Leveling the Playing Field Still Merely an Aspiration

You might not know Tom Williams. You might should. If you think blacks are shut out of top coaching and management positions in college and pro sports, you should know Tom Williams is doing something about it.

Not the famous Michael Jordan, not Tiger Woods, not Ken Griffey Jr. It’s the anonymous Tom Williams giving the voiceless a voice. He is speaking for blacks who not only don’t get top jobs, they don’t get interviews because they’re not in the old-boy network.

Remember Al Campanis? When poor Al froze in the headlights of Ted Koppel’s questioning, the great Dodgers scout could only repeat that blacks didn’t have the “necessities” to be baseball managers. For the sin of stumbling syntax, Campanis was punished by the loss of his career and the humiliation of having his name become shorthand for racism in sports. Jackie Robinson’s friend and Roberto Clemente’s angel later tried to explain that by “necessities” he meant the experience and friends in high places gained by working through all levels of the game.

By friends, he meant the old-boy network. Somebody knows somebody who knows somebody. In sports as well as in the real world, those somebodies in position to hire usually have been white men who know white men who know more white men.

For the last 11 NFL head coaching vacancies in a league where two of every three players are black, no black coaches were hired; two were interviewed. “And it’s worse in NCAA Division I-A,” Williams says. “There were only eight black head coaches, and now it’s down to five.”

It’s a closed loop.

Has been, might always be.

Tom Williams wants to open the loop.

“I met with three NFL assistant coaches this winter, and when I looked in their eyes, I saw despair and defeated people,” he says. “They felt they had no chance -- 11 jobs and not even an interview.”

Williams is 63. He’s a Stanford graduate, the Cardinal’s first black football player, later on the school’s athletic board. His management consulting firm in San Francisco does executive recruiting. His passion for football, expertise as a executive recruiter and realization that black coaches needed help led to an idea that “may make money, but it’s really a labor of love.”

The idea is The Level Playing Field. An allusion to a hope, “the name is innocuous enough that it doesn’t get anybody inflamed,” Williams says. “It represents a desire just to get on the field to play. And not have to play uphill.”

The Level Playing Field is a website at www.tlpf.com/tlpftest. It’s a sort of cyberspace old-boys network, only dedicated to black football coaches. Williams’ advisory board includes Stanford Coach Tyrone Willingham, Vikings Coach Dennis Green and former 49ers coach George Seifert. TLPF carries a newsletter and will make coaching resumes available to subscribers. Only five months old, TLPF at maturity will include a profile on all black coaches at the college and pro levels.

“People can sit in their offices and go through a lot of candidates: 50, 60, 100,” Williams says. “They can get 1’⪙ for individuals they’ve never met. It brings a sense of professionalism into the hiring process.”

In an introductory letter inviting coaches to submit resumes to TLPF, Williams wrote:

“The website will be marketed to all university presidents, directors of athletics, National Football League teams and other interested parties. The purpose of the data bank is to bring to the attention of the aforementioned organizations the talent that currently exists in the profession and provide the opportunity to individuals to be evaluated and contacted on a confidential basis.”

Williams asks candidates to list pro athletes they have coached; to name references on their skills and character and to write mini-essays on “the most challenging problems you’ve encountered as a coach” and “where you feel you need to grow and improve.”

A Williams friend, Stanford Athletic Director Ted Leland, says the NCAA and the Black Coaches Association have job banks. “But I’m not sure either of them is of 21st century quality. Tom’s has a chance to go if universities will use it.”

They should use it, Leland says, “because, clearly, blacks are under-represented in head coaching positions, and I can see no reason for it other than professional and university officials are ignorant of the credentials of these men.”

Black Entertainment Television recently did a show asking, “Racism? Is America Out of Touch?” There’s a one-second answer: yes. But for two hours, the panelists raged. I learned nothing. Rather than a dialogue on race, the show was a monologue of anger.

Yes, I’d be angry, too, if my ancestors’ slavery guaranteed my despair 200 years later. But I wonder what shape my anger would take. Would I have learned anger is self-defeating? Would I know that pulling the shackles of anger tight against our souls guarantees that no one, black or white, can ever be free?

I hope I would put the anger aside and do something.

Tom Williams has done just that.