'Rudy' Macklin guest at Fit, Fun & Fabulous breakfast

By CASEY COLLIER
Fit Fun and Fabulous Serving St. Mary Parish kicked off its annual community awareness festivities Thursday with a breakfast at The Lamp Post in Franklin with Durand “Rudy” Macklin, director of the Governor’s Council of Physical Fitness as keynote speaker.
Macklin was born in Louisville, Kentucky and played basketball for Louisiana State University from 1976 to 1981, where he was named an NCAA First Team All-American in 1980 and 1981.
As a senior, he was named the Southeastern Conference Player of the Year, and led LSU to the NCAA Final Four.
He graduated as LSU’s all-time leading rebounder, with 1,276 rebounds; and was the second-all-time leading scorer, having scored 2,080 points overall.
After graduation, Macklin played two seasons with the Atlanta Hawks, having been selected as the 52nd pick of the NBA Draft in 1981.
He was traded to the New York Knicks, but only played eight games with them, due to chronic muscle cramping.
In 1992, Governor Edwin Edwards appointed Macklin to the council on fitness, where he has served ever since.
Macklin opened his address Thursday morning by confronting Louisiana’s reportedly dire minority population’s health standards.
Macklin expressed the difficulties he has faced in working with different gubernatorial administrations since his initial appointment, exampling the time he sat with then Governor Mike Foster, in the kitchen of the Governor’s Mansion, eating chocolate-chip cookies, discussing the need for more robust health initiatives to target the state’s minority communities. After that initial meeting, Macklin said he convinced Foster to come around to his way of thinking, even growing close with him in their work together.
Macklin moved on from reminiscences, to touch on what he believes is the cornerstone of improving minority health, and all health in the state: prevention. “I believe that prevention is the key to building a stronger, more sustainable healthcare system,” Macklin said.
However, he also explained the conundrum surrounding the access to prevention, as he has seen it, from the standpoint of the passage of time and the difficulties it poses in quantifying the amount of money it takes to elevate a single health risk from the status of being a danger, to that of being a risk that has been prevented.
“I didn’t know how hard it would be to get people to buy into it,” he said, “how difficult it would be to tell people, ‘I need you to take better care of yourself.’
“Why would I have to tell you to take better care of yourself?
“And with all of the thousands of dollars I’ve gotten from the federal government and from the state that I’ve put into all of these programs that have come and gone. Still, the numbers just wouldn’t change, and I just couldn’t understand why.”
He said that Katrina played a part in the worsening of mental health in the state, and that any gains in addressing prevention made before the storm, were all but lost in Katrina’s wake.
Yet, he pointed to current attitudes in the state toward health and wellness as having seen a trend of sloping ascension, saying, “In recent years, healthcare has become much more vital and relevant than ever before.
It’s become more imperative, and this is largely due to the change in dynamics of demographics as Louisiana families struggle more and more to deal with chronic illness and disease such as diabetes, hypertension and stroke.”
Macklin said that chronic illness has proven to affect Louisiana communities without consideration of economic strata, age or ethnicity, and that recent studies having proven such, have done much to extoll the importance of prevention as more than a notion of influence, rather a demonstrable, thematic component of modern health in the state.
He cited four at-risk behaviors as accounting for most of the health difficulties Louisianans face, as: lack of physical activity, poor nutrition, tobacco use and excessive alcohol consumption.
“Those are our major enemies in this state,” he said.
“We have to make prevention part of our everyday lives, and empower ourselves to make better health choices.”
Apart from prevention, Macklin pointed to obesity control as another major mitigating factor in becoming a healthier Louisiana. According to Macklin, Louisiana is now ranked 50th in health among the rest of the country. He said, “Health is about freedom… why not us? We have to own our own health.”
To learn more about the Governor’s Council of Physical Fitness and Sports, visit: http://www.ldh.la.gov/index.cfm/subhome/13/n/149.