Oklahoma connection a big part of Mindy Corporon’s life

At Marlow High in Oklahoma, what Mindy Corporon wanted most in the world was to be a cheerleader at the University of Oklahoma — where her father had gone to medical school and where she’d started going to football games during elementary school.

Realizing the goal led to a “monumental” time in her life, one that included performing annually at Kemper Arena for the Big Eight Tournament and at Oklahoma’s national-title-game loss to Kansas in 1988.

She loved it so much she was devastated when she saw the next set of cheerleaders learning their “Boomer Sooner stuff” … discerning that she best come up with some goals for the rest of her life, even though she later was a Chiefs cheerleader.

But nothing illustrates her connection to OU like Feb. 28 in Norman.

Before Oklahoma’s basketball game with TCU, Corporon and her family gathered on OU’s South Oval to plant a tree memorializing her father, William, and son, Reat Underwood, who last April were murdered outside the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park.

Then they sprinkled some of the ashes of each into the soil around the tree, near where Reat had told her during a 2013 bike ride that he wanted to go to OU.

“He’s there: I never expected him to be there that way, but he’s there,” Corporon said. “We’re part of the university with our heart and our spirit, and they’re physically part of the university and the campus.”

That’s one of many reasons at many levels that she was pierced by the hatred spewing from members of OU’s since-closed Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity in a vile video gone viral last weekend.

“When something bad happens at your alma mater, it touches your soul,” said Corporon, a few hours before she would attend the Sooners’ Big 12 Tournament game Thursday at the Sprint Center, the first major OU athletic event in Kansas City since the murders. “Because we’re a community of people who gather together around that.

“Because we need that community and that love for one another.”

Even if no one was injured or killed, Corporon said, this was evil on display.

That’s jarring enough in itself, of course, but who’s to say where the line between seething hatred and perpetrating a hate crime is, exactly?

But as a woman who embodies mercy and grace that everyone can learn from, Corporon also sees this as something of a teachable moment.

And it’s one she’s proud to have seen OU embrace as such, starting with a rally on Monday.

“How empowering is that for all those students to say, ‘We’re not going to stand for that?’ ” she said.

Significantly, Sooners coaches and student-athletes, too, have come to understand the complicity of silence.

Oklahoma basketball star Ryan Spangler, whose parents are from Corporon’s home town of Marlow, told reporters Wednesday at the Sprint Center that the video made him sick to his stomach.

He was among a number of OU athletes to participate in the rally, as did football coach Bob Stoops and men’s basketball coach Lon Kruger.

“It’s disgusting,” Kruger said Wednesday. “It makes you angry, and it’s something you can’t control. A crazy person or two steps up and gets something like that started …

“You address it, and respond to it, and talk about it and hopefully learn and move on.”

That sounds much like Corporon’s view.

“You just have to make better choices in life,” said Corporon, CEO of Boyer & Corporon Wealth Management in Overland Park. “And we have to ingrain that in people about loving your neighbor as yourself, treat people as you would want to be treated, and we’re more alike than we are different.

“And it’s an opportunity for people to feel that pain and heal from it by learning about other people and how to treat them better.”

If this sounds like a fanciful notion, well, few ever have had the credibility that she has to say it.

Who can forget, after all, how she launched into healing action the very evening of the murder of her father and son?

Somehow, when she heard Blue Valley High students were having a vigil for Reat, 14, she knew she had to go.

Before she left, a friend reminded her it had turned cold out.

So she went into her parents’ closet and grabbed a pair of her mom’s sneakers … and reached for her dad’s Oklahoma sweatshirt for warmth and comfort.

Then she went to offer others consolation, through her shock summoning an inconceivable strength.

“I wanted them to know that their life is going to go on,” she said. “Because when I was 15, I lost a very dear friend (in a car accident), and it was extremely painful and sudden.

“And the next day the sun came up. And I was so angry at God that the sun came up. And I had to learn through that that God didn’t take him.

“And I wanted those kids to know that God didn’t take Reat. God didn’t take my dad. A man chose to be evil, and chose to use a gun in a wrong way and take people’s lives.

“And what we have to do to heal is to cry and to love one another and to try to make a difference in the world and help other people not be that way.”

The horrific murders and the appalling video, of course, are entirely different scales of events.

But Corporon sees the seeds of commonality, too.

When she heard about the SAE video, it immediately reinforced her belief in the need for the work of her foundation, givesevendays.org, and its endeavors in “learning about other’s races, other’s religions (and) other’s cultures.”

The last time Corporon had been at OU’s Lloyd Noble Arena was when she was pregnant with Reat, who was born in Norman.

That was one of the things that struck her as she watched a previously recorded video of him singing the national anthem there on Feb. 28, the bittersweet realization of a dream of his.

“That was really overwhelming when I realized that connection,” she said.

Later, she came to realize something else.

Much like they do around Kansas City with the Chiefs, some Oklahoma fans tend to shout “home of the Sooners” at the end of the national anthem.

Not that day.

“You could have heard a pin drop in that entire facility when he was singing,” she said. “They let him finish out the song.”

She thought of that when she heard about the racist video, thought about the respect and even love she felt all around her that day at OU.

And she thought about how “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel.”

But only if you let it fester.

“When bad things happen, it does touch your soul,” she said. “But hopefully this will make a difference in their lives, and they will all go and be different and better people because it happened.”

Spoken from part of the land itself.

This story was originally published March 12, 2015 at 7:43 PM with the headline "Oklahoma connection a big part of Mindy Corporon’s life."