So many of us Baby Boomers, especially those who grew up in the South and were on the frontline of integrating one thing or another, have issues to this day. But I must say that Tom Payne is way beyond the way beyond.
He was the first black player on the University of Kentucky basketball team, and one can hardly imagine the hell he went through. But he has put others through a greater hell by raping them. I came across this article in which Payne essentially gives himself a pity party: he was an integration warrior without the armor to handle the task. So he became a rapist? “He has been imprisoned for all but three years since 1972, in three different states for three different convictions,” the Fanhouse article says. He is currently finishing out a sentence in Kentucky, but hoping he can be released early since he is nearly 60 and his mother is in her 80s and can use his help and, of course, he has a message to offer to young people who might go astray.
From the article: “Starting in Georgia at the end of his rookie season with the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, then in Kentucky after cases were made against him while he was still in Georgia prisons, then in California in the 1980s after being paroled, then back in Kentucky in 2000 when he was paroled in California, for violating his parole in the previous state, Payne has been in prison for all but three of the last 38 years.”
Pity the fool.
He wants the University of Kentucky to recognize him as the pioneer that he was. But I cannot see a school honoring a man as a serial rapist frittered his life away.
Read the article and make your own call on this:
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