Sidelined (10 page)

Hartmann seems broadly to support this view when he states that despite the excuses given, “most observers also recognized that many of the defections had something to do with the proposed Olympic boycott.”
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This is not, however, an entirely satisfactory conclusion. Certainly Lew Alcindor was a man who took a vocal and principled stance concerning the racial inequalities in America. He, along with Warren and Allen, to a lesser extent, had been involved in the initial OPHR proposal in November 1967, and Edwards pointed to him as an early supporter alongside Tommie Smith.
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Indeed, Alcindor caused something of a controversy when explaining his decisions concerning the Olympics. On NBC's
Today
show in July 1968 Alcindor said that while he lived in the United States it was not really his country. A station break then interrupted the interview and Alcindor could not expand upon his statement. Alcindor gave a further interview the following week in which he clarified his comments, arguing, “We have been a racist nation with first-class citizens and my decision not to go to the Olympics is my way of getting the message across.”
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Certainly Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar after converting to Islam, was a deeply thoughtful man whose decision not to compete was born of a sharp sense of political consciousness.
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Nevertheless, none of the other basketball players mentioned in the Hano article went on to offer anything like the vocal support for the boycott expressed by Alcindor. To argue that by deliberately not participating they were showing support for the boycott ascribes an interpretation to their actions that is not of their own articulation. Neal Walk actually went on the record to say that he had not even contemplated the boycott; his was a truly practical decision based on the pressures of the classroom and the desire to graduate on time. “I want people to know,” Walk said, “that I wanted to go to the Olympics. But I also want them to know that I was changing majors then and I knew that if I went to the trials, it would mean more delays in my school work.”
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Walk, Unseld, Hayes, and others gave no indication that they were part of a boycott, and as such it is wrong to align them with it. Indeed, Hayes told the
Chicago Defender
that he had not been contacted by any supporters of the Olympic boycott and that his main motivation for missing the games was to ensure he received an NBA contract.
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Hano quotes Edwards as saying it is “not what they say, it is what they do.”
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On the contrary, surely given the fact that the aim of the
OPHR was to trumpet injustice and racial inequality, what athletes said and how they justified their actions was very important.

Furthermore, the USOC was less concerned about the connection between the OPHR and the withdrawal of the basketball players than it was about the actions of professional teams in poaching potential Olympic performers. In a telegram sent in March 1968, the USOC president, Douglas Roby, expressed concerns to Vice President Hubert Humphrey that NBA teams were recruiting possible members of the 1968 Olympic team. Roby asked for Humphrey's assistance in ensuring that this practice stopped so that a good-quality team could be sent to Mexico City.
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It is certainly fair to conclude, then, in light of the evidence presented above, that the decision of several top basketball players to miss the Olympic trials was not an unqualified success for the OPHR by any means.

The spring of 1968 brought further ambiguous success for the OPHR, but at the same time the possibility of an Olympic boycott receded significantly. As mentioned, one of the original demands of the OCHR was that South Africa be banned from the Olympics because of its apartheid government. South Africa had been suspended from the Olympic movement in 1963 until such time as it could demonstrate an end to racial segregation in organized sport. Despite dissension by some IOC insiders, following a report that praised the advances made by the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee in changing racial policies, a decision was made in February 1968 to reinstate the South Africans. Avery Brundage highlighted the positive force of sport and concluded that the Olympic movement had helped to improve the position of nonwhites in South Africa.
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President of the South African Olympic committee Frank Braun wrote to Brundage in April 1968 praising him for his stance supporting South African participation in the games to be held in Mexico. He argued that the existence of a multiracial team from South Africa would promote the cause of sports freedom. Braun wrote to Brundage in another letter, “We all feel that the Olympic movement and participation in the Games have so much to offer our non-whites that any further delays in the advancement of their opportunities in world sport will prove disastrous and bring to a stop the progress we are making in the right direction.”
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This was a classic statement of the “sport working to promote racial progress” ideal that Edwards and his supporters were so keen to expose.

Brundage was a vociferous spokesman for the belief that sport could promote social progress. He firmly believed that sport was a force for keeping “the flag of idealism flying.”
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During debate over U.S. participation at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin Brundage had stood firm against anyone who would allow politics to intrude on the sporting arena. He argued that the “Olympic Games are above all considerations of politics, race, color or creed.”
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In one of numerous letters Brundage sent to people who supported his condemnation of the actions of Smith and Carlos during the 1968 Games he outlined once again his clear philosophy. The head of the IOC explained, “We actively combat the introduction of politics into the Olympic movement and are adamant against the use of the Olympic Games as a tool or as a weapon by any organization.”
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Brundage's views concerning race, politics, and sport were somewhat one dimensional. He believed sport to be a force for social and racial progress and in this sense he endorsed its ability to influence the political realm. He firmly rejected, however, any interference by politics in the sporting world. Similarly, Brundage was a vocal opponent of any kind of racial segregation in sport; however, he was “not especially sensitive to discrimination outside of sports.”
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For Edwards and his supporters, this one-dimensional view was characteristic of the whole sporting establishment and provided significant evidence of the need for a boycott of the Olympics. Edwards argued that the USOC displayed its racist demeanor when it supported South Africa's reinstatement and that this was symptomatic of the “intransigency of the white racist dominated Olympic movement.”
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African nations and many others in Asia threatened to boycott an Olympics that involved South Africa, and Edwards supported a proposal for an alternative African Games. The pressure on Brundage and the IOC increased as the Soviet Union threw its support behind the potential boycotters. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 affected events as blacks mourned their fallen hero. African Americans across the United States grieved and raged at the death of the civil rights leader, and cities burned as race riots swept the country. Edwards pointed to the Olympic boycott as “a solemn memorial to Dr. King and his family” and increased his pressure on the Olympic authorities to expel South Africa.
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Despite the pleading of the South African Olympic delegation that the IOC should not give in to boycotts and threats, Brundage was forced to concede to the inevitable and call a vote of the IOC members concerning South African participation. In a statement released on April 24, 1968, Brundage explained, “The International Olympic Committee is not bowing to threats or pressures of any kind from those who do not understand the true Olympic philosophy. Boycott is not a word used in sport circles.” He went on to lament that the necessity of holding such a vote was “a sad commentary on the state of the world today.”
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He finally told reporters on April 28 that the South Africans were to be excluded from participation at the Mexico City Games. He remarked to a British interviewer, “We seem to live in an age when violence and turbulence are the order of the day.”
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In his account of the Olympic boycott movement Edwards argued that, “following the example set by the OCHR and Afro-American athletes, the thirty-two nations of the Organization of African Unity declared that if South Africa were in fact allowed to participate, they would boycott the games in protest.”
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Not surprisingly, Edwards explains that it was his own organization that had taken the lead in campaigning for South African nonparticipation. Certainly, opposition to any athletic competition involving representatives of apartheid South Africa was part of the original OCHR statement of aims released in November 1967. Furthermore, when
the IOC announced in February 1968 that South Africa had been invited to the Olympics, Edwards spoke out against the decision and proposed the staging of “African Games.” There is also no doubt that the efforts of Edwards and the OCHR were acknowledged by the African nations that proposed a boycott of the Mexico City Games. Indeed, a letter to Edwards from the African National Congress in South Africa, dated March 5, 1968, stated, “Your views and support for our struggle against apartheid give us tremendous encouragement that all is not lost regarding public opinion in the U.S.A.”
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The wording of this expression of gratitude is telling, however. The main role of the OCHR was to express opposition to the opinion of the USOC that South Africa should be allowed to compete in Mexico City; any impact that Edwards had was confined to the shaping of public debate in the United States. The main reasons why Brundage and the IOC had to reinstate the ban on the South Africans stemmed from the dynamics of international politics and the stance of the Mexican organizing committee, not pressure applied by Edwards and the OCHR. The potential boycott of a games including South Africa by not only African nations but also the Islamic world and the Communist bloc constituted a serious challenge to the IOC.
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Furthermore, the Mexican Olympic hosts were determined that South Africa should not attend the games. Attempting to project the image of a defender of Third World countries and determined to cast off the perception of Mexican subservience in relation to more “developed” nations, the organizing committee intensively lobbied the IOC to ban the South African team. Indeed, Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz stated that the dignity of the nation depended on ensuring that the South Africans should not attend the games.
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The Mexican organizing committee sent representatives to meet with the African nations that were threatening to boycott the games and assure them that they supported their aspirations and were against racial discrimination and that the decision to allow South Africa to compete was solely the choice of the IOC.
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The Mexican authorities were aware of prevailing negative foreign interpretations of their nation—most notably from those in the developed world who supported South African participation—and the hosting of the games represented an opportunity to assemble “a coherent marketing approach that leveraged the nation's perceived strengths while simultaneously reconfiguring (and erasing) its alleged weaknesses.”
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For the Mexican organizing committee, ensuring that the South African team did not attend the games was an important element in seizing this opportunity.