Rexrode: Ed Temple was a pioneer, achiever

                Greatness takes on a different meaning when it’s required to even be noticed, which is part of why the name Ed Temple should be known across this state and the world of athletics.

                And then when greatness is sustained, after invisibility is exchanged for unyielding scrutiny? That’s why a statue built in his honor and a street named after him probably aren’t enough recognition for Temple, who passed away Thursday at the age of 89.

 Those are the rewards of achievement, and the longtime TSU women’s track coach and two-time Olympic coach had enough of that to warrant the most extensive of tributes. But Temple’s legacy is well beyond the 23 Olympic medals his runners earned, the 40 TSU Olympians he produced — all of them earning degrees — and the 24 national championships he won at the school.

                It’s expressed well in something he once told one of his many proteges, Valencia Jordan, TSU’s senior woman administrator and a women’s basketball assistant when she joined the athletic department in 1989.

                “People are watching everything.”

                That’s why there could be no slip-ups, that’s why Temple was said to be extremely and consistently tough as a coach in a tenure that lasted from 1953 to 1994. He brought the TSU Tigerbelles to worldwide prominence in the early days of the civil rights movement, and well before women’s athletics had any traction.

                He coached athletes who were largely dismissed as women and eyed suspiciously as African-Americans, in a country that still has work to do in both regards.

                Temple’s answer was greatness, beyond his most accomplished runner — the late Wilma Rudolph, the first U.S. woman to win three gold medals in one Games — and demanded of all, in tandem with the expectation of flawless behavior.

                “He understood the toughness and discipline it took to be successful, and he pushed his runners beyond what they thought they could achieve,” Jordan said Friday. “A lot of coaches don’t have the wherewithal to understand that kids make excuses and that you can’t (accept that), but he was all about bringing effort and integrity to the track every day.”

  And he was sneaky funny, dry jokes delivered with a straight face, something the public saw when his statue next to First Tennessee Park was announced in 2014 and he said: "I thought statues are supposed to be for people after they're dead. I'm not dead yet. Maybe they're trying to tell me something."

                Does any of this sound familiar? A coach who pushes harder than most, yet maintains close relationships and is beloved in public, who brings a group of people into prominence by achieving so much that they can no longer be disrespected?

                It sounds a lot like Pat Summitt to me. It’s a shame we lost both of them this year, but it also serves as a testament to the world changers this area has produced.

                The Tigerbelles, like the Lady Vols, stormed into worlds that often were not welcoming to them. In Temple’s case, in the 1950s and ‘60s, the fact that he was coaching women was not the largest obstacle to overcome.

                "This was at a time when these young ladies represented their country and then came back and couldn't buy a hamburger or anything else in a restaurant,” Temple told The Tennessean at the statue unveiling. “They had poor facilities; we were lucky to be able to go to Vanderbilt twice a week to run on their track."

                The Vanderbilt arrangement was kept quiet at the time. Nashville should forever be outspoken on the life of Temple and what it represented.

                Contact Joe Rexrode on Twitter @joerexrode.