Category Archives: black athletes

Beyond Jackie Robinson

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Faster than you can say “Jackie Robinson,” the first sports topic always cited during Black History Month is that Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Famer breaking baseball’s color line in 1947.

Naturally. At the time, baseball’s prominence in American society was uncontested—the NBA had been formed only the previous year; the NFL was small peanuts; only college football had any sort of national awareness—so Robinson’s breakthrough represented a vast public advance in civil rights.

But an evening listening to one of Evan Weiner’s wide-ranging excavations of historic nuggets regarding Black sports history adds crucial layers to the subject.  Weiner—who describes his career as “radio, a lot of radio, some TV, some pundit work”—lays out the numbskullery and scullduggery in the story of segregated sports.

Such as the dumb “belief”—based on ignorance—by Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Al Campanis, in 1987, that Blacks “may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager or perhaps a general manager.” (Campanis was summarily fired.) And the 1950s NFL edict that its teams could have “up to four Negro players [but] none could be quarterbacks, centers or middle linebackers”—theoretically “cerebral” positions.

Then there was the thoroughly undisguised racism that for years prevented the few Black players on white professional teams from service at whites-only restaurants and hotels. And the kind of double-dealing of George Preston Marshall, who owned the NFL’s Washington Redskins from 1932 to 1969 while barring all Blacks from his team and his Washington baseball counterpart, Clark Griffith, refusing to sign Blacks even as he profited from renting out his D.C. ballpark for Negro League games.

Weiner covered all this and provided other relevant tidbits during a recent 90-minute presentation beamed on Zoom to my Hofstra University sports journalism students—one of countless talks Weiner gives on radio, TV documentaries, libraries and others public forums. He also produces books and podcasts on varied human affairs from rock-n-roll, censorship and World War II.

Here’s one detail I hadn’t realized before Weiner’s talk: When Cleveland Rams owner Dan Reeves maneuvered the transfer of his team to Los Angeles in 1946, making the NFL the first professional coast-to-coast sports entertainment industry, a pre-condition to play at the publicly funded Los Angeles Coliseum was that the team be integrated.

Reeves therefore signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, two former UCLA football teammates of Jackie Robinson—the year before Robinson became baseball’s first Black player. In Cleveland, meanwhile, the new franchise in an upstart league, the Browns of the All-American Football Conference, also signed two Black players for the 1946 season, Bill Willis and Marion Motley.

Weiner noted how Baltimore manager John McGraw in 1901 had attempted—unsuccessfully—to sneak a light-skinned Black infielder, Charlie Grant, into the newly formed American League by identifying Grant as a Cherokee Indian named “Tokohama.” Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey objected and McGraw left Grant off his roster. And the so-called “Gentleman’s agreement,” in which baseball owners conspired not to offer contracts to Blacks, prevailed for almost a half-century.

Then there were tales from Weiner of resistance. By Lakers star Elgin Baylor who, in 1959, refused to play an NBA exhibition game in Charleston, W.Va., after Black players couldn’t get equal accommodations with their white teammates. (That led to a league rule against playing in states with such practices.)

And the refusal of Walter Beach, a Boston Patriots defensive back, to stay by himself in segregated living conditions during the team’s 1961 exhibition game in New Orleans. And the Black players joining Hall of Fame center Bill Russell of the Celtics in boycotting a game in Lexington, Ky., after being declined restaurant service in that city. And Black members of the Oakland Raiders protesting segregated seating at their scheduled Mobile, Ala., exhibition game against the Jets, forcing the game to be moved to Oakland.

Weiner’s interactions with key figures spiced his talk, particularly first-person recollections from the late Wally Triplett, who had been Penn State’s first Black player and in 1949 was the first Black drafted by an NFL team (the Detroit Lions). Triplett, Weiner reported, had befriended Jackie Robinson early in Robinson’s career and served as Robinson’s chauffeur, confidant and card-playing buddy, making a point of bringing Robinson to Triplett’s mother’s house for a home-cooked meal whenever the Dodgers were in town to play the Phillies.

One of Triplett’s former Penn State teammates, a fellow named Joe Tepsic, had been a Dodger rookie in 1946, when he played only 15 games and was hitless in five at-bats. The story was that the struggling Tepsic’s Dodgers’ mates wanted Tepsic demoted to the minors and replaced by a veteran pinch-hitter.

Jackie Robinson that season was spending his first season under Dodger contract with their top minor-league team in Montreal, “and while there was no indication that Brooklyn would have brought up Robinson if Tepsic had gone down to the minors,” Weiner said, “Triplett, who was a close friend of Tepsic, believed that Dodger manager Leo Durocher wanted that to happen.”

It didn’t. Until the next season. How’s that for a Black History Month morsel?

A racer. And race.

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Lee Evans’ death this month recalled the Black Lives Matter event that came a half-century before George Floyd, when two Black U.S. sprinters raised their gloved fists during the 1968 Olympics victory ceremony in a silent shout for racial justice. And got the world’s attention.

It was two days after that Black Power protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos, which got them banished from the Mexico Games, that Lee Evans led a U.S. medal sweep in the 400-meter run. After which he, Larry James and Ron Freeman—all Black men—wore black berets and black socks on the victory podium in another plea for the disenfranchised.

The second demonstration wasn’t as dramatic. Unlike Smith and Carlos, the gold and bronze medalists in the 200 who held their provocative pose during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner,” Evans, James and Freeman removed their berets and stood at attention for the anthem. And were allowed to compete—and win—the subsequent 4×400-meter relay.

But here’s the rest of the story on Evans, who died at 74 on May 19, and his lifelong investment in Black progress.

He, like Smith and Carlos, had been part of the San Jose State University “Speed City” track team, all three of them holding the world record in their events at one point. (Carlos’ mark in the 200, set at the 1968 Olympic Trials, was later disallowed because of special spikes he had worn.)

Smith, Evans said, was so fast it was “like he was on a motorcycle.” Evans himself was essentially uncatchable—his ’68 world record set in Mexico City lasted for 20 years—but with a helter-skelter running style that made him look like “a drunk on roller skates.”

His shoulders rolled when he ran. His head snapped from side to side. His hands clawed ahead. He did not tippy toe. He pounded. He strained and gritted his teeth and puffed his cheeks—all appropriate looks for a race that is the closest thing to violence in track and field. A model of dominance.

Still, as he stood to receive his gold medal in the tumultuous days after the Smith-Carlos incident, Evans later said he was “70 to 80 percent sure” he would be shot. He was 21 at the time.

Across America in 1968, some cities literally were in flames over civil rights unrest, the Vietnam War was raging months after both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. At San Jose State, sociology professor Harry Edwards had formed the Olympic Project for Human Rights, with an eye toward a Black boycott of the Mexico City Games, in part because the International Olympic Committee was waffling over whether to admit South Africa in spite of that nation’s apartheid policies.

The irony is that the defiant Smith-Carlos display likely had a far greater—and longer-lasting—impact than a boycott would have. Meanwhile, though, Evans, in a 1999 documentary, “Fists of Freedom,” laughed at Carlos having emerged as a Black spokesman.

Carlos “never went to the [Edwards] meetings,” Evans said in the film. “I asked Tommie, ‘How’d you get Carlos to do that [raised fist]?’ He said, ‘I just gave him my other glove and told him to do what I do.’” Evans shook his head in disbelief.

Except for the social elements afoot, Evans almost surely would have won another gold at the ’72 Munich Olympics in the 4×400 relay, and might well have coached another relay team to a medal at the ’76 Montreal Games. But in ’72, Evans’ relay teammates, Vince Matthews and Wayne Collett, were sent home before the relay after chatting and paying little attention during the National Anthem as they celebrated their 1-2 finish in the open 400. So Evans was left without a team. And, in ’76, when Evans was Nigeria’s national-team coach building an impressive relay quartet, Nigeria joined other African nations in boycotting Montreal as objections to apartheid South Africa’s inclusion continued.

Evans endorsed that boycott so “the Blacks of South Africa could know that the Blacks throughout the rest of Africa cared.”

He had taken the job in Nigeria because “I always wanted to go to Africa,” he said, “to sort of find my heritage.” He ultimately coached six national teams on the continent, became fluent in several of the native languages—and was living in Lagos when he died—but had found incongruities there as well.

One lesson was that, while he quickly built Nigeria into a worthy rival of Kenya as an African track power, he found that “once you get a kid running international times, he’s gone. He’d be in the U.S. with a college scholarship. I couldn’t keep my team together. But you couldn’t’ tell a kid not to go get a free education. A college degree from America meant moving immediately to the middle class, and there’s a difference between middle class and not middle class in Nigeria. A much bigger difference than [in the United States].”

The other revelation, which he decided should not have been a surprise, was that “in Africa, I was considered an American first. If you’re Black, brown, white, red or yellow, an American is still an American first. I was Black, but I was always ‘the American.’ Well, I am. I am the American.”

A memorable one.

Black (school) power

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Among the aspects of racial awareness stirred by Black Lives Matter demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder in police custody, here’s one I hadn’t considered: Young African-American athletic prodigies choosing historically Black colleges over traditional high-profile powers such as UCLA, Kentucky and Kansas.

The New York Times last week reported several instances of top basketball and football hotshots either declining offers—or transferring—from predominately white institutions in favor of lower-profile operations at Howard University, Norfolk State, Arkansas-Pine Bluff and the like.

If that becomes a trend, it could precipitate a fundamental shift in control—from the rich schools and athletic departments which profit mightily off the exploits of uncompensated (mostly Black) athletes in the two revenue sports—to the labor force, the players. In basketball, especially, it takes only one star to carry a team and lure television’s visibility and big bucks.

With moves afoot to allow college athletes some compensation for use of their names and images, all jocks are beginning to acquire bargaining chips regarding their choices. For Black athletes, typically part of a tiny campus minority when they compete for predominately white schools, an added bonus would be that studies indicate they will experience more supportive professors and mentors at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

This comes more than a half-century after the good-news/bad-news of desegregation. While that nudge toward more equal opportunity belatedly opened some doors for Blacks, to polish their athletic skills and resumes at the professionally run white college factories, it meanwhile dried up the quality of sports talent at the HBCUs. And, as a consequence, lowered the already minimal public profiles of those schools.

As Clarence (Big House) Gaines put it to me a good 35 years ago, the last time the best Black players opted for HBCUs was “when it was the only place they could go.”

Gaines, who died at 83 in 2005, was the Hall of Fame basketball coach at Winston-Salem University for 48 years, averaging more than 18 victories per season. His proteges included Earl Monroe, 13 years an NBA star, and Cleo Hill, the first first-round NBA draft pick from an HBCU (in 1961). But with the lifting of Jim Crow restraints, Gaines soon was unable to compete for elite talent against the sport’s aristocracy.

Potential recruits would ask, “Are you Division I?”

“No,” Gaines would tell them.

“Will I be on TV?”

“Not hardly,” he would say.

Gaines described Winston-Salem as “a school with a Division II philosophy, a Division III budget and high ideals. We run this program on the money from student activity fees and gifts from alumni and friends. The gifts we get, I couldn’t support two kids. All our problems could be solved by one thing: Money.”

Among Gaines’ contemporaries was Davey Whitney at Alcorn State which, despite being the first HBCU to play in the NCAA Division I tournament (in 1980), hardly realized a recruiting bonanza.

“We used to get at least three of the best kids in the state of Mississippi [before Southern white schools began to gradually integrate in the 1970s],” Whitney said back then. “None of the major schools in the South cared about basketball. Now, we’ve got to recruit against the Alabamas and the Ole Misses as much as the DePauls.”

The chore was to “somehow show your kids that they’re just as good as anybody else,” he said. “They read about players from the white schools. They see them on TV, and they’re in awe.”

They wanted “to go where the action is,” Whitney’s athletic director, Marino Casem, said. “They wanted the bright lights”—something the underfunded HBCUs couldn’t offer.

If now, as some prominent young Black players have indicated, they can athletically prosper at an HBCU—even as they bring attention (and money) to schools in the Black community—it feels to them as if that piece of their lives will matter.