Battle Against Racism in U.S. Sports Raises Questions of Morality : Social justice: Recent boycotts and economic threats leave the question of who should lead the fight unanswered.

Athletic teams and leagues have made civil rights statements before.

In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers integrated baseball by playing Jackie Robinson, the first black in the modern major leagues.

In the late 1950s, the University of Notre Dame basketball team refused to play any team that wouldn’t compete against its black captain, current Dodger vice president Tommy Hawkins.

And in 1965, the American Football League moved its all-star game from New Orleans to Houston after black players objected that they weren’t allowed in local social clubs.

But none of those civil rights statements carried the economic impact of the potential $200 million to be lost by the state of Arizona because of the NFL’s decision to move the 1993 Super Bowl because its voters rejected a paid holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

And none has forced a policy change as extensive as that of the PGA Tour, which moved five tournaments from clubs with segregated memberships and compelled integration at about 20 other clubs that play host to events on the PGA Tour, the Senior PGA Tour or the Ben Hogan Tour for aspiring professionals.

“I think this Super Bowl situation is the most important thing to happen in the National Football League on a racial issue,” said Richard E. Lapchick, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University in Boston.

” . . . This is the first time they’ve taken a (civil rights) stand as a league. They are saying the NFL is not going to be part of a failure to honor Martin Luther King.”

But the NFL is hardly alone. While the league determined its Super Bowl policy, college football teams wrestled with their consciences on whether to accept bids from the recent Copper Bowl in Tucson or the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Ariz. These events followed the NBA’s announcement that it is unlikely to award the league’s All-Star game to Arizona until it establishes a paid King holiday.

The PGA Tour acted after a highly publicized protest over the exclusionary policies of the Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Ala., host of the 1990 PGA Championship, which is conducted by the PGA of America. The two PGAs are separate organizations.

“I didn’t know I would live to see the day that the PGA would take a stand and have an anti-discrimination policy,” said Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow. “But I’m pleased that in some systemic way (discrimination) is being addressed in all of its roots by the authorities. . . . I think that’s very hopeful and very healthy.”

At the very least, the NFL’s stand is expected to force Arizonans to rethink their position on the King holiday. Gov. Rose Mofford, facing the loss of millions in state revenues from the Super Bowl, said she will ask the legislature to reconsider the King holiday when it reconvenes Monday.

Observers say the matter might be put before the public for another vote. Mofford hopes a positive response will persuade NFL owners meeting in Hawaii in March to return the game to her state.

Skepticism about the consequences of the leagues’ actions also spread to the decision makers’ motives.

Mychal Thompson, the Lakers’ veteran center, said the NFL threatened to move the Super Bowl to mollify the 56% of its players who are black, but that the league still has only one black coach and no black general managers or owners.

He said the PGA integrated courses only after half of the television sponsors dropped the PGA Championship tournament because a Shoal Creek official bluntly defended the club’s segregationist policies. The withdrawal of sponsors, who did not return after the Shoal Creek club integrated, cost ABC $3 million, a network source said.

“(What they’re doing) shouldn’t be impressive to me or to any minorities because they’re only doing it for the almighty dollar,” Thompson said.

Allen Guttmann, a sports historian at Amherst College in Amherst, Mass., said that the motivation for actions such as the PGA’s is irrelevant. Society acts on sports, Guttmann said, rather than the other way around; the actions of league executives have little effect on the world.

“Harry Truman integrated the armed forces in 1948,” Guttmann said. “I don’t think he did it because Jackie Robinson played for the Dodgers. . . . Society also moved from integration to segregation in the late 19th Century, and . . . sports got segregated and stayed segregated until segregation began to weaken.

“I’m arguing for reciprocal interactions, but it’s almost always the case of society influencing sports, rather than the other way around.”

Some athletes who found themselves directly involved in the controversies contend that sports and politics should not mix.

“I’m a strong believer in that,” said University of California Berkeley quarterback Mike Pawlawski, defending his team’s decision to play Wyoming in the Copper Bowl.

“Even the ancient Greeks had a treaty which said when the Olympic Games were on, you could go behind enemy lines to compete when the countries were at war.”

Brian Treggs, a black Carson High graduate who is a Cal wide receiver, agreed: “I think this is a political issue that the legislature and governor should take care of. Football is football. We’re only 18- to 20-year-old youngsters playing a game. I don’t think at our age we should be involved in politics.”

Ted Washington, a starting defensive tackle for the University of Louisville, said he was surprised by the size of the protest against his university’s decision to play Alabama in the Fiesta Bowl.

“You see students putting up signs and saying the football players are sellouts,” said Washington, who is black.

“They’re trying to keep us down, but we’re not going to let them do that. They are just seeing it from their side. They don’t realize how hard we worked to get where we are.”

Whether or not sports and politics should mix, Guttmann said we can expect them to.

“Given the importance of sports in our society, and given the fact that sports are implicitly egalitarian in our conception, it’s inevitable that explicit groups such as black people are going to try to make use of sports,” he said. “That’s been true for a long time and it’s going to remain true.”

Said David Downs, vice president of programming for ABC sports: “I don’t think anything surprises me about a sports protest. I think you come to expect that sports and politics are inexorably intertwined. Whether you believe that’s good or bad, I think it simply is.”

Most observers said they would not fear teams or leagues pursuing social change even though the NFL and PGA have not enjoyed reputations as social pioneers.

“They are going to use their economic power to do things I’m probably not that excited about,” Guttmann said.

” . . . Like where the Raiders put pressure on cities to build or modify a stadium. . . . But if people care enough about sports, they pay the price.”

Former Wimbledon tennis champion Arthur Ashe recalled the role played by sports for decades in reinforcing segregation.

“A coach, especially high school coaches, very much embodies the local and regional cultural and social norms,” said Ashe, the author of “A Hard Road to Glory,” a three-volume history of the black athlete in America.

“When you go back and look at how this was used against people, it is frightening.

“A coach could look a black athlete right in the eye and say, ‘You’re lucky to be here. I don’t want you to make any trouble. You may not be able to join a fraternity or live in a certain apartment. And by the way, I don’t want you dating any white women.’ So sports has always been political in that status quo sense to keep people in their place with public approval.”

When the NFL and PGA involved themselves in social engineering on these issues, their motives were mixed, league executives acknowledged.

Joe Browne, the NFL’s vice president in charge of communications and development, said the league threatened to move the Super Bowl from Arizona in deference to its black players.

“To ask those players to play in a state in which the citizens voted not to respect Dr. King with a holiday, we believe sends a very negative and divisive message to the players and to everyone in the league,” he said.

Browne said the league also feared that television sponsors might cancel their commitments as they did at the PGA Championship.

“We have witnessed what has happened in other sports on somewhat similar issues,” he said.

Although most observers feel comfortable with teams or leagues pursuing social change, there was a wide range of responses to the question of whether athletes are obligated to become socially involved.

Thompson of the Lakers said superstars had a responsibility to speak out for social justice.

“Nobody’s going to listen to a Mychal Thompson,” he said. “Guys like Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, Dave Parker, Rickey Henderson, the minority superstars, have to get out and say, ‘Look, America, this has got to stop and this is what’s got to be done.’

“They should do more to better opportunities for young minorities . . . and address Congress if they have to. If Magic and Michael ask for a session before Congress, of course they’re going to listen. They carry a lot of weight. . . . They have to take a more prominent role.”

Johnson agreed with his teammate.

“He’s right,” he said. “We should do more.”

He added that he would be willing to appear before Congress “if need be, and if the situation was right.”

Johnson’s office said that in 1990 he raised (or donated) more than $2.5 million for the United Negro College Fund and other causes.

Treggs, the Cal wide receiver, was less sure about college players’ obligation to social causes.

He said much of the opposition to his school’s decision to play in the Copper Bowl came from black professors who were giving up nothing while urging players to sacrifice their hard-earned bowl bid for a principle.

“When you (are a professor and) say Berkeley is a racist school, it doesn’t stop you from picking up your check each month,” he said. “Since they are talking about the system, why don’t they protest by giving up their check?”

Billie Jean King, six-time Wimbledon tennis champion who pioneered women’s rights in sports, said athletes are under no obligation to become involved.

“You have an opportunity,” she said. “But if you can’t see it or can’t handle it, no one can say you are wrong. . . . You can’t expect everyone to be creating opportunities for the next generation.”

Sports sociologists and historians say that recent actions by the NFL, NBA and PGA are the latest link between sports and politics in a relationship extending thousands of years.

Sociologist Jay Coakley of the University of Colorado said that ancient Greek city states attempted to enhance their images by hiring athletes to compete in the early Olympics, and centuries later England used sports to promote familiarity with its customs and values in colonies around the world. Amherst’s Guttmann said that 19th Century officials used gymnastics to rally people around the idea of a united Germany.

Sociologists also noted that Adolf Hitler used the 1936 Berlin Olympics for propaganda purposes. Black athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised clenched fists on the victory stand at the 1968 Olympics Games to protest the condition of blacks in America. The United States boycotted the 1980 Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the Soviets boycotted the L.A. Olympics in 1984.

“The larger and more important the sporting contest, the more likely a protest is going to occur,” said David Wiggins, a sports historian at George Mason University in Virginia.

Added Lapchick: “Whenever we play in segregated patterns, society is going to be looking at it. Nobody can afford to be called a racist today and be successful in the business world.”

Lapchick and Marjorie Snyder, programs director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, predicted that tennis clubs will be among the next targets of protest.

“Tennis clubs suffer from the same kind of maladies as golf clubs,” Snyder said. “They may have policies discriminatory toward women.”

NBA Commissioner David Stern said he has a good idea why the protests will continue: Sports act as a powerful magnet to focus attention on issues.

“I think that more people learned about and formed strong opinions on issues of drug abuse on the sports pages (than from other sources), even though it was an even more important issue in our schools, in our prisons and in our work force,” he said.

“Other issues go on around the world in all kinds of settings, but if you wind up having it in a sports context, it generates enormous media attention. Look at the Lisa Olson situation (involving harassment of her in the New England Patriots’ locker room).”

Dave Maggard, Cal’s athletic director, cautions that the power of the protests should not be overused.

Maggard was a shotputter on the 1968 U.S. Olympic team when black athletes protested racial conditions in the United States. He was also a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee when President Carter decided to boycott the 1980 games.

“I felt at the time that perhaps we should boycott,” he said. “But I felt two months after the decision was made it was a big mistake. The only people who suffered were the athletes. I don’t think it did any good in terms of getting Russia out of Afghanistan.”

Maggard said such protests should be carried out selectively.

“Can you separate politics and sport?” he asked. “No. You never will. Can we be thoughtful in terms of ways in which we use sport and politics? I think we can.

“But let’s deal with them in very specific instances rather than making blanket kinds of statements that this and this should be done and there should be no participation. I think every situation is different.”

Ashe said that academic preparation of minority college athletes could become a major concern of black parents. He said the American Council on Education estimates that it costs $100 million a year to educate about 10,000 black football and male basketball players at Division I and historically black colleges.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘Do we want to spend that much on athletes whose graduation rate is less than 20%?’ ” Ashe said.

“If so-and-so is a good football player and has a grade-point average of 2.0 and an SAT score of 701 and he’s got three dozen college scholarships, and my son tries hard and manages a 2.7 grade average and an SAT score of 850, and they didn’t give him a sniff, black parents are saying that’s not right.

“I think they’ll do what they have in public school systems,” he said. “ . . . They will write the governor or the board of regents at state colleges and say, ‘My tax dollars are paying for this, but they are not being distributed equally. It just isn’t right that a self-professed, would-be NBA player (would get this kind of financial help merely on the basis of his athletic ability).’ ”

Rachel Robinson said that because protests are intended to raise issues of exclusion from the broader society, she found the recent discussion of integrated golf courses “ironic.”

“When we moved to Stamford, Conn., in 1955, Jack was an avid golfer,” she said. “He was not interested in joining the country club for social reasons. He only wanted to play golf.

“The High Ridge Country Club, not 10 minutes from our house, voted not to accept him. It meant that he had to get up at 4 a.m. and go to a public course and get in line to play. Occasionally he was the guest of others at courses which did not accept black members. To think that we are still struggling with that (issue) says something about resistance in that area.”