Sidelined (24 page)

When black athletes did engage in militancy on campus they invariably received help from outside agencies. This was the case at Oregon State. The NAACP endorsed the black student activism at Oregon State University. The university's Commission on Human Rights and Responsibilities ruled, after two months of deliberation, that Milton's human rights had been “violated.” Recommendations were made to improve the position of black athletes on campus, but no procedures were established to ensure the recommendations were heeded.
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Milton won his point, but this remained something of a pyrrhic victory as the university balked at putting in place strong and effectively enforced procedures to allow athletes more freedom of cultural expression. Nevertheless, Milton was able to affirm his black manhood and show he was standing up for the rights of his community. In this way he could achieve a psychological win.

The Milton affair is one of countless examples of problems between white coaches and black athletes during 1969. The black athletic revolt increasingly focused on these issues of identity and self-expression and argued that sport was tainted by racial discrimination. Significantly, though, the type of protest that black athletes pursued could all too easily be branded as simply an expression of a countercultural impulse born in declining standards of discipline among young athletes. Jake Gaither, the coach at the traditionally black college Florida A&M, recognized worsening standards among his black players. Crucially, as he was himself black he did not perceive the problem to be racial in any way. Gaither argued, “You're dealing with a new breed of young people today. I began to see it three or four years ago. Kids, who did not have anything better to do than rebel against discipline, rebel against the Establishment, rebel against the status quo.”
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One Big Eight football coach argued, “I'm tired of this crap about protesting.” One of his colleagues stated, “We've always got to understand
them.
Well maybe I can't. I can't know what it's like to be a Negro. Or live in a ghetto. But that doesn't mean I don't try, and I sure think trying works two ways: they've got an obligation to understand
me.
I'm the one giving them the scholarship.”
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The problem of resolving these tensions was something that the sporting establishment could not ignore.

The black athletic revolt was accompanied by a wider athletic revolt. Athletes were increasingly insistent that they should be treated with greater respect and that they should play a part in the administration of sport. This was particularly the case among white amateur athletes. Hal Connolly and Cleve Livingston were prominent supporters of the OPHR who began to voice concerns that athletes' human rights needed to be given more consideration. These included the right to train as they wished, to take part in events that they wished, to earn a living, and to participate in the administration of the sports in which they competed.
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John Dobroth, a lesser-known track and field competitor, worked alongside Connolly, Lee Evans, and others to set up a biracial organization called United Amateur Athletes (UAA). This organization was designed to protect the rights of athletes and to press sporting authorities for a greater say in the administration of athletics. Dobroth recalled, “We thought we were taken advantage of in those days…. It was archaic and we knew it had to change and we knew we had to get some power.”
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The UAA newsletter of November 1971 stated that it was “no secret that competing athletes have periodic grievances concerning the administration and promotion of United States track and field.” The newsletter went on to outline the various grievances of the athletes and suggest some proposals for change. For example, the UAA was to request a significant donation from all track and field promoters in order to help finance its activities.
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The UAA remained, in the words of Dobroth, something of a “rump organization.”
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It did not achieve any major advances in the development of athletes' rights, and although sports administrators were aware of the threat posed by actual and potential unrest, power still remained in the hands of traditional administrative bodies. Nevertheless, the organization did give athletes a voice and served as a warning that their views needed to be considered.

The defensiveness that traditional governing elites exhibited in response to criticism has already been noted in the response of the NCAA to the charges of racial discrimination in sport made in Jack Olsen's
Sports Illustrated
series. Echoes of this can be seen in the response of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) to the activities of the UAA. A letter written to Dobroth from the AAU's track and field administrator, Ollan Cassell, in November 1971 was very specific in addressing what Cassell believed to be factual errors in the newsletter that Dobroth had produced.
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From 1968 through the early 1970s the AAU, the USOC, and the NCAA were all aware of the potential threat posed by a rising desire among athletes to become more involved in the administration of sport. This issue ran alongside the growing focus on alleged racial discrimination in sport. Administrators' responses to these twin challenges to the sporting community reveal a mixture of strategic concessions and an attempt to neutralize dissent.

At the executive committee meeting of the USOC in December 1968 the members started by reviewing the report on the Mexico City Olympics and the recommendations for future games. Referring to the issues surrounding the protests of Smith, Carlos, and other athletes, the report argued, “There should have been a confrontation between coaches and team personnel and these problems should have been resolved in the United States before permitting teams to leave for Mexico City.” Included in a list of seemingly contradictory recommendations were calls to “enforce statements from athletes to comply with USOC and IOC rules … improve indoctrination of athletes prior to departure for Games” and “consider recommendations from athletes, coaches and managers for improvements.”
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So USOC leaders acknowledged that there were problems and that athletes'
suggestions for improvements should be considered but in the same breath they revealed a desire to neutralize dissent by calling for improved “indoctrination” of athletes. This was hardly a statement to please those who wanted athletes to have more freedom of thought and action.

In the December meeting of the USOC executive committee the former rower John Sayre gave a presentation on behalf of a board of consultants that had been set up to liaise with athletes in the months leading up to and during the Mexico City Olympics. This was the board that had Jesse Owens as its most notable representative. Sayre presented a statement written by athletes after the games that called for their greater involvement in the decision making of the USOC. Sayre argued, “Our athletes are mature, intelligent, aware and concerned men and women. They feel deeply the problems and divisions of today's world and see sports as a major force to give new and positive purpose to the younger generation.”
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Sayre went on to recommend several initiatives that should be adopted if further unrest was to be averted. These included seats on the board of consultants for recently retired athletes and a responsibility for members of the board to eat meals with the athletes in the Olympic village so as to gain a greater appreciation of their concerns.

The realization of a need to include the voices of more athletes in the administration of U.S. Olympic sports in the long term helped to neutralize potential unrest among athletes who were concerned with issues other than race. The UAA was a loose affiliation of athletes, and boycotts or major protest action in favor of their intended aims never materialized. What is important here is that the USOC in particular recognized the potential for political issues to be brought into the sporting arena. Sayre argued that athletes felt the “problems and divisions of today's world” and the warning was that they might use sport to dramatize these issues. The USOC had been consistent in its aversion to the intrusion of politics into sport, and making concessions toward increasing athletes' rights of representation within its own organization seemed a small price to pay to head off such an intrusion.

The problems posed by the racial turmoil on college campuses had to be approached by the NCAA. The organization responded to the increasing campus unrest and the revelations of Underwood's articles in much the same way as it had to Olsen's series a year before. The major concern was to discredit the claims of those who argued that sport was infected by widespread racial prejudice and to neutralize dissent. In this case the NCAA was not as concerned as the USOC with sport being used to highlight
wider political issues. The major problem facing intercollegiate athletics was a challenge to the ideal that sport provided a positive racial force. The NCAA set about a policy of neutralizing dissent and reaffirming this traditional ideal.

In November 1969 a memorandum to NCAA executive director Walter Byers presented a list of questions to be used in an investigation to ascertain the extent to which “outside interests” may have been involved in the difficulties some universities had experienced with “Negro student-athletes.” Interestingly, the vast majority of the proposed questions were aimed at discovering how students protested, what the impact was on other team members and coaches, and the level of disruption to the university as a whole. Only two of the proposed thirteen questions were actually concerned with what the athletes were “demanding” and whether or not the athletics department had met with the protesters. None of the questions, which were to be used in “off the record” discussions with coaches at Wyoming, Washington, Colorado State, Oregon State, and Iowa, probed whether black protesters' grievances were in any way legitimate or whether the universities had attempted to meet these grievances with policy changes.
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There is evidence that a number of press clippings and editorials were collected by NCAA staff in relation to the racial problems on the campuses mentioned above. Some of this material was passed on to Senator John McClellan, who led the Subcommittee on Investigations that had produced the Student Disturbance Act earlier in 1969.
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Many college athletes were caught up in the antiwar movement and asserted their right to break out of what Bob McLennan, white captain of the 1970 University of California track team, called the “apolitical atmosphere which has permeated the athletic community.”
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McClellan's investigations, however, did not simply focus on dissent concerning Vietnam. Indeed, in his statement introducing the 1969 act on the Senate floor he quoted Professor Nathan Glazer in identifying “radical white students [and] militant black students as the major threat to universities.” The senator went on to identify the Black Panthers among several groups that incited trouble on college campuses.
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There was a feeling among administrators that black activist groups were attempting to influence student athletes and were instrumental in instigating some of the campus demonstrations. Certainly one of the questions that the NCAA was planning to ask in their off-the-record talks with coaching staff was whether there was any evidence of outside interests exerting pressure on their athletes.
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The concern of national administrators was to minimize the disruption caused by protests and to deflect charges of institutional racism. Their mindset was similar to that of men like Brundage, Roby, and Owens. Sport had provided an arena where African Americans could excel, and to disrupt that arena was an act of ingratitude and immaturity on the part of protesting black athletes. The dominant focus of the NCAA was, therefore, on how best to refute the claims that sport was in any way institutionally racist. This became the principal issue because of the shifting focal point of the black athletic revolt. The major emphasis was on protest against racism in sport as opposed to using sport to protest racial injustice in the wider society. Nevertheless, the NCAA did attempt to engage with these wider problems. One clear way to combat the attack on the long-held belief that sport was a positive racial force was to reemphasize this ideal.

In concert with the federal government the NCAA embarked on an initiative aimed at bringing the benefits of involvement in sport to inner-city youth. The National Summer Youth Sports Program (NSYSP) was to involve approximately 150 colleges running activities and events for young people aged twelve to eighteen. This program had obvious racial connections because many of America's most impoverished inner-city youth were in fact black. The NCAA was, therefore, continuing to preach the ideal that sport was a positive racial force. The NSYSP program could be cited as an example of sport being used to promote racial progress and therefore reaffirmed the very ideal that the black athletic revolt sought to challenge. Clearly NCAA administrators were pleased with the progress of the program. The minutes of the organization's executive council meeting of 1969 commend Walter Byers and other members of the NCAA for their leadership of the NSYSP project. Members of the committee watched a documentary that showed the positive impact of the activities of the NSYSP. It was noted that the continuance of the project was very much desirable, as long as the appropriate funding was supplied by the incoming Nixon administration.
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What we can see in the response of sporting administrators to the problems of athletic unrest in the period after the 1968 Olympics is a mixture of strategic concessions and attempts to neutralize dissent. The calls for greater athlete involvement in the running of sport were taken into account by the USOC and the AAU, and processes were set in motion that led to reforms that resulted in the 1978 Amateur Sports Act. This act provided for gender equality, sports development, and athletes' rights.
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So a framework that could deal with athletes' calls for greater involvement
without fundamentally revolutionizing the administration of sport was conclusively put in place. The contemporaneous focus on racial discrimination and prejudice within sport itself was greeted with great defensiveness by the NCAA. They were more concerned with refuting allegations and neutralizing dissent than with actually helping to improve conditions for black athletes.