March 15, 2000 SportsLine.com wire reports

BATON ROUGE, La. --

	Related Links: West Regional preview West Regional breakdown Forum: How will LSU fare in the tournament?
	T O P   N E W S

Collis Temple III is following in his father's footsteps, but along a very different path.

The younger Temple, like his father, is an LSU basketball player. And like his father, the son had difficulty being accepted by some fans. But for the current player, winning over critics took less than a season. For the elder it took years.

"There weren't many people that were happy to see me go to LSU," Temple II said. "Including me."

When Collis Temple II joined the team in 1971, there were only a handful of black students at LSU, none on the team that Pete Maravich had just put in the spotlight.

Temple II wanted to go to Southern University, Baton Rouge's predominantly black school.

"My father had other ideas," he said.

Collis Temple I was a high school principal. He had applied to LSU for grad school in the early 1950s and rather than accept a black, the state had paid for Temple to go to Michigan.

"Governor (John) McKeithen came to the house to get my father to make me go to LSU," Temple II said. "The irony did not escape my father -- he couldn't go to LSU and there was the governor begging him to make me go."

Temple II, whose mother was also an educator, was considered the best person to break the color barrier because he was as good a student as he was a basketball player.

But things weren't easy.

Fans yelled racial slurs and wrote letters telling him he wasn't wanted. Even his teammates were hostile.

"I caught another player putting a note under his door one night," said then-coach Dale Brown. "It was a nasty note, full of racial crap. A lot of people went out of their way to be as nasty as possible to him."

The note sparked a fist fight but the years have eased hard feelings.

"I see that guy all the time at games now, and we talk and kid around," Temple II said. "We aren't friends really, I've never been invited to his house, never invited him to mine. But we get along OK. Times have changed."

Some of his teammates were outright hostile, some merely ignored him, Temple II said. He made no friends. When some teammates invited him to a local hangout, Temple II was denied admission because they didn't serve blacks.

"I didn't mind that so much," he said. "I just stayed by myself and studied."

There were only a handful of black players in the Southeastern Conference then. Games both on the road and at home were filled with coarse heckling, not about his game, but about his race.

Temple II persevered, graduating and going on to professional basketball, then returning to Baton Rouge where he got a master's degree and became a successful businessman.

Unlike his father, who first attended school with whites his senior year in high school, the younger Temple was thinking team colors.

Temple III wanted to play at LSU, but there were many who thought he did not belong. By this time the team, if not the school, was majority black, and the questions centered on the younger Temple's ability.

"People thought I was here just because my father played here," Temple III said. "It was just that after my high school they thought I wasn't good enough. They thought the scholarship should go to a blue chipper."

Although an injury hampered Temple his freshman year, he has become a critical player off the bench this year on an LSU team that has just nine scholarship players, but still qualified for the NCAA Tournament.

LSU, seeded fourth in the West bracket, plays Thursday against Southeast Missouri State in Salt Lake City.

Temple, a 6-foot-6 point guard, can play several other positions for coach John Brady.

"People love to see Collis go in," Brady said. "They're proud to see a second generation player on our team. I get more questions about him than I do about Stromile Swift."

Race relations on the team are fine, although blacks and white tend to separate off the court.

"We do things together as a team sometimes, but otherwise it's pretty much black guys with black guys and white guys with white guys," Temple II said. "But it doesn't mean anything. It's just how it is."

Like his father, Temple III gets fan mail. Unlike his father's, these aren't filled with invective and hate.

"People all know me as `Collis Temple's son. They write and tell me what a great player my father was, what a great man he is," he said. "They tell me I have a lot to live up to. I know that, but my goal is to be good enough that someday people will say about my father, `He's Collis Temple's father."'