SPORTS WEEKEND
TV/RADIO
Years Later, Raveling Has a Dream Too

Home Edition, Sports, Page D-4
Sports Desk
30 inches; 1045 words
Type of Material: Infobox

By LARRY STEWART,

Saturday is a significant day for Fox Sports Net commentator George Raveling, and not only because he's working a Pacific 10 game, California at Oregon State, with his friend Barry Tompkins.

Raveling, of course, is excited about the game. Every college basketball game excites Raveling.

What makes Saturday particularly significant for Raveling is that it is Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday (although the holiday is being observed Monday).

Raveling and King will forever be linked because of a twist of fate in 1963.

Raveling had graduated two years earlier from Villanova, where he had been a basketball star and at the time was a graduate assistant coach. In late August of that year, he went to visit his best friend in Wilmington, Del. His friend's father told the young men about a massive civil-rights demonstration that was taking place in Washington that weekend and suggested they go.

"We drove to Washington, found a motel room and were walking among the crowds about 10:45 at night," Raveling recalled. "A man approached us, and I guess because of our size offered us jobs as security guards. He told us to report at 8:30 the next morning.

"We were so excited we showed up a half-hour early. We ended up among the 10 security people assigned to the podium in front of the Lincoln Memorial where a number of speeches were to take place."

The event drew more than 200,000, and one of the speakers was King.

Each speaker was limited to five minutes. King went 8 1/2. It was his "I have a dream" speech, which USA Today recently named the No. 1 speech of the century.

When King turned to walk away, his speech in hand, Raveling, stationed behind him, asked if he could have the typewritten copy. King nonchalantly handed it to him.

"I don't why I asked for it," said Raveling, who was 23 at the time. "It didn't seem to be a big deal."

When Raveling got home, he put the speech inside the cover of another important possession--a signed book he had been given by President Harry Truman when he participated in a college all-star basketball game in Kansas City.

"For years, the book and the speech were in my basement somewhere," Raveling said.

Raveling didn't give it much thought until 1983, his first year as coach at Iowa. He had previously spent 10 seasons at Washington State, and, after a three-year stint at Iowa, he was at USC from 1986 until he retired from coaching in 1994.

A reporter from the newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, during an interview, asked Raveling if he had been involved in the civil-rights movement of the '60s. Raveling said not really, but he told the reporter his Martin Luther King story.

"It was after that story came out and all the reaction to it that I realized that I had something special," he said. "I didn't know how naive I was."

Raveling has had the speech in a safe-deposit box ever since.

So what is it worth?

"I'm not sure," Raveling said, "but after I saw [last October] that the King family got $20 million from the Library of Congress in Washington for his personal papers, my guess is the speech would be worth about $1 million," Raveling said.

Raveling said at one time the King family asked for the speech so it could be displayed at the King Center in Atlanta. "I said I would agree to that if they'd give me a signed agreement that the speech belonged to me. They wouldn't agree to that."

Raveling said the phrase "I have a dream," which King used several times in the speech he delivered on Aug. 28, 1963, was not in the original speech.

"He ad-libbed that part," Raveling said.