts it, "Burning churches sends a message to African-Americans because the black church is more than a place of worship. It was a safe haven our leaders met in during the civil rights movement. It's a place where we historically have come to find repose and restore self-respect. During the rest of the week a man might be abused with some racial slur like 'boy.' But on Sunday in church, he became 'deacon' or 'mister.'" White has continued to bring attention to the church burnings, although Inner City senior pastor David Upton has received at least two death threats since the fire. In the days after the blaze, a vitriolic hate letter was received at the Knoxville community investment bank that White founded. A postcard with singed corners and racist epithets was sent to church offices a couple of weeks later. It carried a Wisconsin postmark and was addressed to White. Not long afterward, someone in a pickup truck drove down the long tree-lined lane to White's home -- past the two-foot-high letters on the front gate that read JESUS IS LORD -- and seemed to be casing the house. Last month a bank employee found a suspicious package at the back door of the building. Authorities feared it was a bomb, but it proved to be a hoax. Reggie says his wife, Sara, and their two children, 10-year-old Jeremy and eight-year-old Jecolia, have long accompanied him on trips. But he also concedes, "The family has been with me more than ever this year." White fatalistically speaks of getting "knocked off" and asserts that he's "willing to die for the things I believe in." Yet he insists that he does not fear for his safety. Moments later a side door to his house swings open, and Sara enters. A beam of sunlight slants in. The signal on the security system beeps twice, indicating the system is on. It's one in the afternoon. That White would find himself at the forefront of another battle is hardly surprising. His life has a rolling topography: It has been a series of triumphs and setbacks in which his pursuit of an NFL championship and his commitment to his ministry have seemed at odds. Then, almost magically, things somehow work out. Asked to explain this phenomenon, White will break into a smile and say, "God spoke to me. And he said...." At 34, White is probably two years away from the end of his remarkable NFL career. He's the league's career sack leader. He'll be remembered as the biggest star to attach his name to a 1992 lawsuit that helped revolutionize free agency in the NFL. Players and coaches will recall his 4.6 speed in the 40 and the python embrace he clamped on ballcarriers. They'll laugh about his Herculean strength, which allowed him to toss aside a 320-pound lineman with one arm, and his habit of helping up the same foe with a reminder that "Jesus loves you." He'll leave the game an authentic hero, an overused phrase in sports that truly applies to him. During five of his eight seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles, White was the fulcrum of coach Buddy Ryan's body bag defense and the moral center of a talented team that White believes should have won at least two Super Bowls. When Eagles owner Norman Braman refused to ante up the money to keep White from leaving as a free agent in 1993, thousands of fans gathered in Philadelphia's JFK Plaza for a "Rally for Reggie." Braman only dug his heels in deeper. At a downtown awards luncheon later that month, White couldn't bring himself to say goodbye. He buried his head in a napkin and cried as a crowd of more than 300 gave him a prolonged standing ovation. When he could finally speak, White tearfully said, "I didn't give up on the Eagles. It seems as though the Eagles gave up on me." He didn't want to leave Philadelphia. By then, Reggie and Sara were deeply involved in a street ministry. On Friday nights Reggie often coaxed teammates to join Sara and him in the north Philly projects, where the Whites would visit with large crowds. Reggie often returned to the same neighborhoods to lead weekday Bible studies, to volunteer his services to surprised church councils and to help at fund-raisers. He often told bidders at charity auctions, "I'm not just asking for your money, I'm asking for your time." In March 1993, after the Eagles made it clear they were no longer interested in him, White embarked on a 37-day, seven-city tour that at times bordered on the ridiculous (Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell ordered a moratorium on profanity at team offices during the two days that Reverend White would be on the premises). The San Francisco 49ers and the Washington Redskins were thought to be the finalists for White's services because White had said he wanted to go to a contender and to continue his inner-city work. "God will tell me where to go," he said. But when the Packers made an 11th-hour offer -- a four-year, $17 million contract that would make him the NFL's highest paid defensive player -- White took the money and went to play for a mediocre team based in the league's smallest city. Braman scoffed, saying White's decision "wasn't going to be made by a ghetto or by God. It was going to be made for the reason most human beings make decisions today: money." It marked one of the few times White's integrity has been questioned. He's still irked by it. "I just thought, How dare Mr. Braman say that?" White says now. "Money was important, because I needed resources to continue the projects I wanted to do. But how dare he speak for what was in my heart? He doesn't know me. We had dinner. But he never walked down any streets with Reggie White." Among the enduring images of last January's NFC Championship Game was the sight of White wiping the season's final sweat from his brow on the Packers' bench and bitterly telling a cameraman to stop recording his pain. Green Bay -- fresh off its upset of the defending Super Bowl champion 49ers a week earlier -- had led the Dallas Cowboys, soon to be the new Super Bowl champs, by three points with 10 minutes to play. Then Emmitt Smith split the Packers' defense for two touchdown runs. White was inconsolable. Green Bay's title run had stalled one quarter short of the NFC crown. Though Packers quarterback Brett Favre was the NFL's MVP in 1995, White is held in equal, if not greater, esteem in Green Bay. About 2,000 fans attended White's first day of training camp as a Packer in 1993, and he stuck around long afterward to sign autographs. Favre, then a pup of 23, looked around and said, "I don't want to say [Super Bowl], but deep down I think we have a chance to go." The Green Bay Press-Gazette devoted the cover of its special football section to an illustration depicting White as Moses, holding a yard marker as a staff and leading the Pack to the promised land. So what if it sounded like a reach? Green Bay had finished a modest 9-7 in 1992. Still, that was only its fourth winning season in 20 years. The Packers went 9-7 again in White's first year and not only made their first postseason appearance since the strike-shortened '82 season but also won a road playoff game, in Detroit. The defense leaped from a ranking of 23rd in '92 to No. 2 in '93. Coach Mike Holmgren said it was no mystery why. "Reggie has changed everything -- the way we play, the other team's offensive scheme," he said. "And that's just one player. Some teams may have two or three guys with that kind of impact." Holmgren paused. "Can you imagine?" Green Bay's ascent hasn't stopped. Last season the Packers won their first outright NFC Central title since 1972. They trounced the Atlanta Falcons in the first round of the playoffs and then stunned the 49ers 27-17. On the flight home from San Francisco, White -- who had experienced only one playoff win with Philadelphia but already had four with Green Bay -- sat down next to Holmgren and said, "Coach, I've never been this far. I just want to thank you." There was silence. Then Holmgren came up with a good punch line. "Nice try," he said. "But you still can't have my Bud Light." White is the locker room sage to whom the younger Packers turn for inspiration or advice. Older teammates kid him about everything from his habit of calling team meetings -- "He calls more meetings than Congress," says safety LeRoy Butler -- to his staunch refusal to listen to almost nothing but gospel music during his and Butler's shared rides to practice. White's teammates know that his preaching about putting the team first isn't just talk. Despite the meat-grinder nature of the position he plays, until last season he had never missed a nonstrike NFL game. After an All-America senior season at Tennessee and a two-year stopover with the Memphis Showboats of the USFL, he came into the NFL in 1985 saying that he wanted to be the best defensive lineman ever, and more than a decade later, he's still rolling toward quarterbacks like a wave of lava, burying whatever is in his path. He burns to win. His example has been contagious. White gets after teammates he views as slackers. "When I got to Green Bay I told some of our guys, 'You make more excuses than anyone I've ever seen,'" he recalls. "We had some guys who walked around like they didn't care if we lost." Before the playoff game against the 49ers, White told his defensive teammates that he would hand out cash bonuses for big plays, like interceptions, fumble recoveries and cobweb-inducing hits. Shaking his head now, White says with a groan, "I wound up paying out almost $9,000. You'd be amazed how guys who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars get up and go after that $100. They'll sit in the film room the next week saying, 'Ooh! I caused a fumble and recovered it. That's $200!'" Already, he's pounding home the message that the way Green Bay played against San Francisco on that charmed afternoon last January is the standard that the Packers must meet consistently in the regular season. "To be a championship team," White says, "you have to do those things all the time." A man with less conviction than White might alienate his teammates with his frequent insistence that "God spoke to me" and his statements that he's on "a mission from God" and that football is merely his platform. As Packers tight end Keith Jackson says, "The walk with God that Reggie has is almost, you know, scary." White tends to see a divine hand at work in almost everything. He still insists that it really was the voice of God that told him to sign with Green Bay. He says he spent the entire night before his announcement on his knees, sobbing and praying, because "I thought, I know God told me go to San Francisco. What's the deal? And the Lord spoke to me. And when the Lord spoke to me, he said, 'Let me ask you a question: Where did the head coach, the defensive coordinator and the offensive coordinator all come from before they went to Green Bay?' I said, 'San Francisco?' And he said, "That's the San Francisco I'm talking about!'" As incredible as that image is -- the idea of God's knowing the curricula vitae of the Packers' coaching staff because, well, God is God -- nothing left fans shaking their heads like White's seemingly miraculous recovery from a torn hamstring last season on the eve of Green Bay's playoff run. (During afternoon soap operas, local stations ran a crawl across the bottom of the television screen with the bulletin that White would miss the postseason.) "What most people don't realize is that was actually the third time God healed me," says White, who previously had almost been sidelined by an elbow injury in 1994 and a thigh bruise in 1995. Two aspects made White's hamstring injury unique: It took God nine days to get around to healing it, instead of the usual two or three; and by then White had sat out the first game of his NFL career, he had scheduled season-ending surgery, and he had called a meeting -- what else? -- at which he tearfully told his teammates, "You have to believe you can win the rest of the way without me." That same night, however, White noticed that his leg, though still sore, felt better. He was so excited that he called Green Bay strength and conditioning coach Kent Johnston, and the two met at the Packers' training facility at about 10 p.m. Once there, White worked on weights and drove the blocking sled, neither of which he had been able to do the day before without excruciating pain. "Then," White says, "I looked at Kent, and I started smiling. And Kent -- see, Kent's from Texas and he's got this Texas kind of twang -- Kent said, 'Man! God done healed you again!'" The hamstring has still not been surgically repaired. "I'm working out the same way I have in the past," White says, "so I just believe it's going to be all right." Until the church fires started rolling across the South, White planned to spend this off-season the way he usually does -- getting himself in condition for another run at an NFL championship, spending time with his family, tending to his busy ministry and filming Reggie's Prayer, a semiautobiographical movie that is scheduled for theatrical release later this month. Instead, it was one of the most hectic and difficult times of his life. The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the civil rights division of the Justice Department and other local organizations continue to investigate the fires. White, however, is among the many black church leaders who have been critical of the federal government's efforts. "The response was too slow," he says. "The fires can't all just be a coincidence." What happened at Inner City Church remains unclear. Among the possibilities that authorities have pursued is whether a church leader or a congregant was involved. All 13 parishioners who had a key to the building agreed to take polygraph tests. White estimates that 200 church members have been questioned. Church financial records dating back to 1992 were subpoenaed. By March, White was so unhappy with the insinuations that he took his complaints to a fellow Tennesseean -- Vice President Al Gore. White also joined other church leaders in clear-the-air meetings with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who oversees the ATF. During these meetings White pounded home the message that many of the burned churches are poor and underinsured and would need financial assistance to rebuild. Then he initiated an NFL Players Association's fund-raising drive. Although White wasn't among the Inner City Church members questioned about the fire, he was visited by two ATF agents last spring. According to Sara, it was not the friendliest of meetings. "It could've ended in five minutes," she recalls. "It took about an hour. They didn't want Reggie speaking out, that was the bottom line." If those were the authorities' intentions, they picked on the wrong man. White wonders if Inner City's emphasis on the economic empowerment of blacks and other poor people has ruffled feathers in Knoxville. White's church has a congregation of about 450. It is in a struggling, mostly black inner-city neighborhood on the east side of Knoxville. As Harold Smith, one of White's fellow ministers, says, "We're not just a good-time, hand-clapping, shouting-hallelujah church that holds services on Sunday and then forgets about people come Monday." No. The church has a community development arm that refurbishes condemned houses for resale and builds affordable homes. Using a $1 million gift from White as seed money, the church in late 1994 opened the investment bank, which lends money to people who can't qualify for a loan from a full-service bank. The bank also runs finance and job-skill seminars, and it provides small-business owners with credit lines, planning help and access to office equipment. Before the sanctuary and adjoining church offices burned down, the congregation ran an AM radio station with religious programming, and it was about to open a low-cost day-care center in the basement that would have created at least 40 jobs. In short, White says, "we get people off welfare and help them become tax-paying citizens." He and Sara also opened Hope Palace, a home for unwed mothers on the same property on which they built their own house. As Dewey Roberts, president of the Knoxville chapter of the NAACP, says, "I would think even a racist would have to like some of the things Reggie does." As a youngster growing up in Chattanooga, White attended a Baptist church. He began giving sermons at 17, and in 1992 he was ordained as a nondenominational minister. His ministry is part community outreach, part old-fashioned preaching because he believes that "people are tired of you jibber-jabbering at them, just telling them what they need." In a typical summer White preaches four to five times at Inner City Church, and he travels around the country to help with street ministries. He sits on the Inner City executive board and runs a football camp in Knoxville because, he says, "I want to keep in touch over a number of years with the kids I meet." In addition to giving the community development banks a nationwide presence, he would like to start all-male private schools for black youths and other minorities and hire an all-male teaching staff as role models. "Our kids are dying in the streets," he says. White has strong opinions about politics and government, and his beliefs are grounded in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Among other things, he doesn't smoke, swear, gamble or drink. He regards welfare as a failed policy that breeds dependency and undermines the nuclear family. Unwed mothers, gang members and homosexuals are among the people his street ministry tries to reach because he believes more traditional churches have shown such groups too much contempt. "We need to be making them feel loved," White says. As compassionate as that sounds, gays might run from White if they knew he believes the Biblical passage that calls homosexuality "an abomination" or if they overheard him say, "Homosexuals have problems, and that's why they're homosexuals." Likewise, many people who applaud his self-help themes might chafe when White talks passionately about the way blacks in the U.S. have historically been mistreated. He is an ardent student of black history. The church fires keep taking him back to the long hot summers of the 1960s and the lynchings that were still going on in the '50s, the days when racists rode through Southern neighborhoods in the dead of night and terrorized places like the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where in 1963 four young girls were killed in a bomb explosion. Now, as then, White believes political rhetoric has fanned white resentment. And he believes the historic echoes in today's church burnings shouldn't be missed. "That's why these militia groups are rising," he says. "That's why these skinhead groups are rising -- those racist attitudes are still there, and, too often, we've forgotten our history. We don't want to think about lynchings, we don't want to think about burning the churches, or anybody who would compare slavery to how the Jews were treated during the Holocaust. What history's not telling us about is the slaves who died on the way over here or the others who were lynched, who were castrated, whose feet were cut off. Our women were raped. We don't want to remember that. "But if you remember it, and you begin to look at it, then you begin to say, 'This can't happen anymore.' Then you begin to understand me. Then you'll begin to understand why I hurt like I hurt. And why I get so mad." He is leaning forward in his chair now. He glares, and his expression is pained. He is saddened that more athletes haven't taken a vocal stand on the church burnings. "I'm out there by myself," he says. For now, the Inner City congregation holds its services in a nearby high school auditorium. All that's left of the church is the hole where the foundation used to be, a few shards of charred wood and twisted metal and a mud-smeared patch of cobalt-blue tile that marks where the basement kitchen once was. Smith stood on the lip of the crater late one June afternoon and wistfully said, "Our day-care center would have been letting out about now, and this area would have been full of little children, all kinds of children running around and giggling and screaming when they saw their parents coming to pick them up." By June more than $250,000 had been donated to Inner City Church. The outpouring has been so great that White changed his unannounced plan to retire when his contract expires after this season. "One boy sent us 92 pennies taped to a piece of cardboard," he says. "Those people forgot about me being a football player and said Reggie White, the man, needs our help. They revived me, to be honest." Inner City Church will be rebuilt; work crews are scheduled to break ground for the new foundation this month. There are plans to go forward with the day-care center, and the church's radio station -- "WDMF, What the Devil Mostly Fears," Smith says with a buoyant lilt -- was already back on the air when White left for training camp in mid-July. The same Sunday that White was away meeting with Reno, a middle-aged black woman in a sharp blue suit was bustling toward the front door of Inner City's interim home to attend church services. She is old enough to remember the Birmingham bombing. But when asked for her impressions of the recent church fires, she smiled ever so faintly, lifted her chin a little and said, "The devil's been mighty busy. But that don't mean he gets the last say." Issue date: September 2, 1999
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