“For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This 1979 Classic article shares Katie Cook’s experience as a religion tutor for student athletes — including Baylor legends Mike Singletary and Walter Abercrombie — reflecting on her relationships with her tutorees and the pride she takes in their academic success.
Every Baylor student hears the comment at least once a year: “Jocks are dumb.” Anyone who makes that comment to Katie Cook, though, won’t do so a second time.
Katie is a religion tutor for the athletic department, and she is always quick to stand up for the students she calls “my guys.”
“It pushes a little button in me to hear people talk about dumb jocks. Those fellows are like little brothers to me, and I tend to get protective,” she says a bit sheepishly.
Katie is not exactly the typical athletic tutor. For one thing, at 27 she is older than most of the tutors. She received her bachelor’s degree in religion in 1974, put in a short stint at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth and then returned to Baylor for a master’s degree in church history (’78).
In the second place, most tutors are undergraduates. Katie began working with the athletes as a graduate student, but she didn’t quit when she received her MA. Now she is state editor of the Texas Baptist Oral History Consortium, quartered at Baylor, and she says being out of school has advantages for her as a tutor.
“Most of the students don’t have the time I do,” she explains. “They have their own studies to keep up. Plus, I work in the same office all day. The guys don’t have to chase me all over campus; they know where to find me if they need me. And I’m not as busy during finals week as the other tutors. I don’t have to take exams anymore.”
Katie has lasted longer than most athletic tutors, too. This fall she begins her third year. Usually tutors last only a semester or two, either because tutoring takes too much of their time or because they find more lucrative work. Katie shocked the athletic department most, however, simply by asking for the job.
While she isn’t sorry she volunteered, Katie has learned quite a few things while working with the athletes.
“You can always tell who the new tutors are,” she remarks. “You walk in the study hall, and they’re all sitting there being really nice. Then we veterans walk in, and it’s completely different. We’re just, well, ‘laid back.’ We’ll walk in and hit someone, slap ’em on the back and start clowning around.”
Tutoring calls for a combination of clowning and serious business.
When it comes to her tutoring, though, Katie is all business. She and Marsha Martie, her roommate and fellow tutor, have learned to divide the religion students by professors. “I have a good set of Dwyer notes,” she says, “and Marsha takes Christian’s students.”
And Katie has learned, by a few rough experiences on the part of her tutorees, which professors she should advise her “little brothers” to avoid. “Let’s face it,” she says forthrightly, “There are some classes that would be just like kamikaze missions for them.”
She doesn’t really view such advice as special treatment, though. Some students think Baylor athletes are pampered, but Katie outspokenly takes the opposite view. “Those guys are up against a lot. They’re beaten around all afternoon on the practice field. By the time practice is over, it’s time for supper. Then, after they eat, they have study hall, and after study hall they have to watch films or go to meetings. By the time all that is over, it’s 11 p.m., and they may still have studying to do. Sometimes I think it’s simply not fair,” Katie says.
Many tutors work with the athletes at their study hall, but Katie has learned that she can be more effective on a one-to-one basis in a less crowded setting. She’ll pass out notes and study guides, then ask the athletes to call or come by her office if they need help. Often she will send a note to the study hall monitor saying that certain of the young men have permission to go study in the evening at Seventh and James Baptist Church’s Adult Learning Center which Katie directs. She also tells the men they are free to call, anytime, day or night, if they need help.
“It helps take away some of the panic right before a test if they know they can call,” Katie says. “And we have been waked up at 2 a.m. by someone calling to ask, ‘Who was Tiglathpileser III?’ ” [He ruled the Middle Assyrian empire from 1116- 1078 B.C.]
One night several men were studying together but had differing opinions on a tricky passage of Scripture. They called Katie and Marsha for an explanation.
“Marsha spent about ten minutes going over it with one of them on the phone,” Katie recalls. “Then, five minutes after she hung up, the telephone rang again. This time it was Mike Singletary, who apparently didn’t believe the first caller. He said, ‘I want to be sure he got this right…'”
Katie laughs and jokes with Singletary now, but she was afraid of him when they first met. “He never said anything!” she explains. “He just went around all day with this . . . this linebacker expression on his face.”
She has learned that Mike looks serious — even fierce — from force of habit, not because he plans to do anyone bodily harm. She has also learned not to walk up to new tutorees and ask them their names. The first time she did so, three different men told her they were Gary Don Johnson. Now she will approach a player she knows and ask him, “Is so-and-so here?” or “What’s that guy’s name?” Even that method, however, is not foolproof.
Some have deficient backgrounds, but most just need to learn how to study.
One evening she entered study hall and asked Lester Ward, “Who is that fellow?” pointing to an athlete sitting at the back of the room.
Ward smiled and said, “Oh, just call him Black.”
Katie replied, “Well, I don’t think I should do that,” casting a hasty glance at the player in question, who turned out to be Jeff Black. He just sat there, watching her, with a big grin on his dark-skinned face.
While Katie has helped “her guys” pass freshman religion classes— including an honors class in which one athlete was enrolled by mistake— she has benefited, too. For one thing, she has more fun at football and basketball games now that she knows half the team members. For another thing, she has formed some deep friendships with the men she tutors.
“Sometimes it gets to the point— the guys are so tired and they’ve worked so hard — that you just can’t get them to talk about religion anymore,” Katie explains. At those times, she says, they either become very silly or look for other topics of conversation. One of Katie’s favorite topics is feminism.
“Marsha and I have really got those fellows thinking about that,” Katie says with pride. “One night Walter Abercrombie made some comment — I don’t remember what it was now. But I stopped him and asked, ‘Walter, did you just say something chauvinistic?’
“He paused for a minute and looked kind of surprised, then he said, ‘Well, yeah, I did.’
“I jumped on him then. I told him, ‘That’s just as bad as my saying I’m better than you because I’m white and you’re black.”
Even if they don’t agree with her, Katie’s charges will often inadvertently reveal her influence on their thinking. Professors can easily recognize her pupils in New Testament classes; they are the ones who say Priscilla wrote the book of Hebrews.
Serious conversations at Katie’s tutoring sessions are not limited to women’s liberation. She and the athletes also discuss topics as varied as politics, speaking in tongues and the Romantic poets. These times are special to Katie, but she balks at taking too much personal credit for drawing anyone out or inspiring serious intellectual discussion. “Religion kind of sparks deep things in people anyway,” she says.
In the midst of such talk Katie ceases to think of the athletes as “little brothers.” “It’s person-to-person, then,” she says. “And really, even when I’m tutoring them and answering their questions, it is on an egalitarian basis. It’s only when I think of them collectively that they seem like a whole big bunch of brothers.”
And, again, she is determined to stand up for them — if they deserve it. “They are not dumb,” she insists. “Some of them don’t have good backgrounds in reading and writing. They have problems with verbal skills. Most, though, are like I was. They won all sorts of honors in high school, but they didn’t know how to study when they first got to college.”
If they don’t know how to study when they first meet Katie, they do by the time she is through with them.
She says her highest tribute from “her guys” was one’s recent comment about her and Marsha: “They’re cool. We can tell they really care about us.”
