There are a lot of people in sports who should give a talk just about every day. Maybe every other day.

Warrick Dunn in a third-grade classroom telling kids they don’t have to take the gutless and violent way out if they have only one parent and not a lot of money is one example.

He can point out how his mother, a police officer, was shot and how he had to raise his siblings, and he did it without dancing near the line of drugs or gangs.

And he’s helping single mothers avoid the temptations of the easy way out by helping to finance their first homes.

Dick Vitale could visit with inner-city third-graders offering a different version of the same topic, and I’m sure he can give some examples of headline makers who came from the exact same situations as some of those third-graders — useless parents or no parents, nonexistent encouragement — and worked past it, because it was worth the work to become something other than a dirtbag.

And Bill Curry should just talk. No parameters of the audience. It can be a Rotary Club or the same class Dunn figuratively visited a week earlier.

The Georgia State head football coach’s visit to the Macon Touchdown Club on Monday cinched his spot on such a list.

Pete Wellborn, the Maconite who played at Stratford and Central and for Curry at Georgia Tech, went on and on during his introduction of Curry, with maybe one of the best and well-done introductions the Touchdown Club has heard in a long, long time.

“I love you, boy,” Curry said to Wellborn, “but that’s the last time you’re doing that.”

Curry then surpassed the standard Wellborn had set, following four minutes of assorted greetings and pleasantries with serious substance.

“The greatest team sport ever devised is the sport of football,” he said. “It’s the only sport in which every player needs every teammate on every play, just to survive.

“We are living in a culture that demands the same kind of understanding from us, and ... we are not delivering it at the congressional level or the business leadership level or at any leadership level that I’m aware of other than coaches in the sport of football and some of the other sports.”

Sure, it’s a stretch to canonize only football coaches as bastions of great guidance, but that’s not the greater point to be made.

“Our culture depends on the capacity to get along with one another,” he said. “We are living in the longest lasting republic in the history of mankind. It’s based on the notion that all men are created equal, and that there are certain inalienable rights that should be available to everybody, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“What a ridiculous notion for a nation to be founded upon.”

Curry should host a town hall meeting, with a strong mute button for the audience so it might actually listen and learn.

“Where do you see people of color and Caucasians and Jews and Gentiles and atheists and Northerners and Southerners and Christians and fundamentalists and liberals and conservatives, where do you see them hugging on Saturday afternoons other than the football field?” he asked. “That’s what’s supposed to happen in a church, and sometimes it does. It’s supposed to happen in the family, and sometimes it does.

“It happens every day in the huddle.”

It’s as if doing the right thing remains a surprise.

He noted how different the cultures are that bring a kid from south-central Los Angeles and one from north Georgia together and how they perhaps have been taught by those cultures to hate each other. Then they begin working together, wear team clothes

“And then we watch a miracle happen,” he said. “These children that were raised to hate each other become brothers.”

Because, as Curry said, all the sweat smells the same on everybody, all the blood is the same color.

“You can’t be a racist and be a real football man anymore,” he said. “If you want to be in the huddle, you better learn to get along with other folks in the huddle. It doesn’t matter where they come from.”

And right there, sadly, is where football has ceased to be that metaphor for life.

It’s often hard to tell that this is 2009 in supposedly the most enlightened and progressive — and often arrogant — country on the planet.

We have yelling, no teamwork. We have automatic disagreement based on the speaker, not the topic. We have closed minds, not open. We have divisiveness, no unity. We have “my idea,” not “let’s see what the best idea is.”

We’ve become a nation of cable TV talk shows: no listening, no thinking, no patience.

We can’t get enough people in the huddle anymore to get the job done.

So here was this white 67-year-old career football man from suburban Atlanta preaching tolerance and patience, a discourse that increasingly seems to put him in the minority as voices of reason get drowned out amid the yelling.

He talked of future Hall of Fame defender Willie Davis, a Grambling alum who was working on his master’s degree in business from the University of Chicago “while he was the captain of the greatest football team of all-time.”

Curry was nervous and tentative as a Packers rookie.

“A voice came out of the darkness one night,” Curry said. “ ‘Bill.’ I thought it was God. It was Willie Davis.”

Davis went on to tell Curry that he was there to help.

“We were right in the middle of the civil rights movement, and I was clueless,” Curry said. “Clueless. Didn’t get nothin’ at all.”

Davis’ main point was work ethic, to never ever leave the field with the feeling that maybe you hadn’t tried your hardest, that you “left regrets on the field.”

Davis told him that no matter how rough practice was to seek him out, and the veteran would get the rookie through it.

“He changed my life in the twinkling of an eye,” Curry said, “with an unexpected, undeserved and unrewarded act of kindness.”

There was a group of teenagers in the audience, from Westside. Certainly Curry was directing a fair portion of his thoughts to the teenagers, since their minds haven’t necessarily been warped and slammed shut and become one-dimensional in the example set by adults. Hopefully.

But make no mistake. This old Southern football coach needs to be heard by both sides of all aisles, and often.

Often, because every day offers evidence that unfortunately, yeah, there is an “I” in team.

Contact Michael A. Lough at 744-4626 or mlough@macon.com