SIOUX FALLS – If troubled former Nebraska football star Lawrence Phillips would have been a part of the TeamMates youth mentoring program his former coach Tom Osborne helped start, perhaps his troubled life and tragic death would have been avoided.
That is the sense Osborne gave in a one-on-one interview with KWSN after speaking at a news conference in which he helped announce the launching of the Sioux Falls branch of TeamMates, which will be available to Sioux Falls Public School students, on Friday.
“I think it would have helped him a lot, because he never really knew his dad, and his mom kicked him out of the house when he was 12,” Osborne said of Phillips’ adolescence in the Los Angeles area in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
“He had no support system and went into a group home. So, there’s no question that having another caring adult in his life would have been really important to him.”
The three-time national championship coach and three-term U.S. Congressman helped create TeamMates in 1991. Last year, the program served more than 10,000 youth in more than 170 communities across Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, Wyoming and Iowa.
During his speech at the Sioux Falls School District’s Instructional Planning Center, Osborne rattled off the dangers of the influences of modern pop culture (TV, video games, music, drugs) has on all young people, but especially those who lack a steady parental figure. He provided statistics of how much the program keeps kids out of trouble, including a 95 percent high school graduation rate of program participants.
Mentors meet with their mentees one-on-one in school, once a week, during the academic year. They help students identify their gifts and talents, assist with homework and spend time just talking.
Educators at West Covina High School in California certainly identified Phillips’ gifts as a running back. So did Osborne and his staff. At Nebraska, Phillips rushed for 3,102 yards in three seasons — 11th on the all-time career charts — helping the Huskers to back-to-back national titles in 1994 and ’95.
But it was “LP’s” arrest for assaulting an ex-girlfriend in the late night after the ’95 season opening win — and Osborne’s decision to reinstate Phillips after a misdemeanor conviction and a six-game suspension — that continues to be, to some, a stain on Osborne’s legacy.
According to reports, Phillips came to the apartment of Kate McEwen’s boyfriend — future Husker quarterback and current head coach Scott Frost — and dragged her by the hair and then down three flights of stairs before smashing her head into a mailbox.
Osborne at the time refused to cave to both university and national media pressure to keep a convicted player benched.
In Sioux Falls on Friday, Osborne was asked how strongly he still feels he did the right thing by reinstating Phillips, who went on to play the Huskers’ final four games that season, including a 165-yard performance in the 62-24 national championship win over Florida in the Fiesta Bowl.
“The problem was, what was publicized that he did was not what he did,” Osborne said. “So, I had to punish the activity that he actually did, not what was written in the press. That was important to us… because your players know if you throw a player to the wolves just because of public perception, that’s not the right thing.”
Asked Friday to specify what the difference was between what was reported and what Phillips actually did, Osborne said:
“The storyline is, it’s always who writes the first story, then every other person copies that. And so, it was characterized as a brutal beating, but the young lady who was involved told stories at school that he never hit her. Now, he did pull her down a couple flights of stairs, but never beat her up, and that was what the assumption was. If he had done that, he would’ve been charged with a felony. He was charged with a misdemeanor. And so, we treated him as we would anybody who had a misdemeanor, so we were consistent with that and the players knew it.”
While Osborne’s reputation took a hit, Phillips was the sixth overall draft pick in the 1996 NFL Draft after deciding to skip his senior year of college.
“When he left Nebraska, I thought he was in good shape,” Osborne said Friday. “But he got into the NFL and got some money and some of the old friends started hanging around with him again, and pulled him down.”
Phillips’s eight-year professional career with seven different teams from the NFL, CFL, and Europe was mostly a bust, which included injuries and an alleged drinking problem and conflict with coaches and teammates on the St. Louis Rams, the team that drafted him.
In 2008, five years after his playing career ended, Phillips was sentenced to 10 years in a California state prison for a felony assault from a 2005 incident in which he drove a car into three teenagers following a dispute with them during a pickup basketball game. At the time, he was already wanted by both San Diego and Los Angeles police for three cases of domestic abuse, one in which he allegedly choked a woman to the point of unconsciousness.
Phillips eventually died in jail in 2016, four months after being charged with first-degree murder of his prison cellmate.
Before that alleged murder, Osborne visited Phillips in prison and did not sense his former player was in a dark place.
“He sat there and smiled the whole hour that we were together,” Osborne said.
“And we never abandoned the guy. We kept writing to him. So, I felt bad about what happened to him at the end, but I felt good about the fact that we never really threw him aside.”
Really, what Osborne was doing for Phillips that day — simply being a parental figure who cares and shows belief in a strayed younger soul — is what he hopes volunteers in Sioux Falls will do for years to come and insists has for almost 30 years helped thousands of TeamMates participants down a healthy, successful path away from the one Phillips followed.
The cautionary tale, and Osborne’s mission, is for those types of sessions to happen in a school early in life so they won’t take place in prison later.
