I’m not a crying person, really. It was tough, it was tough because you were sending your best friend. He served so many positions in my life. We always disagreed but we were never disagreeable, because we were so much alike. His views and my views sometimes didn’t intersect very well, but on the basic things we never had a problem,” Carolyn Fugett says.
When his goodbyes to friends and family had been said, Lewis crammed his belongings into his tiny sports car and headed south down Interstate 95.
“HE COULD BE A VERY DIFFICULT PERSON”
Before coming to college, Lewis had had a room to himself. That wouldn’t be the case at Virginia State, because freshmen were required to stay on campus and have a freshman roommate.
“He had a hard time with roommates,” Lewis’s mother recalls. “He had his own way of doing things and they had their way. Eventually, he moved off campus and got his own place. See, he was an exacting person and everybody didn’t like him.”
Lewis’s first roommate was Lynwood Hart, a homeboy who lived about four blocks from Lewis in Baltimore and played football with opposing Edmondson High School. They knew each other well enough to have developed a nodding acquaintance, although Hart today vividly remembers knocking quarterback Lewis out of a high school football match.
That Lewis and Hart wound up being Virginia State roommates may seem an unlikely coincidence. But as Hart recounts it, their beingroommates resulted from Lewis’s gift for controlling situations and using that skill to his advantage.
Virginia State had a policy of pairing football players in dormitory rooms. Lewis, Hart, and the rest of the team were lined up so the coaches could decide which players would room together. A coach stood in front counting off “One and two, you’re roommates, one and two, you’re roommates.”
Lewis saw how the sequence was unfolding in terms of which boys ahead of him were getting the same room. He then moved up a few places, positioning himself in a way that he and Hart would become roommates. “Reggie denies this happened, but he did it—I saw it,” Hart says.
“Reggie was the kind of guy that was always thinking ahead of everybody else. And that caused him a lot of problems with people. There’s people who if they are honest will tell you that Reggie was not the easiest person in the world to deal with. He was always ahead of most people relative to what he thought about life and what he was planning to do. He realized it was kind of good to have a receiver as a roommate,” Hart recalls.
Lewis and Hart grew very close during their time at Virginia State, but only after Hart got beyond his roommate’s prickly persona. Even though they were both black kids from the same neighborhood and fellow athletes and graduates of Baltimore City public schools, they couldn’t have been more dissimilar in temperament and personality.
Hart found out for himself that Lewis could be difficult to live with. “Reggie sometimes could make you very angry. He had a way of talking about things that if you didn’t know him, you would view as a personal put down. But it was more of a kind of shock treatment,” Hart recalls.
Lewis was self-assured, articulate, and dogmatic when expressing his views. Whenever he and Hart debated some issue—which was often—Hart’s logic would come under vigorous attack, “Don’t you understand? Don’t you see the shortcoming of that philosophy, of that belief that you’re holding? Don’t you think you need to rethink that?” Lewis would insist.
There were many times, Hart recalls, when he wanted to tell Lewis in exasperation, “Who the hell are you?” However, Hart adds, “But itwas never an exchange on an emotional level, where we got into great disputes and stuff. He was constantly shocking you into thinking about things in a way that kids coming from where we came from didn’t normally think.
“Reggie, there’s no question that he could be
When his goodbyes to friends and family had been said, Lewis crammed his belongings into his tiny sports car and headed south down Interstate 95.
“HE COULD BE A VERY DIFFICULT PERSON”
Before coming to college, Lewis had had a room to himself. That wouldn’t be the case at Virginia State, because freshmen were required to stay on campus and have a freshman roommate.
“He had a hard time with roommates,” Lewis’s mother recalls. “He had his own way of doing things and they had their way. Eventually, he moved off campus and got his own place. See, he was an exacting person and everybody didn’t like him.”
Lewis’s first roommate was Lynwood Hart, a homeboy who lived about four blocks from Lewis in Baltimore and played football with opposing Edmondson High School. They knew each other well enough to have developed a nodding acquaintance, although Hart today vividly remembers knocking quarterback Lewis out of a high school football match.
That Lewis and Hart wound up being Virginia State roommates may seem an unlikely coincidence. But as Hart recounts it, their beingroommates resulted from Lewis’s gift for controlling situations and using that skill to his advantage.
Virginia State had a policy of pairing football players in dormitory rooms. Lewis, Hart, and the rest of the team were lined up so the coaches could decide which players would room together. A coach stood in front counting off “One and two, you’re roommates, one and two, you’re roommates.”
Lewis saw how the sequence was unfolding in terms of which boys ahead of him were getting the same room. He then moved up a few places, positioning himself in a way that he and Hart would become roommates. “Reggie denies this happened, but he did it—I saw it,” Hart says.
“Reggie was the kind of guy that was always thinking ahead of everybody else. And that caused him a lot of problems with people. There’s people who if they are honest will tell you that Reggie was not the easiest person in the world to deal with. He was always ahead of most people relative to what he thought about life and what he was planning to do. He realized it was kind of good to have a receiver as a roommate,” Hart recalls.
Lewis and Hart grew very close during their time at Virginia State, but only after Hart got beyond his roommate’s prickly persona. Even though they were both black kids from the same neighborhood and fellow athletes and graduates of Baltimore City public schools, they couldn’t have been more dissimilar in temperament and personality.
Hart found out for himself that Lewis could be difficult to live with. “Reggie sometimes could make you very angry. He had a way of talking about things that if you didn’t know him, you would view as a personal put down. But it was more of a kind of shock treatment,” Hart recalls.
Lewis was self-assured, articulate, and dogmatic when expressing his views. Whenever he and Hart debated some issue—which was often—Hart’s logic would come under vigorous attack, “Don’t you understand? Don’t you see the shortcoming of that philosophy, of that belief that you’re holding? Don’t you think you need to rethink that?” Lewis would insist.
There were many times, Hart recalls, when he wanted to tell Lewis in exasperation, “Who the hell are you?” However, Hart adds, “But itwas never an exchange on an emotional level, where we got into great disputes and stuff. He was constantly shocking you into thinking about things in a way that kids coming from where we came from didn’t normally think.
“Reggie, there’s no question that he could be
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