Terez Paylor, right, visits with the Tiger Club’s University of Missouri alumni in Kansas City last year after covering another NFL Scouting Combine. KansasCity
Among the reasons Mizzou men’s basketball coach Dennis Gates scheduled MU’s opener at Howard University is in appreciation of the school’s enduring significance as one of our nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
“The other part of it is our country,” Gates said Thursday in a Zoom interview with The Star. “Our country is in a different time. It is what it is. It’s well-documented.
“We’re still America, though. And there are still learning opportunities along the way.”
As it happens, the matchup itself makes for a learning opportunity through a link between the schools that would be great to celebrate:
Each has an endowed scholarship in the memory of the estimable Terez Paylor, our dear late friend and former Star colleague who graduated magna cum laude from Howard in 2006 and earned the same stature as a journalist.
Perhaps when the schools meet again next year in Columbia, someone will push to market the game as the Terez Paylor Classic, with funds allocated to each scholarship.
Assuming, that is, that his name remains affixed to the scholarship initially launched by PowerMizzou to aid prospective minority journalists and bolstered by the addition of his name months after his death in 2021 at age 37.
Because if you look that up online now, you’ll no longer see Terez’s radiant face and a bio about who he was and his desire to financially support aspiring minority sports journalists in need.
Instead, you’re directed to a generic MU fundraising page with a perfunctory small-print mention of PowerMizzou and Terez, whose roles at The Star included covering MU and the Chiefs before he joined Yahoo Sports.
Terez Paylor, left, interviews Kansas City Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt during training camp in 2017. KC Star file photo
Colin Kilpatrick, Mizzou’s senior executive director of advancement, said Wednesday that the school is working to fix what was inadvertently caused by recently changing its crowdfunding platform from GiveDirect to GiveCampus.
Underscoring his point, it bears mention that Howard also uses GiveCampus — and that Terez’s name right now can’t be found through a link that once led to a page to donate in his memory.
Like Kilpatrick, Howard associate dean Ingrid Sturgis said the school is updating its site and would soon restore the specific reference to Terez.
Assuming these glitches that will soon be repaired by both schools, though, there’s a certain symbolism to it when it comes to the MU version.
Because the spirit of Terez has at least in part been excised from the scholarship.
The shameful shift was triggered by the regressive U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 outlawing race-based admissions. That very June day, then-Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey extended that approach to include scholarships and other programs.
Ultimately, per the Missouri Independent, MU’s Board of Curators last year removed racial and ethnic criteria from 53 remaining donated scholarships and funds.
Because of that interpretation by the state and MU’s acquiescence at the top, race-based criteria was eliminated in every scholarship intended to enhance opportunities for people of color.
Terez Paylor, right, visits with the Tiger Club’s University of Missouri alumni in Kansas City last year after covering another NFL Scouting Combine. KansasCity
So whenever the updated bio and wording does reappear, it will be stripped of the most essential element of what Terez would have sought — a vision and wish articulated after his death by his fiancee, Ebony Reed.
And it will further illuminate a breach of the fundamental basis on which many donated to a now-endowed fund brimming with $109,815 and growing.
The mission, after all, was to help fund and enable minority candidates in need to work toward opportunities they might not otherwise have been able to afford.
It also seemed a beautiful way to enshrine Terez’s legacy.
Instead, it suddenly feels hollow.
“In some regards, it’s like Terez and our desire to help students of color has been erased,” said Reed, a Mizzou graduate and co-author of Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap. “Like other things that have been erased in this moment of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) backlash.”
BJ Kissel, Terez’s friend and the founder and CEO of KC Sports Network, helped raise nearly $30,000 for the scholarship through the KCSN Foundation and is upset at both aspects:
That the money no longer will go toward what he promoted with donors, and that it diminishes it from something that should embody Terez.
A “gut punch,” he called it.
“The whole point has been to honor Terez; people loved him for who he was and what he was about,” said Kissel, who since the scholarship became endowed has turned in another direction to help aspiring minority journalists. “It’s just disappointing that the world has gotten in the way of honoring a good man we all knew.”
The Kansas City Chiefs paid tribute to the late sports journalist Terez Paylor by retiring his press box seat and presenting a check to the Terez A. Paylor Scholarship at Howard University during a ceremony Friday, Aug. 27, at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City. Tammy Ljungblad/file photo tljungblad@kcstar.com
Some might say this happening to something related to Terez is an unintended consequence of the SCOTUS ruling ... and the state of Missouri’s gleeful rush to undo programs seeking to make the world a more fair and equitable place.
In fact, though, this is exactly the intended consequence.
It just so happens to be related to an iconic, real-life figure — a man so universally popular that his fans likely include many who support what happened in Jefferson City and the anti-DEI movement.
Maybe this will make more people think about what it really means to say you’re against initiatives such as this and countless other positive endeavors being dismantled in the current climate.
Meanwhile, Gabe DeArmond of PowerMizzou continues to support the scholarship in Terez’s name — including with an internship for each of the recipients. That’s because he believes it still does honor Terez and keeps his name alive. And that the money ought to be used for good.
Indeed, the story of this year’s recipient, Blake Wallis, a white male selected through Mizzou’s now-race-blind scholarship process, could make you weep from the trauma and neglect he suffered in childhood.
No doubt he’s a worthy recipient of a scholarship, and DeArmond is exactly right that it’s going to a meaningful cause.
It’s just that it’s not the same one to which people donated.
Even as Mizzou says it appreciates PowerMizzou’s efforts and wants to continue to make the scholarship a commemoration of Terez.
“What we want to hold up is his accomplishments as a journalist,” Kilpatrick said, adding that he hopes many will try to follow in his footsteps.
Meanwhile, the endowed scholarship in his name at Howard is now more than $140,000 and continues to make good on the original plan — a notion described by Terez’s parents when the campaign was announced.
“By virtue of this scholarship, it is our hope that our son’s legacy will live on and inspire future Black sports journalists to employ the tenacity and perseverance Terez epitomized,” they said in a statement then. “And to uphold these values he embodied by committing to be the best they can possibly be and to ‘never be outworked.’ ”
With that as the foundation now combined with the $300,000 Sports Journalism Success Fund launched over the summer by Jim Trotter, Sturgis said, Howard has been able to grow its sports journalism program overall.
“He was a great student and a great scholar from this university,” she said. “So I think all of that is a win-win for everybody.”
As for back here, we can only hope it’s a learning opportunity.