The Surge for More Black Influence On, Off the Field

When Harry Edwards took jobs with the San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors a year ago and then accepted a position recently as consultant to Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, some of his friends didn’t understand.

“ ‘How can you go in and link arms with Ueberroth? How can you go in and link arms with (49er President) Bill Walsh in his Volvo and his tennis whites and his country club affiliations? How can you link arms with (Warrior owners) Dan Finnane and Jim Fitzgerald, bankers, media people, and still be true to your principles?’ ” he recalls their asking.

The questions did not ruffle the bearded, 6-foot-8 sociology professor with the shaven head who burst to prominence in the radical ‘60s when he organized an unsuccessful effort by black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics.

“The beautiful part about it,” he said in his faculty office at the University of California last week, “is that I can be true to my principles because they have come around to understand and imbibe the same principles. . . . In every instance the one thing I have stated--I told Bill Walsh this, I told Dan Finnane this, I told Peter Ueberroth this--is that I am going to leave here with everything that I came in here with in terms of my principles, in terms of my integrity and in terms of my dignity. Every single thing.”

Either that or he will quit. But then, people have been coming around to Edwards’ viewpoint for years.

The University of California, which tried to deny him tenure a decade ago, shot footage of his sociology of sports class last week for use in a promotional film.

Even the leaders of the Olympic Games rebounded to his side; the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to take a position in 1984.

Edwards now appears regularly on “Nightline” and other news shows and commands $5,000 per speech, making 75 to 100 talks on the sociology of sport throughout the country each year.

Last week he sat in his office, with boxes of textbooks for his summer classes scattered about the floor, and talked about working with Ueberroth toward a new goal: creating a pool of women and minorities for front office and field management jobs in baseball.

“You cannot have an upper-middle-class, white, affluent front office effectively managing without benefit of input from anyone else, (for) what is essentially an increasingly black underclass . . . at the core of player personnel,” Edwards said. “You run into tremendous problems.”

Edwards said understanding will be particularly important when black athletes deal with what he predicts will be their next crisis--AIDS.

He said the black athlete is highly vulnerable to AIDS for several cultural reasons. Society expects athletes to be sexual and they grow up expecting that sexual access accompanies their athletic prowess, he explained. Furthermore, the black lower class produces the majority of athletes and “it is also that sector of society that is most afflicted with intravenous drug use and with prostitution for the same economic reasons,” he said.

Ueberroth asked Edwards to form a pool of talented minorities after former Dodger Vice President Al Campanis said on national television in April that blacks might lack the “necessities” to manage on the field or run the front office for a major league team. Washington consultant Clifford Alexander, a former secretary of the Army, was also hired to help major league teams develop affirmative action plans.

“I want it to be done as quick as it can be done well,” the commissioner said. “(Brooklyn General Manager) Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson did it well (when they integrated baseball in 1947) and it stayed.”

As Edwards flew to New York for discussions with Ueberroth’s staff Thursday through Saturday this week, an assistant to Ueberroth noted that some teams--each team employs an average of about 110 people in full-time, off-the-field jobs--had already hired a few minorities.

The Dodgers hired former catcher John Roseboro as a minor league instructor. Philadelphia named former outfielder Garry Maddox, who attended San Pedro High School, as a broadcaster and community relations representative. Minnesota secured a roving minor league instructor and Detroit hired a minority CPA as a comptroller.

Ueberroth said he would not dwell on those appointments because the program’s success will not be measurable for one or two years at least.

Nevertheless, the hiring of Edwards and Alexander and the beginning of affirmative action plans persuaded the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call off plans for a boycott of selected major league stadiums on Saturday.

Now 44 and living with his wife and three children south of Oakland in Fremont, Edwards said he hasn’t changed since his Olympic protest days. The world has.

“The table has turned in front of me; I’m saying the exact same things that I’ve been saying since 1966,” he said, holding up massive hands to emphasize his point.

“I’m still pushing change in sport,” he said, wearing a tight black shirt and slacks that made him look trim and muscular enough to continue the college basketball and discus-throwing career he once pursued.

Long before Campanis’ remarks, Edwards said, he noted the paucity of blacks in sports management. The Center for the Study of Sports and Society at Northeastern University reports that major league baseball and the National Football League employ no black managers or head coaches and that only four black head coaches work in the National Basketball Assn.

Only 2% of baseball and 3% of football front offices are black despite the fact that blacks constitute 75% of NBA players, 58% of NFL athletes and about 25% of major league baseball rosters.

Similar statistics abound in college athletics, Edwards said. While blacks dominate college football and basketball, only 29 of 267 predominantly white Division I basketball schools and only three of 105 predominantly white Division I football schools employ black head coaches. A black works as an athletic director at only one school--Arizona State.

Ueberroth noticed these numbers too and warned the owners about them during the baseball meetings in Florida last December. When a furor developed over Campanis’ remarks, he turned to Edwards.

They had known each other slightly when they attended San Jose State College at the same time in the early 1960s, and they got reacquainted during the Los Angeles Olympics.

“We had some telephone conversations and he was constructive and forceful, strong and yet measured in his opinions,” Ueberroth recalled. “I more or less made mental note at the time that most writers had only characterized his involvement in 1968 and had never followed the growth and the depth of the individual.”

The same qualities interested owners of the San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors, where Edwards counsels young black players on off-the-field problems, including drugs, education and investments.

Forty-niner president and head coach Bill Walsh said his relationship with Edwards began over the phone several years ago and developed into a salaried affiliation last season. Edwards attended all home and away games and spent time at practices and training camp getting to know players and management.

“He’s the most knowledgeable black leader on the sports scene,” Walsh said recently in the 49ers offices in Redwood City, south of San Francisco. “He has dedicated his life to it (the study of sports and society). It’s my feeling that . . . our players would have access to this man for whom they have so much respect.

”. . . Many perceive Harry as somewhat militant and very stark in his approach. But Harry is very cognizant of the impact he has and he makes things happen. He’s not a fool. In his own way he is organized and competent.”

Daniel Finnane, president of the Warriors, said he heard about Edwards’ work with the 49ers and asked the sociologist to join his team. Finnane, a former cable television executive who helped buy the Warriors a year ago, reasoned that Edwards would facilitate his players’ jump from college to professional sports.

Sitting in the Warriors’ Oakland Coliseum office, Finnane said that persuading Edwards to join his organization was not easy.

“He’s very careful,” Finnane said. “ . . . You do not start dealing with Harry by calling him. You go through the motions of getting to know him.

“I don’t think we had a consultant’s agreement with Harry until February and we had started working with him in October. I appreciate that. I don’t like a guy who comes and tells you you’re right when he really doesn’t understand you.

” . . . He doesn’t want to lend his name to something he’s not comfortable with. . . . He isn’t in it to collect a check. He’s in it to accomplish something.”