KAPPAS IN SPORTS
ster, said his mom, saw all of his success coming. Growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, Gragg was a responsible, mature kid long before he should have been. His two brothers would always tell their mom: "He won't do anything bad even if he wants to." For Gragg's kindergarten play at the end of the school year, his teacher as- signed him the role of Dr. Quiz. "And I said, 'How did you come up with this?" Malone said she asked the teacher. "She said, 'Girl, if anybody's going to be a teacher in that class, going to be a professor or a doctor in my class, that's Derrick." When Gragg graduated from elemen- tary school, Malone noticed he was the only Black boy to make the honor roll every single six -week period. She asked him what he felt about that. "He said, 'I feel like I'm going to be at Harvard,'" Malone said. "'Whatever they're going to do OK, but I know what I'm going to do.'" And so it went. At Lee High School, Gragg was involved in all sorts of things. He was crowned Mr. Lee High School his senior year, he was on the yearbook staff, he made stellar grades, he was vice
president of the student body his sopho- more and junior years. Malone, a lifelong educator in the public school system, bought each of her three sons a card table. The family couldn't afford those big wooden oak desks and there wasn't space in their tiny rooms anyway. "We weren't rich people. We lived OK. We never lived below the poverty line," said Malone. "I did the best I could with the money I had in our situ- ation." Dictionaries and sets of encyclope- dias filled their home. Schoolwork came before anything else. "Derrick was the responsible and more mature one back then. He was the father of that group," said Sevillian, president and CEO Of McLaren Bay Region Hospital and president of six hospitals in the system's north region. "He would always pretty much keep us in line." If they needed advice, it was Gragg they would go to. His advice was always solid. Gragg says his success comes from many things, but among the biggest is the guidance from his parents. They
never focused on race; they talked only about possibilities. "They would tell me 'You are going to be a great man,'" said Gragg. "And I was going to be able to do anything I wanted to." "In order to play football or basket- ball or baseball, run track, whatever they were doing. In order to do that, you had to produce As and Bs," said Malone. "If you get a C, that's average. If you are average, you need to set your average behind right there and you don't need to play football in my estimation." Academics, Gragg said, that's how his mother groomed him. But sports, that was his father's love. 'You are going to be a great man' As a three-sport athlete in high school, Gragg was thriving. But it soon became clear football was where he shined. Clarence Sevillian met Gragg shortly after he drove that Mustang onto cam- pus. The two came to Vanderbilt as competitors, both wide receivers trying to earn a starting spot. They quickly became friends off the field, along with the other Black players. People have to remember, Sevillian
38 | WINTER 2020-SPRING 2021 ♦ THE JOURNAL
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