Out Front : After 74 Years of Beating the Odds, USOC’s Walker Doesn’t Mince Words

LeRoy T. Walker has broken bread with Jesse Owens and Jesse Jackson, watched from the wings at the Cotton Club as Duke Ellington led his orchestra, played golf with Michael Jordan, washed windows at the Pentagon and been chancellor of a university.

His is not the quintessential African-American experience. On the contrary, his life has been extraordinary. Yet he is as deeply rooted in the tradition and culture of his race as the cotton picked by his ancestors was in the Georgia soil.

And it is from there that Walker, the 74-year-old, churchgoing, Churchill-quoting grandson of slaves, has risen to become the first black president of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Elected in October to a four-year term, he is beginning his first full calendar year in an office that has been held by such prominent Americans as A.G. Spalding, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Avery Brundage and William E. Simon.

As the lone nominee for the position, while serving two months before the election as head of the U.S. delegation to the 1992 Summer Olympics at Barcelona, Walker served notice that he would be an aggressive leader by taking on the Dream Team. He became its most formidable challenger, protesting the U.S. basketball team’s selection process, living arrangements and priorities that he believed were inconsistent with the Olympic ideal.

Although many USOC members agreed, most wished he had delivered his criticisms behind closed doors instead of on the front pages of the nation’s leading newspapers.

But even today, while acknowledging that he should guard his opinions lest they be confused with official USOC positions, he barely tempers his remarks regarding the Dream Team, and, in the three months since his election as USOC president by acclamation, he has been out front, ahead of the committee, on other controversial issues as well.

“I guess I’ve lived too long and come too far to not speak my mind,” he said in a recent interview at the headquarters of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, organizing body for the 1996 Summer Olympics. He served as ACOG’s senior vice president for sports until he resigned to accept the USOC position.

Born in 1918, he was the youngest of Willie and Mary Walker’s 13 children and became the first to go to college. His mother would not have settled for less, insisting that the brightest light in the house be over the table where LeRoy read his books, usually the Bible. When LeRoy was 9, his father, a fireman for the Georgia Southern Railroad, died, and Mary sent her youngest child to live with a brother in Harlem.

“I’ll never forget what she told me,” Walker said. “She said, ‘If anything gets in your way, look it in the eye, grab hold of it and find a way to achieve in spite of it.’ One of the things that was drilled into me was to not let circumstances determine what I could begin to be.”

It was a lesson well learned.

After receiving his master’s degree from Columbia University in 1941, he overheard an administrator comment that no black could be allowed to earn a doctorate there, even though Walker already was progressing toward the degree. So Walker traveled downtown to New York University and got his Ph.D.

In the ‘50s, as the track coach at predominantly black North Carolina Central University in Durham, N.C., Walker sometimes had to take his teams as far as 200 miles out of the way while traveling to meets in the South to find hotels and restaurants that would serve them. Yet Walker produced athletes who participated in seven consecutive Summer Olympics between 1952 and ’76.

After attempting to reason with athletes who planned protests during the 1968 Summer Olympics, Walker was hurt by criticism that he was not outspoken enough on behalf of black causes. Fifteen years later, he heard similar complaints when promoted from vice chancellor to chancellor at North Carolina Central. In both cases, he eventually earned respect from most of his critics.

One day last October, on the way from the airport to the Fontainebleau Hilton in Miami Beach, where he would be elected the USOC’s 23rd president, Walker was recalling chapters of his life when he spotted a familiar hotel from the causeway.

Visiting the city some years earlier for a convention of the American Assn. of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, Walker was prevented from registering at the hotel because of his color. When fellow members learned of the situation, they issued a threat to move the convention. It achieved the intended result and then some. Walker ended up with the honeymoon suite.

On the walls of Walker’s office are pictures and memorabilia from his almost five decades as a track coach and athletic administrator, including certificates from a couple of the 14 halls of fame into which he has been inducted. But there are no diplomas--not from Benedict College in South Carolina, Columbia or NYU.

The education he values most, he said, came from the streets of Harlem.

“Talk about a place of hard knocks,” he said. “I know where all of them are.”

Walker moved to a small apartment near Columbia University when he was 9 to live with his brother Joe, who was 25 years older, and his family. When asked about his role models, Walker named Churchill, Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson and the late Joe Walker, who was not formally educated beyond junior high but had “a doctorate in common sense.”

Joe Walker also had good business sense, owning three barbecue restaurants in Harlem and a glass cutting and window cleaning service. Early in the days when government agencies were required to hire a certain percentage of minority contractors when possible, he had one of the few window cleaning businesses owned by a black. As a result, he and his crew, including LeRoy, were offered jobs throughout the East. A regular client was the Pentagon.

“I’ve been hanging out from 30 or 40 stories with nothing between me and death but a belt,” Walker said. “But it was fun. I kept my union card until I had my doctorate. I used to say, ‘I’m going to keep this card because if anything goes bad at the university, I’ve got a trade.’ ”

Joe Walker taught his brother business administration through the restaurants, one of which was next door to boxer Sugar Ray Robinson’s bar. By the time he went to college, LeRoy Walker was so involved in the operation that Joe gave him a percentage of the profits.

“We used to have people coming from downtown in limos to get our spit-cooked barbecue,” Walker said. “I was one of the few people in college whose mother used to write me for money because I did so well.”

But Joe was not all business. He also made sure LeRoy was exposed to culture, once insisting that he accompany clients whose house they were painting to the Metropolitan Opera to see “Aida.”

“I didn’t understand one word they were singing,” Walker said. “But that’s how I was inspired to learn about languages.”

He studied French and German at Benedict College.

LeRoy was more in his element during the summer between his junior and senior years of high school when Joe arranged for him to work for a swing band after a valet had stolen bandleader Jimmy Lunsford’s horn and pawned it. LeRoy was responsible for making sure uniforms were clean, pressed and delivered on time, that the instruments were safe and that the band had food and coffee.

The early jobs that summer were at the Cotton Club and the Lafayette, where Duke Ellington ruled, but Lunsford’s band later went on the road, where Walker was shocked by the racism he found. Even the White Castle hamburger stands in some cities would not serve the band.

“That was the first time racism really hit me,” he said. “I lived in the South until I was 9, and when I would go into a department store there would be two water fountains, one for colored--which blacks were called then--and one for whites. And there were worse things than that. But that was the mores of the South then. Yeah, it hurt, but, at least, you knew where everybody stood.

“But it was in places where the racism was more subtle, like in the North in those days, where it really got to me. I could go on and on with stories, like the time I had to go to five different hotels in Philadelphia before I found one that would let me have a room. There, in the City of Brotherly Love. I don’t think people understand how deeply some of these things are ingrained in me.”

Years later, as track coach at North Carolina Central, Walker stressed two messages to his athletes.

One is that nothing in life comes easily, which is why he emphasized academics as well as athletics. In 30 years, only 12 of his athletes failed to graduate.

The other is that individuals should not be judged by their skin color.

“I felt so bad for my athletes because of some of the things we had to go through,” he said. “Sometimes we had to ride hundreds of miles before we could find a restaurant--not to go into to eat but (one) that would even serve us sandwiches to take out.

“But I always told my athletes that they shouldn’t make any unilateral judgments about a group of people.”

As the times became more militant, however, his conciliatory efforts were not always appreciated, such as during the 1968 Summer Olympics at Mexico City. His longtime friend, Jesse Owens, asked Walker to join him in speaking to U.S. athletes who were planning demonstrations to protest racial discrimination at home.

Owens was Walker’s boyhood idol, and he dreamed of succeeding the hero of the 1936 Summer Olympics as the 100-meter champion. It was not entirely a fantasy, because Walker was fast enough to have made the U.S. team, but neither he nor the rest of the world at that time could outrun the Nazis, who forced the cancellation of the 1940 Summer Games by starting a war.

In 1968, USOC officials believed Owens was still respected enough to turn the athletes’ heads with a discussion of the Olympic ideal and the necessity of its remaining above politics. Instead, they turned against him. They also criticized Walker, even though he said his message was different.

“Jesse was saying one thing, and I was saying something else,” Walker said. “The athletes misinterpreted it.

“I told them if they were trying to send a message back home, do it with dignity. And I told them that they had better be prepared for the consequences because it was going to cost them. They thought that the administration had gotten to me, that I was trying to talk them out of it. It wasn’t that at all, but they said I was ‘Uncle Tomming’ them.

“It hurt me, and it hurt Jesse right up to his death because I don’t think they really listened to either one of us. Some of them since have told me they understand now what I was trying to say. They know I was right. It did cost them.”

In the most celebrated incident, the clenched-fist, black-power salutes of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the victory stand after they had won medals in the 200 meters, were met with anger from the USOC, which kicked them out of the athletes’ village, and resentment from many Americans.

Although Walker had mixed feelings at the time, he said that, in retrospect, he is proud of Smith and Carlos.

“They did what they felt they had to do, with real dignity,” he said.

In 1970, a North Carolina newspaper published a feature article about Walker.

The headline: “No More Worlds to Conquer.”

It did not seem like a bad assumption at the time. After all, Walker had gone to North Carolina Central in 1945 as a track coach for a university that had no track and, over three decades, produced 30 national champions and 11 Olympians, including two-time high hurdles gold medalist Lee Calhoun.

Walker also had served as a coach or consultant for track and field teams from seven foreign nations. He coached Ethiopia’s Olympic track and field team in 1960, when Abebe Bikila won the marathon.

But the headline writer did not know Walker, who was only beginning to conquer worlds.

“One thing I’ve always told my athletes is that success is a journey, not a destination,” Walker said.

Since that article appeared, he has been coach of the U.S. men’s track and field team at the 1976 Summer Olympics, president of the U.S. track and field federation, chancellor of North Carolina Central University, chairman of North Carolina Amateur Sports, U.S. Olympic Committee treasurer, a senior vice president for Atlanta’s Olympic organizing committee and, now, USOC president.

“I’ve been asked so often about being the first black president that reporters have started asking if it offends to be asked the question,” he said. “No, it doesn’t. I’ve been the first black this, that and the other for a lot of years, but I’ve never worried about it because I’ve always gotten it on merit.

“But I think this election was so important because it was justification of my message--if you persevere and don’t get caught up in feeling sorry for yourself, you can overcome any obstacle.

“I hope I’m a model for minorities and women in the USOC. I’m sure some of them have wanted to throw in the towel, but now they can say, ‘Look at Walker. He hung in there. Maybe I’ve got a shot.’

“It’s been traumatic to see the number of intelligent, talented people who have walked away from situations because they didn’t have the tenacity. We’ve lost a lot of leaders because of that. I like to quote Churchill. He said, ‘Sometimes it’s not enough to do the best you can; you have to do what’s required.’ ”

What kind of president will Walker be?

A proud one, he said.

“I couldn’t write a movie script like this that people would believe,” he said. “A guy born in Atlanta, when segregation was rampant, fights through all this and then returns for the centennial Olympics as the president of the flagship of all Olympic committees. It sounds Hollywoodish, but there it is.”