Sidelined (32 page)

There were, of course, some racial tensions inside the locker room between white and black players, and there were some problems between black players and their white coaches. Again, though, this did not manifest itself in boycotts and significant racial discord in the way it did on many campuses outside of the SEC. University of Georgia coach Vince Dooley recalled an incident in the early 1970s when some white players on the team became angry because a black player was pictured in the student newspaper in the middle of a Black Student Union demonstration. Dooley explained that the white players did not believe that black players on the team should be getting involved in this kind of political activism. Dooley and his staff defused the situation by bringing the team together and talking about the issue. It transpired that the black player in question had simply been watching the demonstration rather than participating in it, and the picture had misrepresented his position.
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As on other campuses across the country, there were racial issues surrounding facial hair on SEC football teams. Haskel Stanback recalled a situation at Tennessee in which some of the black players had discussed the possibility of boycotting the preseason Orange and White Game because they wanted to keep their facial hair. In this instance there were white players who also wanted to grow longer sideburns and mustaches.
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Coach Battle dealt with the issue by asking the black players during a team meeting if he discriminated against them. They said no and he explained to all the players, white and black, that his rule was no facial hair. Battle recalled that this was all that was needed and that no player tried to boycott or make a serious political demonstration.
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White University of Georgia player
Thomas Lyons recalled that his coach told all players when they arrived for spring practice that facial hair would not be accepted. It was not perceived as a racial issue but simply as a point of discipline and team rules.
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Condredge Holloway recalled that integrating football and other sports teams was easier than it was to integrate other areas of life. “It was all about your team winning and what was the best combination you could put out on the field…. So it went from not being able to play to making sure you get the best players you can from your area, so I think it [integration] was a much easier transition than in regular life.”
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This may well have been so. The key point is, however, that these other areas of life had faced the initial challenges of integration before the football teams of the SEC had to. In other parts of the country a myth had long developed that sport provided a special arena in which racial progress could be made. This was not the case in the South because long into the 1960s sport was still used as a symbol of the segregationist creed. When black and white players pulled on the colors of the Tennessee Vols or the Alabama Crimson Tide and played side by side they did so after schools, buses, and theaters had been required to integrate. The integration of the SEC was not at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. Football was not perceived to have blazed a trail ahead of conditions in the rest of society. As a result, a black athletic revolt did not emerge. There was not an effort to probe the discontinuity between the myth of sport as an arena that fostered racial progress and the harsher reality. Indeed, in many respects, following the integration of the SEC, sport was responsible for the development of greater racial understanding.

Vince Dooley coached the University of Georgia football team from 1964 until 1988. He saw the expansion of the number of black players in the SEC and the way in which sport could bring black and white people together. Dooley argued, “Athletics helped to integrate the South…. Passions run so hard with sports and when they saw white and black were playing together for a common cause then they were for that cause.”
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Clarence Pope, one of the first black players for the University of Georgia, told the student newspaper that he and his fellow black athletes had been given a “fair deal.” Pope elaborated, “This is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I have received an education in and out of the classroom. I have learned that Georgia is not the school it was rumored to be in the way of treatment to blacks.”
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In the passionate atmosphere of interstate rivalry in southern football after integration, race was steadily less and less of an issue. It was about winning against old rivals and playing the game
to the best of one's ability. Horace King recalled his high school days to illustrate the ability of sport to defuse racial tensions. In the first few years of integration he recalled that if the school basketball and football teams were winning then the school was unified.
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For individual black and white southerners, integrated competition helped to break down racial barriers and to foster a shared sense of purpose and identity. Johnny Musso explained, “There is something mystically good about being a teammate; you're locked together in ways that you may not be in other walks of life.”
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Athletes who look back on their experiences during the integration of college competition in the South maintain a belief in the positive role of sport in the development of race relations. At the University of Houston Donald Chaney, Elvin Hayes, and Warren McVea integrated the athletics department. They were featured in Olsen's 1968
Sports Illustrated
article as men exploited by the university and subject to social ostracism. Recent interviews with the men, however, challenge Olsen's claims. The men argued that Olsen had exaggerated the problems of their position and instead praised the Houston athletics department for the experience that it gave them. The men clearly subscribe to the view that sport promoted racial progress.
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Among both white and black players and their coaches who were at the forefront of the integration of the SEC there also remains a deep belief that sport helped to improve race relations in the South. There is a sense of romanticism as these men look back from the early twenty-first century to those experiences in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This could provoke the assertion that their views lack veracity, but the very strong and genuine way in which they are expressed shows the endurance of the myth of sport as a positive racial force. Their commitment to the ideal that sport developed racial progress in the South is strong and real. This sentiment overlooks the way sport was used for so long to maintain segregation in the South, but in some ways it is this very fact that strengthens the ideal. Since the early 1970s, when the SEC was finally fully integrated, the number of black athletes participating in the conference has increased to the extent that in many sports they are now in the majority. The fact that blacks and whites could increasingly join together to cheer on integrated teams had an important impact on southern identity; an identity that can now be shared by blacks as they continue the process of reclaiming their southernness.

Conclusion

In March 2011 black Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall stirred controversy when he supported comments by Adrian Peterson, his Minnesota Vikings counterpart, that playing in the NFL was like modern-day slavery. Mendenhall posted on his Twitter page, “Anyone with knowledge of the slave trade and the NFL could say that these two parallel each other.” What caused real outrage were posts on his official Twitter page two months later referring to the celebrations following the killing of Osama bin Laden. Mendenhall commented, “What kind of person celebrates death? It's amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We've only heard one side.” He later posted, “For those of you who said you want to see Bin Laden burn … I ask how would God feel about your heart?” The running back was rebuked by his employers, who put out a statement from team president Art Rooney II. The statement read, “I have not spoken with Rashard, so it is hard to explain or even comprehend what he meant with his recent Twitter comments. The entire Steelers organization is very proud of the job our military personnel have done and we can only hope this leads to our troops coming home soon.”
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Mendenhall later clarified his comments and insisted that he had not intended to offend anyone. This came too late for his endorsement deal with sports apparel company Champion, however. They cancelled their contract with Mendenhall, asserting, “While we respect Mr. Mendenhall's right to express sincere thoughts regarding potentially controversial topics, we no longer believe that Mr. Mendenhall can appropriately represent Champion.”
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Mendenhall's teammates also criticized his Twitter posts. Defensive captain James Farrior argued, “He made some comments that he probably shouldn't have made at the sensitive time that it was. You can voice your opinions, but you don't want to try to offend people that have strong feelings about that. You've got to think about everybody that's involved.” Cornerback Ike Taylor added, “You live and you learn, and I hope everybody accepts his apology. Some mistakes are bigger than others, and I say this is a huge mistake. It's just something you can't say. He'll learn from it.”
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Mendenhall is a professional athlete and as such he competes within a different framework from those experienced by the amateur and college athletes who have been the focus of this study. Mendenhall has signed a contract with his employers that is different from the scholarship agreements of the black fourteen, the Speed City sprinters, or basketball players at Marquette coached by Al McGuire. Indeed, this study focused on amateur rather than professional sports so as to more effectively investigate the impact of the black athletic revolt on local and national communities. Nevertheless, in the responses to Mendenhall's Twitter posts we see echoes of the problems facing athletes who wish to engage with the wider social and political agenda. As a black athlete questioning expressions of American patriotism, Mendenhall crossed a racial line and transgressed the cherished mythology of the sports world as apolitical.

The world of college sports also reacted in 2011 to the potential problems posed by Twitter. South Carolina Gamecocks football coach Steve Spurrier instated a ban on his players' use of the social media site. This ban was traced back to an incident in which one player incorrectly tweeted that his teammate had been arrested after a bar fight.
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CNBC's sports business reporter Darren Rovell criticized the trend among college coaches to prohibit the use of Twitter. Rovell argued that the ban was evidence of players not being treated as responsible students as well as athletes.
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There is an echo here of the frictions over team discipline during the black athletic revolts. As members of a team are players duty-bound to sacrifice certain rights of expression? What are the differences between Coach Andros insisting that Fred Milton remain clean-shaven and Coach Spurrier demanding that his players not use Twitter?

What these issues serve to illustrate is the contentious status of student athletes and their ability to express their own political views. Throughout this study we have seen how the position of athletes could work to compromise their ability to engage successfully in the black freedom struggle. When Tommie Smith and John Carlos connected with that struggle, most symbolically on the podium in Mexico City, they faced a backlash against their racial politics and the fact that their politics had infringed upon the sacred world of sport, a world dominated by the ideal that it was colorblind and provided leadership in the progress toward racial equality. At the time of writing there are fewer than one hundred days until the start of the 2012 Olympics. What would be the reaction if Tyson Gay, Justin Gatlin, or any other black member of the U.S. track and field team spoke out about
racial injustice after winning a medal in London? What if they posted their comments on Twitter? The prevailing ideal that sport can and should rise above racial politics would provide the context for any discussions of any such hypothetical comments.

In the period since the black athletic revolt the role of African American athletes has been used to reinforce the myth of the sporting world as a place of uncontested racial progress. A specific black aesthetic has been used at various times to emphasize this message. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall asserts that the Old Right, on the wrong side of the quest for civil rights in the 1960s, reinvented itself by painting the Civil Rights Movement as a struggle to end institutional inequality. By the 1970s New Right “color-blind conservatives” sought to ensure that equality prevailed.
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The skewing of the civil rights chronology and consequent efforts by the New Right to reduce the scope of the civil rights struggle are reflected in the institutional response to the black athletic revolt.

Activists such as Harry Edwards were painted as extremists with unrealistic and destructive demands, whereas the grievances of more moderate athletes were given more consideration. While continuing to defend the historical record of sport as a vehicle for racial progress, sports administrators enacted legislation to address the main complaints of black athletes. This response was often quite cosmetic, however, and was aimed at presenting an outward impression of racial progress in sports. In 1972 the NCAA set up an advisory commission that took steps to encourage the appointment of more black coaches and administrators, for example.
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The approach of sports administrators to the problems of the black athletic revolt reflects the color-blind conservatism that Hall identifies. The legislation that was enacted was designed to prevent the most egregious individual acts of racism. Sports administrators continued, however, to resist the use of sport to protest racial injustice in wider society.

Just as the Civil Rights Movement was reduced to a distinct, narrow period and its gains minimized by the New Right, so the radicalism of the black athletic revolt was diffused by sports administrators in the 1970s and beyond. Furthermore, the black athletic revolt and the civil rights struggle from which it grew have receded into “an expanding disjuncture between African-American prosperity and poverty.”
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Sporting achievement is seen as the way out of the ghetto. Racism in sport, however, reflects the racial prejudice of society in general. A 2000 study concluded that “racial discrimination in sports continues to erode remarkable accomplishments that are being realized among African-American
athletes.”
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Disturbingly, the message of Edwards and others has been largely forgotten with the emergence of a distinctly black athletic style into the sporting mainstream.