COLUMN ONE

Paddling Against the Current

Some say spanking is central to child-rearing in the South. But a Memphis high school coach finds that times may be changing.

By Ellen Barry
Times Staff Writer

November 20, 2004

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — It is a comedown for Ted Anderson, at the age of 60, to spend his days in a social studies classroom, fighting for the attention of sixth-graders.

Gone are the trophy case and the glory of tournaments. Although people in Memphis still call him Coach A, out of habit or respect, he will watch this year's Hamilton High School Wildcats from the bleachers if he watches them at all.

The investigation that ended Anderson's legendary basketball career left the press with a now-notorious shorthand to describe him, as the coach who paddled players for missing baskets. Anderson takes issue with the school district's findings, but agrees to this extent: He is the first casualty of the Memphis spanking wars.

For more than a century, Memphis City Schools staff have had broad rights to punish students by paddling, or "whupping," as many call it. Most use a wooden paddle shaped like a slim oar, wrapped with duct tape or perforated to minimize wind resistance. They ask students to bend over a desk, or to grip the back of a chair, before administering several licks to the student's backside.

Along with Dallas, Houston and Tampa, Memphis is one of only six big-city school systems in the country that still allow teachers to hit schoolchildren. Since the 1970s, when authorities on child-rearing declared that corporal punishment had no place in the schools, a string of reformers has criticized Memphis' policy, calling it archaic and slightly embarrassing. Now, a fresh challenge has emerged; on Monday, the Memphis school board may vote paddling out of existence.

The proposal has met with fierce emotions, particularly among African American parents, teachers and clergymen, who say corporal punishment is a central and loving aspect of child-rearing in the South. The debate has taken on a deep cultural significance in Memphis, whose leadership looks coolly on interference from outside.

It was in the middle of this debate that Anderson — the most old-school of Memphis' old-school coaches — found himself during the last season of his nearly 20-year career.

"I'm talking about how black people raise their children," said Anderson, who is black, the son of sharecroppers. "In the white community, it might work to tell a child, 'Go to your room without dinner.' Well, in the black community, there was no dinner. There was no room to go to."

It was no secret that Coach A made use of the paddle; it was part of his persona, like the lectures about slopping hogs and hitching up mules as a child in Marigold, Miss. Blustery and bombastic, Anderson sang popular songs in the hallways and made students laugh, but turned stern when they stepped out of line. He would glower and ask, "where's my wood," by which — they learned quickly — he meant the paddle.

Hamilton High School has a reputation for strict discipline that dates back to the 1960s, when Anderson himself attended. He can remember when the lunch bell would ring and all 3,000 kids would "stop in their tracks," freezing on the ground if they happened to be tying their shoe, and then line up in silence and file back into the building. It was "almost penal," Anderson said, "but it worked wonders."

As late as 1985, when Samantha Jackson Milton was enrolled there, discipline was still very strict. "The principal never had to come out of his office. Just one step into the hall would make the kids walk in a straight line," said Milton, 35, an elementary school teacher in Greenwood, Miss.

By then, drugs and gangs were an increasing draw for young black men in south Memphis; the paddle, she said, "drove all that foolishness out of your heart."

No one was ridden harder than the Wildcats — the school's scrubbed, buttoned-down basketball heroes. Coach A's players were forbidden to wear earrings or low-slung pants that showed their "filthy drawers," as he put it.

Like his own coach at Hamilton, Anderson paddled his players for a variety of violations: bringing home bad grades; arriving late for school; dressing sloppily; misbehaving on the road; or, very occasionally, failing to apply themselves on the basketball court. He used to joke that he would sue them all for causing his arthritis.

It was a regimented life that some of his most successful former players remember not just with respect, but with fondness.

"The paddle, I think, was hard love," said Will Smith, 29, a 6-foot-6 center for the Wildcats, who is now operations director for the University of Colorado's basketball program.

Smith's father, William, said he had visited schools all over Memphis, searching for "strong black male leadership," before putting his son in Anderson's hands.

"Everyone wanted to be a Wildcat," said Eldridge Henry II, 30, the son of Anderson's assistant coach, who played for him in the 1990s. "You knew there were going to be days when you had to run a lot, and you knew there were going to be days when you got some wood."

Memphis is the capital of the Mississippi Delta, populated by sharecropping families that poured north during the first half of the 20th century. It sits in the region of the country that remains most accepting of corporal punishment.

Even here, Memphis — whose student body of 118,000 is 86% black — stands out. Over the last school year, the district recorded 27,918 paddlings on students from elementary school through high school, affecting 10.4% of students.

The data showed that middle school children, and boys, were far more likely to be paddled. It also showed that 97% of students paddled last year were black. Thirty-eight of the system's 185 schools did not use it at all.

The policy does not allow parents to request that their child not be paddled.

Teachers and parents unaccustomed to paddling are often shocked when they learn how much the practice is used in Memphis.

Elaine Lurie, a high school English teacher, had been teaching for eight years when she was asked to step into the principal's office to witness a paddling — of a teenager who was 5 foot 7 and weighed, she estimated, 145 pounds. The experience was so degrading, she said, that she stopped sending students to the principal for punishment.

"Here he is, probably 16 or 17 years old, and he had to bend over a table while this thing was brought down on his butt," said Lurie, 62, who is now retired.

"How do you look somebody in the eye after you have beaten them with a board?" she asked.

Support among parents remains strong. When the school district commissioned an independent survey of 1,006 parents in September, 70% said spanking was acceptable, although Asian and Latino parents tended to disagree.

The district's corporal punishment policy, written in 1958 and revised twice, sets vague limits on the right to paddle students: Paddling should "generally speaking" be used "in cases meriting such action" after other forms of punishment have been tried. Only the principal, assistant principal and acting principal are fully empowered to paddle, and they must do so in the presence of a qualified adult witness. A teacher who decides to paddle needs permission from top administrators.

Over the years, though, instructors have tested the policy's limits: Coaches were often designated as a school's official paddler, for instance, and corporal punishment was so common in sports that the two went together "almost like bacon and eggs," said Robert Newman, a basketball coach at Melrose High School. Newman was disciplined for paddling a player in 1978, and hasn't used the paddle since.

When a board member, Laura Jobe, proposed abolishing the practice in 1997, the ban was rejected and she was inundated with emotional letters. "We're battling a lot of history here, and a culture," said Jobe, who is white.

But the arrival of a new superintendent from Minneapolis last year has changed the landscape. Carol Johnson, 57, who is black and grew up near Memphis, scanned personnel files to study violations of the corporal punishment policy and concluded that staff routinely ignored the guidelines. She was "deeply concerned" that parents were not required to give consent before their children were paddled, she said.

Jobe revived her proposal to abolish paddling, and on Monday, the nine-member school board will again vote on the matter. Advocates against corporal punishment will be watching closely, said Robert Fathman, an Ohio psychologist and president of the Center for Effective Discipline.

Memphis is "just kind of the last in a line," Fathman said. "Eventually it will go."

The vote, however, will mean little to Anderson, whose life turned a sharp corner in a locker room last December.

For his boys, the annual holiday tournament was a departure from the life they were familiar with: It meant an airplane trip, a hotel room, a steak in a nice restaurant. In Los Angeles, at a tournament sponsored by Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles, Anderson was in classic form.

Halfway through the first game, frustrated by what he called "lackadaisical play," Anderson asked his manager for his paddle. There in the locker room, in front of the rest of the players, he told three boys to bend over, and gave them two licks apiece. Only once or twice in his coaching career had he paddled for poor play, Anderson said, describing it as an "indiscretion." But he wanted to wake them up.

"They weren't trying. They weren't thinking. They just weren't into it," he said. When the boys went out for the second half, he said, they had "a little more seriousness of purpose." The Wildcats won the game.

Joseph Watkins, who had traveled to California with the team, noticed a strange expression on his son's face as the players returned to the court.

Watkins, 62, had debated the coach a few times on the subject of paddling, arguing that he taught his son not to use violence to address problems. He hadn't made much headway with Anderson; he knew that.

This time was particularly hurtful, though, because his son didn't understand the reasoning behind it, Watkins said.

Word filtered out about the incident, but Henry, Anderson's assistant coach, didn't make much of it.

"Twenty years I've been with him. Parents brought their kids to him because they knew he was old-school," Henry said. But, Henry acknowledged, as time has passed, Memphis has changed, bringing in parents with different expectations.

Months later, during an investigation of organized cheating and other wrongdoing at Hamilton, attorneys hired by the school district wrote up the paddling incident as part of a broad and damning report on activities at the school.

"While there are conflicting reports as to the frequency of 'bringing out the wood,' such paddling was used at least every other practice and during halftime of some games," wrote attorneys Jeffrey Weintraub and Robin Hutton.

Some players said paddling "was tough and the rough talk served to destroy their self-esteem," the lawyers wrote.

In deciding to remove Anderson from coaching, school authorities focused on two aspects of the paddling: first, that it was used to punish athletic shortcomings, not for disciplinary matters; and second, that the coach was paddling without oversight from school administrators.

"It's safe to say that is violating the policy. If people were thinking that's OK under this administration, that's not OK," said Vincent McCaskill, a schools spokesman. "This was the message to all employees: If you do not do what you're supposed to be doing as an educator, you could face disciplinary action."

In early June, Anderson was informed that he was temporarily banned from coaching and would be transferred to a job teaching social studies at a middle school. He left Hamilton High with a record of 414-179.

"It's just a clash between the old-school and the new way of doing things," said Gary Parrish, a sportswriter for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal. "He was a legend within that community. All it took was a couple of complaints, and that was it."

The news that Anderson had been removed let loose a range of emotions. Milton, the Hamilton alumna, wept.

Watkins, who had complained about the halftime paddling, was shocked by the severity of the punishment, and called Anderson "a good coach, a good person, a good man."

Reggie Tate, whose son plays on the team, worried that his son would drift into delinquency without Anderson's firm hand. When the new coach called Tate with a minor complaint about his son, asking Tate to address the problem, Tate scoffed at the coach for not handling it himself: "Call me if he cuts somebody's head off," he said. "That was something too simple for a man to call another man."

Some had murkier feelings.

Marcus Nolan, 32, a former Hamilton player who thrived under Anderson, earned a scholarship to college and now lives in a comfortable suburban neighborhood. His younger brother played on last year's team.

Paddling worked for coaches in the past, Nolan acknowledges. But now that he is a father, Nolan said, he would prefer to discipline his children himself.

"I believe in flowing with the times," he said. "Sometimes you can't do in this century what you did in the last century."

As for Anderson, he warns that removing the paddle could blow the lid off a school system already struggling with violence and truancy.

For him, it goes all the way back to Marigold, where his parents trusted the neighbors enough to leave him under their supervision. If he misbehaved, he got whipped twice: once by the neighbors, and again by his parents when they came home. If he didn't tell his mother and father what he did wrong, he knew someone else would.

The way Anderson sees it, he stayed out of jail because of that system — a system "as old as 'it takes a village to raise a child.' "

But, with that said, Anderson has put away the paddle for good.

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