Forty-four years ago, I saw Clark Hudak break the law by saying a prayer in an American public school. But I didn’t just watch; I was also an accessory. Make that an accessory before, during and after the fact. Mr. Hudak, as all the members of the wrestling teams he coached called him, died last week. His daughter Suzanne Hudak sent me an email telling me the news.
She probably had no idea how often I’ve thought about her father over the years, and what he taught me about things other than wrestling.
There was the time a referee ruled that one of Mr. Hudak’s wrestlers had been pinned. He clearly had one shoulder off the mat, and threw a hissy fit as he stormed to the sidelines.
Mr. Hudak wasn’t happy with the call either, but chided the wrestler for showing poor sportsmanship and benched the gifted athlete, who was of championship caliber, for the rest of the season.
Then there was the wrestler, another of championship caliber who was also very popular with the rest of the team, who blew off an important dual meet. Mr. Hudak cut him from the team.
Both actions — the benching of the kid who showed poor sportsmanship and the cutting of the other wrestler — probably blew any chances that Mr. Hudak’s team would win a championship that season.
I get the feeling Mr. Hudak couldn’t have cared less about that. There were far more important things he had to teach us. Maybe that’s why, before every dual meet, he gathered his wrestlers in the locker room for a group prayer.
I wrestled on Mr. Hudak’s team for the 1967-1968 season. It was over four years after the Supreme Court’s Abington School District v. Schempp decision, which ruled that Bible-reading and prayer in public schools were unconstitutional.
When Mr. Hudak and the team said our first prayer that season — at a December 1967 dual meet — I wondered if our coach knew we were breaking the law of the land.
That didn’t matter to me then. I needed divine intervention when I wrestled, if indeed the word “wrestle” can be used to describe whatever the heck it was I did on the mat. All wrestlers have a learning curve when they’re new to the sport.
Some pick it up immediately and are good from the start; those are the ones we call “the naturals.” Others get around their learning curve and become really good at various stages.
Years later, I now realize that my learning curve for wrestling turned out to be an infinite straight line. My learning curve for other things — like dissecting and evaluating controversial Supreme Court decisions — is much shorter.
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in the Schempp decision. The lone dissenter was Justice Potter Stewart, who rightly advised his fellow jurists that there really was no complete separation of church and state in America, that Congress and the Supreme Court itself opened their sessions with prayer.
The First Amendment, Stewart said, was meant to prevent Congress from passing a law that would establish a religion or prevent the free exercise thereof. Stewart chided his fellow justices for undoing what Congress never did in the first place.
Prayer and Bible reading in public schools hurt no one. There are some who believe the decline in academics and discipline in public schools since 1963 indicates that the ban on school prayer hurt us all.
That smacks of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” thinking, but when we kicked one moral foundation to the curb, we’d better darn well replace it with another one.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
