reality-based educator

Pat Waring, 75, of Chesterton, Md., first brought her story to MSNBC when she contacted us in a direct phone call. We then conducted a series of interviews. Waring says that at a sports match in the late 1970's, Allen repeatedly use the ‘n’ word to describe blacks.

"I just didn't think in the late 70's people would be so ugly and so overt about it and so public," Waring said.

Waring says that in 1978, she and her then-husband, Robert Michael Schwartz, had just moved to Charlottesville, Va. Friends from the time confirm that Schwartz was a Ph.d. candidate at the University of Virginia, an avid rugby player and the volunteer coach of the school's rugby club team.

MSNBC has also confirmed Pat Waring worked in a doctor's office and came to some of the rugby games. Waring says there is one game, from either the fall of 1978 or the spring of 1979 that she will never forget.

"I heard to my left, the ‘n’ word, and I heard it again, and I looked around and heard it again,” she said. “And there was this fellow sitting on the ground. He was putting on red rugby shoes, it is seared in my brain, believe me. And he was kind of showing off I guess, but he was telling a story about something or other and in the story was a lot of ‘n’ words. So, I got out of the bleacher and I went over and I said young man, I am the coach's wife and if you don't mind, would you please not use that word. And he in essence told me to buzz off.”

Waring said when she learned the man using the slurs was George Allen, son of the Washington Redskins coach, she was “crestfallen.”

“I thought, ‘My god this just can't be. He can't just sit there in front of all of these people,’” Waring said. “There were people all over the place. And he was talking loudly or I never would have heard him."

Waring says the incident has stayed with her because of the ‘n’ word, because Allen's father had been coach of the Washington Redskins in the 1970's and because she is a lifelong Redskins fan.

// posted by Reality-Based Educator @ 7:23 PM