Delaney Kiphuth Marches on Down the Field of Love

Years ago, when I wrote for the Yale Daily News, some people in the sports department chopped up and damaged a piece that I had written about Delaney Kiphuth, the former athletic director at Yale from 1954 through 1976.

 

Mr. Kiphuth was a legend at Yale.

 

He was also a legend to me, just a kid in high school when I met my American History teacher, who became my mentor and one of my greatest heroes.

 

Mr. Kiphuth was so modest that people sometimes did not realize all that he had accomplished.

 

To give just one example, Mr. Kiphuth stood about 5-foot-6, but he was a starting lineman for the Yale varsity football team in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

 

He was a warrior, who would later win a Bronze Star in World War II and who would lead the way in founding the Ivy League sports division in the mid-1950s.

 

He believed deeply in amateur athletics and the ideal of the scholar-athlete.

 

Mr. Kiphuth’s father, Bob, a fabled swim coach at Yale, had instilled in Mr. Kiphuth and generations of swimmers the critical importance of amateur athletics and scholarship.

 

And both Kiphuths came from the scholar-athlete tradition at Yale that went back to Walter Camp, the founder of modern American football, and earlier.

 

I never got to see Mr. Kiphuth near the end of his life when he was ill in 1997; he passed away in February of that year.

 

I had, however, visited him in the hospital when I was a student at Yale.  In fact, I can vividly recall showing him my article about him for the Yale Daily News when it was in galley form in the fall of 1984.

 

He came out of his room at the Yale Health Plan on Hillhouse Avenue, where he was dressed in a johnnycoat, and we went over his quotes in a draft of the article.

 

I read him the piece before hand.  Mr. Kiphuth deserved that respect.

 

He had famously given Calvin Hill a pep talk when the football star was thinking of quitting the Yale football team.

 

Calvin Hill remained on the Elis and would go on to be rookie of the year in the NFC for the Dallas Cowboys.

 

Mr. Kiphuth gave me some pep talks, too.

 

He wanted to know what I really cared about, what I really loved.  And he wanted to encourage me, as his dad encouraged his swimmers, to pursue my passion.

 

I told Mr. Kiphuth that I loved movies.

 

I ended up moving out to Los Angeles in late 1994 and working for a brief period of time in the film business.

 

What I never stopped loving was language and, one might say, the Word.

 

Before I moved out to L.A., I saw Mr. Kiphuth on the streets of New Haven, on the Yale campus, in 1993.  

 

He warned me at that time that people were hurting me.  He was trying to protect me, but I did not know what he was talking about.

 

I was dissociating from the trauma that had scarred me as a young boy, when my kindergarten teacher abused me.

 

Mr. Kiphuth, by contrast, nurtured and shielded me from evil, from harm.

 

He had been a deacon at Yale, as well as its athletic director.

 

He was also an adviser to Kingman Brewster, the president of the university for much of the 1960s and 1970s, and he helped to heal the students and New Haven residents and others, serving as a force of calm, a force of moderation and openness, during the Black Panther trial in 1970 in New Haven.

 

An advocate for civil rights, as well as athletics, Mr. Kiphuth was one of the founders of the Ulysses S. Grant Foundation, a partnership between the city of New Haven and Yale to provide summer scholarships primarily to students of color from the New Haven school system.

 

Like his father, Mr. Kiphuth helped so many young people over the generations by counseling a sense of calm, healing, good sportsmanship, ethics and a love for God and country.

 

My mother contacted me in 1996 or 1997 to tell me that Mr. Kiphuth was quite ill.

 

My mother herself became very ill with a brain infection in late 1996.

 

I came back to New Haven to help my mother and my dad, as my mother recuperated from her illness.

 

Then, when I returned to Los Angeles in December 1996, I too became quite ill with my first major depressive and psychotic episode. 

 

What got me through that psychotic break was love, the love of God as well as the love of His angels, like my mom and father, Barbara and Mr. Kiphuth.

 

Unfortunately, as I say, I was not able to see Mr. Kiphuth before he passed away in February 1997 at a time when I was writing Strikeout at Hell Gate, my baseball novel, and battling severe depression and psychosis.  

 

But Mr. Kiphuth is in the opus.

 

I have received the opus from God, from Jesus, and in receiving His love, I have created a loving character, who is modeled after Mr. Kiphuth.

 

Delaney Kiphuth inspired generations of young men and women.  And I will always love and admire him.

 

He tapped me to go to Yale, one might say, when he asked me if he could write me a letter of reference.

 

I will always remember the times we spent at Mory’s, a Yale club, talking about history, about sports, about amateur athletics and scholarship, and serving our country as well as the Lord.

 

Mr. Kiphuth will always be one of my greatest heroes and angels.

 

God bless you, Mr. Kiphuth.

 

God bless you in Jesus’ name.

 

Amen.