Laut: African Tour Not Black, White

On the day he entered a national record book, Oxnard real estate salesman Dave Laut wasn’t even sure he should have been competing.

Laut, a shot putter, was at Pilditch Stadium on the outskirts of Pretoria, South Africa, on that October day in 1988, part of a contingent of 14 track and field athletes from the United States who had chosen to ignore an international ban on competition in South Africa. They were risking their eligibility by competing in a country where apartheid in sanctioned by law.

Laut admitted he had mixed emotions as he stepped into the shot-put ring at Pilditch, with 16 pounds of metal tucked between shoulder and chin.

“I mean here I was, about to throw the shot in South Africa, and I’m thinking, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ ” recalled Laut, who swallowed his emotions long enough to launch a 66-foot put--the longest ever on South African soil. “I really had the adrenaline going on that one.”

The Athletics Congress, the governing body for track and field in the United States, recognized Laut’s record by handing him a four-year ban from competition. However Laut, an Olympian in 1984, is far from repentant--recently he returned from his third trip to South Africa, a decision he fully expects will earn him yet another ban, this time for life.

“I’m guessing, but they’ll probably give us a lifetime (ban) now because we went back,” said Laut of the five-meet tour in which he and 13 teammates participated in November. “I’m waiting to get the letter any day.”

Nine of the U. S. athletes who participated in the original October, 1988, tour received TAC suspensions ranging from two to 12 years.

Laut, 33, said there is no simple reason for his decision to risk punishment by competing in South Africa, although money was an important factor.

A standout shot putter at Santa Clara High, Moorpark College, San Jose City College and UCLA, Laut earned a bronze medal at the Los Angeles Olympics. The following year he won the TAC outdoor championships and, buoyed by those performances, drew a bead on the 1988 Olympics.

Looking for a job that would provide him with both the cash and the time to train, Laut tried out in the summer of 1986 for a position with the Oxnard Fire Department. While running with a fire hose, he felt a sharp pain in both knees. Ruptured tendons sent him sprawling to the pavement.

The following year, which Laut should have spent in training for the Olympics, was consumed instead with rehabilitation. His few performances were poor and he lost both his momentum and valuable financial support from Nike.

When he took a part-time time as a realtor, his training suffered. At the 1988 Olympic Trials in Indianapolis, Laut, who needed to finish in the top three to win a spot on the team, placed fifth.

When Skip Robinson, the track coach at Pasadena City College, approached Laut at the trials and proposed a possible tour of South Africa, Laut was apprehensive. Robinson was straightforward--he told Laut this would be the first such tour since 1962 and the first since the International Amateur Athletic Federation banned South Africa from international track and field competition in 1976.

Any athlete who went likely would face repercussions. Laut, however, was ready to take a chance.

“It sounded like a pretty serious commitment, but I’d lost my contract (with Nike) and things were looking pretty bad, so I thought, ‘Well, why not take a chance and see?’ ” said Laut.

According to published reports, the U.S. athletes were paid a minimum of $10,000 per meet during the 1988 tour and, with performance bonuses, could earn much more. Miler Jim Spivey claimed he was offered $200,000 to compete in the meets.

Spivey declined the offer.

Though Laut refused to discuss specifics, he said he was paid somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000. Whatever the sum, said Laut, money was the only way to get athletes to take the risk.

“You’re not going to ask an athlete to risk his eligibility and his whole sports career without paying them for it,” Laut said.

Though money spurred Laut to take his first trip to South Africa in the fall of 1988, subsequent trips in April and November were taken for other reasons.

“South Africa is the only place in the world I can compete now,” Laut said.

“I think that everyone who’s gone over there has a goal and we’re committed to seeing it through,” added Laut, whose tour teammates have included Olympians John Powell, Ruth Wysocki, Tom Petranoff and Gregg Tafralis. “Hopefully through our efforts and what we’re doing we’ll maybe make a dent on this ban on sports over there.”

Not everyone agrees. When plans for the first tour were announced, many decried the idea, saying it would lend legitimacy to a political system that allows South Africa’s 27 million blacks no vote and little voice. Critics say the tours have fostered no change, and many accuse the athletes who participated of ignoring moral concerns for financial benefit.

“The people that went there, they know its wrong,” said George Mehale, a South African who coaches track and field at Cal State Long Beach. “Nothing changed because they went.”

“If anything, people are telling me informally that in a way they hurt the cause--not major injury, but they certainly did set things back,” said TAC President Frank Greenberg, one of several TAC officials who voted to ban the athletes who participated in the 1988 tour. “I think it’s counterproductive when individuals go. Global reaction against South Africa is getting stronger, that pressure has already produced some changes.”

Supporters of sanctions against South Africa say the sanctions contributed to President Frederik De Klerk’s recent decisions to release political prisoners such as Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela.

De Klerk also lifted a decades-old ban on the African National Congress and more than a dozen other groups dedicated to the abolition of apartheid; eased government censorship of the media; and asked his justice department to reserve capital penalties for the most severe crimes.

But De Klerk, whose Nationalist Party has ruled South Africa since 1948 and is thus responsible for instituting the most repulsive separatist laws, left most of the pillars of apartheid intact. The pass laws, which require blacks to carry legal documents when traveling outside their townships, are still enforced and the nation’s black citizens are still not entitled to participate in the government or in national elections.

Laut prefers to steer clear of debate. Others, however, vehemently defend the tours.

“We spent time doing clinics, promoting goodwill and helping people of all colors,” said tour organizer and coach Dick Tomlinson. “Ours is a purely humanitarian effort. We’re trying to bring understanding and turn the lights on the South African situation so people will realize that there are millions of black South Africans who are being deprived of international sport.”

Laut said he has seen few signs of segregation during his trips to South Africa. Critics argue that Laut and his fellow athletes were sheltered from apartheid’s worst. Although they were free to travel as they wished--including visits to the volatile black townships of Soweto and Crossroads--one team member admitted there was “a strong possibility” she and her fellow athletes were sheltered during their visit.

“We did go different places, but they had an itinerary set up with where they were going to take us and what we were going to do,” said Pamela Page, a hurdler who participated in the most recent tour. Page, who is black, also said that despite outward appearances of normalcy, something was amiss.

“People were nice and they kept saying, ‘We’re trying to change, we’re trying to change,’ but it was still strange,” Page said. “I’d be shopping and they (white South Africans) would just kind of stop and look at me like, ‘Wait a minute.’ It kind of caught them off guard.”

But while Laut admits he knows little about South Africa’s politics, he does know something of sport and he sees in South Africa a potential track powerhouse.

“There’s just an unbelievable amount of talent over there, it’s just amazing,” Laut said. “If they could become a part of the world, they would be a major power in track and field in 10 years. That’s my sincere belief.”

During the November tour, Laut and the rest of the U. S. contingent met briefly with De Klerk. According to Laut, the president lent his support to the tour and expressed hope that the South African athletes would soon be able to compete internationally.

“They’ve got a lot of national pride and I think they would really like to see their country get back into international competition,” Laut said.

Laut also expresses admiration for the South African athletes who continue to train and compete in the face of an international ban that keeps them at home, leaving them to compete against the same faces in the same places.

“When I was in high school and college I always had that Olympic medal as my dream. That was my focus, the driving force that kept me going . . . ,” Laut said. “The South African athlete doesn’t have that dream, but he keeps working as hard as we do, maybe harder. To me that determination is amazing.”

For Laut, training and competition have also taken on a slightly different slant from his college days. He has pared his training substantially--slipping away from work in the afternoon to put the shot at Hueneme High or lift weights in the garage of his home.

“If I’m lucky, I can get in two hours of training a day,” Laut said. “It’s not what I need, but I know what to do now and I can eliminate a lot of the nonsense stuff that I used to do. I just do the exercises that will help me throw the shot, which is basically the whole name of the game.”

Laut will return to South Africa, possibly as early as April for the South African national championships. According to Laut, a full team will probably return to South Africa again this fall and there is talk of a contract with sponsors and the South African Athletic Union that would guarantee such visits for the next three to five years.

Laut’s ultimate goal, however, is to compete in South Africa as a member of an official U. S. team.

“I’d like to be able to represent the United States, have USA colors, raise the flag and compete for the United States,” Laut said.