The fourteen black players had come peacefully seeking permission to wear black armbands in their games against Brigham Young University, a Mormon school. Mormonism, explained the blacks, discriminates against blacks and will not allow them to progress to the priesthood, which all other male Mormons are supposed to attain. (Some blacks spread the malicious rumor that Mormons preached that blacks are descendants of the devil; this was a libel. Mormonism teaches that blacks are descended from Cain, who slew his brother Abel, and are thus ineligible for the priesthood. Blacks are free to attend Brigham Young, but few do. In Provo, where the university is located, of the 36,000 residents, there was recently only one black family.)
We know that the fourteen black athletes entered Coach Eaton’s office. What happened next is unclear. The blacks say they requested permission to wear the armbands on their uniforms the next day when they lined up against Brigham Young; Coach Eaton says they demanded the right. The blacks say Eaton took one look at them, smelled defiance, and fired the lot from his championship football team; Coach Eaton says he listened patiently for ten minutes as they presented their petition, then realized that he had rebellion on his hands and informed them quietly that they were no longer members of his team.
The ensuing fracas practically tore Wyoming apart. The faculty senate voted 37–1 to ask the athletic department to rescind the dismissal and impose instead a temporary suspension, but the community, which had always resented the intrusion of the big-city blacks into their peaceful cowboy town, insisted that the blacks be run out. And when seven faculty members threatened to resign unless the blacks were reinstated, the Touchdown Club offered to raise money to pay their fares out of the state.
‘Give me Wilt Chamberlain’s height, Muhammad Ali’s strength, O.J. Simpson’s speed, Arthur Ashe’s ground strokes …’
The university board of trustees met from seven o’clock Friday night till five o’clock Saturday morning trying to bring some order into the situation, and finally they agreed to back Coach Eaton all the way. I arrived accidentally on the scene a few weeks later and found bumper stickers across the state proclaiming the driver’s undying faith in Coach Eaton. Friends told me that at the height of the trouble, bands of armed men drove about the streets of Laramie ready to shoot the place up if blacks caused any trouble; word had been passed that two thousand Black Panthers armed to the teeth were descending on Laramie from points like Chicago and San Francisco, determined to capture the town.
Finally, the case went to the courts and struggled along with recriminations and countercharges. State officials in Wyoming held firm; the blacks had scandalized the university by openly challenging the dictates of Coach Eaton, and their testimony was persuasive. In 1972 the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in Denver, ruled that the university had been within its rights when it dismissed the fourteen blacks and that they had no further recourse, since none of their civil rights had been infringed.
When the Cowboys, without their black stars, pulverized Brigham Young 40–7 for their fifth straight victory, then walloped San Jose State 16–7, there was jubilation across Wyoming. ‘We can go all the way, even without our niggers,’ ranchers throughout the state rejoiced. ‘Gettin’ rid of them will turn out to be a blessin’.’ Not so. Without its blacks, Wyoming lost seven straight games, finishing 6–4 in 1969 and 1–9 in 1970. In succeeding years the ardent Wyoming fans watched as their football and basketball teams wallowed in despair. Unable to recruit top black talent, the Cowboys compiled dismal records, and in 1974, the year Marvin Bates took his third trip on the Treagle from Cheyenne to Laramie, the football team won only two games while losing nine to opponents they once beat with ease. In 1975 they had the same record.
Wyoming is a state I cherish, one of the truly distinctive areas of the United States, and its university has a proud history. I am distressed that football, which should be a unifying experience, has been the cause of such a fracture. In 1968, when the Cowboys went to New Orleans to play in the Sugar Bowl against LSU, it was said, without too much exaggeration, ‘that half the state flew south for the game.’ In New Orleans they still say with fond memories, ‘We never had a bunch of better spenders than that Wyoming crowd. Wish they’d come south again.’ I should think that within another two or three years Wyoming might be a pretty good place for a black athlete; the redneck ranchers will have learned by then what the Southeastern Conference learned earlier, that you can’t field a first-class football team without black players.
The third confrontation was more to my liking, because it was intellectual, orderly and responsible. In early 1972 blacks at Michigan State University, athletes and faculty alike, decided to compile a document that would inform Wayne Duke, Big Ten Athletic Commissioner, of the actual state of affairs in his conference. Drafting a preliminary paper listing grievances, they circulated it among the other Big Ten schools, soliciting their counsel. Finally, three black faculty members from Michigan State, Robert Green, Joseph McMillan and Thomas Gunnings, drafted the final report, using scholarly procedures and non-inflammatory language:
… Of the black student athletes in the study, 100 percent reported that their coaches expected them to remain eligible, but only 7 percent reported that their coaches expected them to receive their degrees. Seventy percent reported that their white coaches and professors and white students expected them to be weak academically.
… Black athletes from several Big Ten schools commented that severe punishment was meted out for missing practice, yet no real concern was exhibited when classes were missed.
… At one university 156 letter winners in football, basketball, wrestling and track were observed from their freshman year in 1960 through November of 1970. Of the 113 whites, 82.3 percent had graduated; of the 43 blacks, only 46.5 percent had done so.
… Those black athletes who were admitted to one university with only a marginal chance of academic success, according to the Big Ten Prediction Table, had about as good a record of graduating as the black athletes who entered with satisfactory prediction scores.
… Black athletes also commented that recruiters make them think they are going to the university to get an education and that athletics is a secondary concern. By their junior year, many feel that the reverse is actually true.
The report then made a series of recommendations to Commissioner Duke. Black officials should be hired for every sporting event. Departments of physical education should hire a reasonable quota of black assistant coaches, secretaries, trainers, medical personnel, publicity people and custodial help. Big Ten schools should see to it that black athletes get a fair share of jobs dispensed by the athletic department. And black counselors, outside the athletic department, should be responsible for the educational progress of black athletes.
The report ended with a mournful judgment: ‘The patterns of racial discrimination both overt and covert, institutional and individual, found in the larger society are reflected in and perpetuated in athletics in the United States.”
(In view of my low opinion of cheerleading as an occupation for women, I must in fairness report that in the Michigan State confrontation, and in scores of others throughout the United States, one of the principal protests of the male black athlete is: ‘Complaint 7. MSU has never elected a black cheerleader.’ The men feel, and understandably so, that if American society considers the cheerleader the highest position to which a co-ed can aspire, it is unfair to deny admission to that Valhalla to black Valkyries.)
Three special problems have fascinated all imaginative observers who have speculated upon the problems of the black athlete, and I should now like to summarize each briefly. The first is sex, a harsh, constant reality for which there seems to be no adequate solution. Stated bluntly, the problems is this. A university in the north, with no history of ever having accepted black students and with none in residence, suddenly decides to ‘go big time,’ send its recruiters into city ghettos, and hire a group of black gladiators. These young men are super-vi
rile types, at the precise age when sexual pressures and longings are greatest, and they are brought into this sterile setting, where every coach they meet, every advisor, every faculty member cautions them that they must never, no, never, date a white girl.
The literature is jammed with case histories of exactly what coaches have told their black importees. For a good summary see Jack Olsen’s second article in his series in Sports Illustrated (July 8, 1968). From a score of horror stories the one that seemed saddest to me was a trivial thing that sprinter Harold Busby of UCLA’s championship track team recalled. ‘The first three finishers in each event were to be kissed by the queen and trophied at a victory stand. This was fine as long as it was the mile or the pole vault. But when Charlie Green won the hundred, Jim Hines finished second, and I was third, the girl wouldn’t even shake our hands.’
The black athlete, cut off from black society of any kind, is supposed to spend four of his most virile years playing games for his university, and sitting alone in a room, forbidden to speak to any female. If he dares to do so, the whole weight of the athletic establishment falls on him; he is castigated verbally, threatened with the loss of his scholarship, demoted by his professors in class, and denied a starting position on the team where he is probably the best player of the lot.
Prior to the big final trouble at Wyoming one of the football players had made overtures toward dating a white girl, and word got to her cowboy brothers, who organized a posse to ‘gun down the nigger if he makes another move.’
It seems to me immoral for a university to import black athletes into a situation where there are few black co-eds and almost no blacks in the surrounding community and then to demand that the athletes refrain from social contact of any kind with what young women are available. And if it isn’t immoral, it’s ridiculous.
The second problem concerns stacking, the procedure whereby a coach who wants some blacks on his team but not too many, because his rich white alumni might complain, channels all his blacks into two or three positions commonly reserved for them, so that they can compete against one another rather than land one of the more important positions reserved for white players.
The so-called ‘white positions’ in football are quarterback, center and the two inside running guards on offense, it being held that whites, with their supposed superior intelligence and capacity to react to unfolding situations, will handle those jobs better than flighty and irresponsible blacks. On defense it is the linebacker, who must ebb and flow with the play as it develops, who has to be white.
In baseball the ‘white positions’ are those down-the-middle slots which control the movement of the game and especially the execution of the double play. Catcher, shortstop and second base are critical, and folk wisdom demands that whites, with their supposed superior mental adaptability, handle these spots.
Once this assumption of white intellectual superiority is accepted, it becomes logical to direct blacks away from those positions where intelligence is required and into those where fleetness of foot, muscular agility and capacity for quick turns in flight, characteristics that blacks are supposed to have, are an asset.
For several decades I had heard rumors of stacking and dismissed them. But recently several teams of investigators have applied computer analysis to football and baseball rosters, coming up with startling results. John Loy and Joseph Elvogue in ‘Racial Segregation in American Sport,’ International Review of Sport Sociology (1970), provide the best summary. In an article crammed with philosophical implications, they advance the theory that blacks, because of the social prejudices of white managers and owners, are channeled into those peripheral positions on the field where they will have least contact with their teammates and least influence upon the intricate development of the game. In a computer analysis of all the teams in professional football, they found that the central positions of close contact and generalship—quarterbacks, centers, guards on offense—were 96 percent white, whereas the peripheral positions where contact was not constant and generalship not required—cornerbacks on defense—were 77 percent black. They analyzed each position and found without question that certain ones were reserved for certain colors. Thus linebackers, who play a central role on defense, were 92 percent white, while halfbacks, who play off to one side on offense, were 62 percent black.
In baseball the situation was the same. In the three crucial down-the-middle slots where intelligence and quick response to fluid situations were prized, 91 percent of the players were white. In the outfield, far from responsibility for central decisions, 49 percent of the players were black, and if the figures had been broken down into right field and left, the really isolated positions, as contrasted to center field, where more judgment is required, the discrepancy would probably have been even greater.
Left or right field in baseball, cornerback in football, these are the ideal spots for black players according to present thinking, and it is probable that many intelligent college blacks, aware of the stacking that faces them, specialize in these positions, knowing that they will have a better chance to land one. Thus discrimination feeds upon itself.
There is a contradiction in the philosophy of stacking which defeats me. Why would an athletic department spend thousands of dollars recruiting the best black players, traveling to all corners of America to do so, and then not use the men at their maximum capacity? Why would a coach recruit eleven superior blacks and then turn them all into cornerbacks competing against one another? The only answer is that they do. It is quite probable that no basketball team in any American college or university ever plays all its best players, because if the coach did so, his team would be all black, and the white alumni would not stand for it. Furthermore, we know from many accounts that institutions like Notre Dame and Texas recruit some ten times the number of football players who will actually be able to play.
I remember one Notre Dame alumnus in the coal regions of Pennsylvania who told me, ‘I went to South Bend all fired up. I’d been all-Scholastic quarterback. Tore my conference apart. Sixty schools wanted me. But I wanted the best, so I chose Notre Dame. I came on as a real hotshot, and at the first practice the coach has all us freshmen together and I see that among that mob I’m the runt. He reads off the first team, and I’m not on it. “Well,” I mumble to myself, “I still have this great record. I’ll accept second team.” So then he reads off the second team, and I’m still missing. And the third and the fourth. I’m on the eleventh team, but by that time they’ve run out of footballs. So we have to practice with a helmet. Here I am, the hottest thing ever to come out of the coal regions, and I’m forward passing a helmet. Right then I understand what big time meant.’
The final topic is one that merits the closest attention, for it is bound to recur; it engenders the fiercest partisanship; and it is deeply ingrained in American folklore. Is the black athlete different physically and psychologically from the white? Translated into its simplest terms, is Archie Bunker right when he says of the black football player, ‘Them jungle bunnies can run faster than any white man’?
This popular subject for barroom debate was given a rational structure in Sports Illustrated (January 18, 1971), when Martin Kane, then a senior editor, advanced the theory that there were indeed substantive differences between the young black man and his white competitor. Reviewing all known existing studies, Kane offered these tentative conclusions:
… Blacks tend to have longer limbs, smaller calfs, less fat and narrower hips than whites, and this combination gives the black athlete a superior agility.
… Whites have substantially greater lung capacity than blacks.
… Blacks have marked superiority in hyperextensibility, or capacity for double-jointedness and general looseness of joints. This may be because they tend to have more tendon and less muscle.
… This point is subjective, and not measurable, but many observers who have worked closely with both black and white athletes contend that the former have a superior capacity to relax
under pressure.
… One researcher points out that all living things from tropical climates tend to have longer limbs, which aids them in dissipating heat. Blacks share this characteristic.
… Black infants are able to control their heads and muscles much sooner than white babies.
… Perhaps because of physical inheritance, no black has ever been a swimming champion or even a near-champion.
… And finally, the most contentious theory of all: centuries of slavery placed a premium on the superior physical specimen and weeded out the weakling, so that in time the black genetic structure became superior. Two black athletes have been outspoken supporters of this theory. Calvin Hill, the great Yale-Dallas running back, says, ‘I have a theory about why so many sports stars are black. I think it boils down to the survival of the fittest. Think of what the African slaves were forced to endure in this country merely to survive. Well, black athletes are their descendants. They are the offspring of those who are physically tough enough to survive.’ Lee Evans, Olympic champion in the 400 meters, says, ‘We were bred for it. Certainly the black people who survived in the slave ships must have contained a high proportion of the strongest. Then, on the plantations, a strong black man was mated with a strong black woman. We were simply bred for physical qualities.’
The publication of this daring article, containing so much unsupported speculation, created a storm of discussion and hopeful refutation, which was understandable, because if the article was correct in its suppositions, then the black athlete, and indeed the whole black race, was a thing apart, and society would be justified in treating blacks differently from the way it treated whites.