Sidelined (23 page)

Novels about football written in the 1960s, like Gary Cartwright's
The Hundred-Yard War
(1968) and Robert Daley's
Only a Game
(1967), for example, invariably focus on a hero who loves the game for its own sake, whose individual flair and brilliance are confronted by a manager's or coach's insistence on regimentation. There was a “shift from earlier in the century when writers of sports fiction valued athletic work to an almost unanimous insistence that what was meaningful in sport was its endangered spirit of play.”
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The impact of the counterculture in the late 1960s, which challenged authority and saw young people rebelling against the value system of their parents' generation, was felt in sport. It is important to note that while this phenomenon was linked to the black athletic revolt, the problems college athletics experienced were by no means purely racial in character. Indeed, the interconnection between racial politics and wider cultural trends contributed to the continued difficulties experienced by athletes who wished to use sport to dramatize racial injustice in society as a whole.

In the summer of 1969, many of the problems faced by college administrators were highlighted in John Underwood's three-part
Sports Illustrated
series titled “The Desperate Coach.” Underwood told of many incidents that exposed the great difficulties faced by coaching staff in dealing with a new breed of student athlete. At the University of Maryland a losing football team engineered the firing of their coach, and a small Pittsburgh college dismissed its basketball coach because he would not listen to his players.
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A track coach in Providence, Rhode Island, found a TV set in the dormitory room of four of his athletes. He argued that TV and studying did not mix and confiscated the set. The coach advised that the students could have their TV back if they decided they did not want to be
in the track team. The students duly chose the TV over their place in the team. One by one other athletes began to drop out of the team in sympathy, until there was no team left. The spring schedule had to be abandoned and the coach was fired.
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The above examples serve to illustrate that the problems encountered by coaching staff were not solely connected to race. Coaches faced challenges to their rules and discipline in countless examples all across the country. There were several examples, however, of clashes between coaches and players that did indeed center on race. At Indiana, Coach John Pont dismissed ten black players from his football team when they missed practice. Jim Owens at Washington suspended four black players who failed to show full commitment to the football team, after which eight other African Americans refused to go to a game at the University of California, where the Washington team was humbled 57–15.
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In Iowa Coach Ray Nagel refused to allow two of his black football players—one of them had been arrested on a bad-check charge—to take part in spring practice. The other blacks on the team asked the coach to apologize for things he had said about their two teammates. Nagel did apologize, but the other black players said he was insincere and they all boycotted spring practice.
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Underwood reported that many black athletes were spurred on or coerced by activists from Students for a Democratic Society or the Black Student Union. Working in concert, these organizations had “rattled athletic departments up and down the West Coast, putting heat on coaches and athletic directors, forcing the cancellation of games, threatening and coercing uncommitted athletes.”
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This issue of “uncommitted athletes” is interesting. Many coaches and administrators believed that outside influences were affecting their players. Certainly the developments in campus activism had an impact on black athletes. Younger blacks, who were often isolated on predominantly white campuses, saw continued black social and economic inferiority despite the legislative gains of the mid-1960s. Furthermore, liberal and left-wing white activists had shifted their attention from civil rights issues to opposition to the Vietnam War. This, coupled with an increased focus on gaining black control over their own communities, encouraged black activists to make a stand against any university practices they deemed to be discriminatory.
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This impulse had an impact on the relationship between athletes and their coaches.

One sociological study of black students on white campuses detected a pattern whereby white students withdrew from leadership of interracial
activism on campus. This was followed by black-white tension on campus and the formation of segregated fraternities and social organizations.
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This sense of separation directly affected white coaches and black players. Underwood contended that “many black athletes read race into almost everything a coach says or does. Often mistaking discipline for discrimination … these blacks challenge rules whenever they are contrary to their emerging cultural pride, especially as they relate to hair, and demand retribution, or more.”
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Harry Edwards explained the distinct dynamic created by the black athletic revolt on the campus. “While the philosophy of the movement depicted every white person as an institutionalized racist,” hence making them legitimate objects of political attack, he argued, it decreed that “every Negro is a potential black man,” thus exempting them from the type of political attack suffered by white coaches.
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The black athletic revolt was increasingly affected by the wider racial struggles on college campuses across the country. Throughout the 1960s the national political community had sought to address racial inequalities, and black students were empowered with the belief that they deserved to be consulted on matters that concerned them. The Black Student Union demanded a voice about issues that affected the student body and the wider community.
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This was partly because, despite the legislative achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, mainstream institutions had not been transformed to the extent that they recognized black identity. Therefore, the emphasis of the black student movement was on the reclamation of racial identity and the promotion of black culture on campus and in educational programs.
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This wider campus movement of the late 1960s touched the black athletic revolt and was touched by it.

What is crucial is that the growing athletic activism was part of an expression of black masculinity. Young black men were influenced by the culture of the growing Black Power Movement and its emphasis on the reclaiming of black masculinity. Black male athletes were therefore under pressure from within the black community to engage with the new sense of black consciousness in the late 1960s by making a stand for their cultural identity. This identity was intertwined with black masculinity, which was often expressed by the clothes and facial hair donned by black men. This development further contributed to the fact that the black athletic revolt was almost entirely a masculine movement. The role of female athletes was minimized and the language, aims, and methods of the movement reflected a concentration on the black male athlete.

This was a response to the growing Black Power Movement and its
impact on young black men in the second half of the 1960s. Activists like Stokely Carmichael embraced a vision of manhood that focused on “black men's ability to deploy authority, violence, punishment and power.”
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Music and the arts increasingly disseminated the Black Power ideology among the young black population. James Brown's 1968 anthem “Say it Loud—I'm Black and I'm Proud” expressed a confident and assertive message of black consciousness.
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A large element of this consciousness was a focus on black masculinity and the desire by black men to reclaim the manhood that had been suppressed by the white power structure. John Carlos spoke out in the aftermath of the podium salute in Mexico City against the attitude of coaches and the society they reflected when they referred to him as a “boy.” When sanitation workers in Memphis campaigned for better conditions in 1968 the slogan they adopted was “I AM A MAN.” Theirs was a conscious assertion of their manhood as central to the struggle against oppression.
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Young black men often chose to express their manhood and loyalty to Black Power ideals through their outward appearance. Facial hair, Afro haircuts, and dashikis were all part of the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s. Such styles were part of the striving of many African Americans to reject traditional cultural parameters and “affirm their racial personhood and shape their environment. No longer would they meekly respond to white stimuli.”
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Indeed, in his 1965 autobiography Malcolm X, the father of the Black Power Movement, wrote of the shame he felt when recalling his own attempts to straighten his hair as a young man. Malcolm argued that black men should embrace their blackness and wear their hair as it was meant to be.
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In the late 1960s the Afro became a potent stylistic symbol of Black Power.

The case of Fred Milton provides a good example of both the increased focus on protests about racism in sport itself and the strong elements of masculinity that were connected with this focus. In February 1969, racial tension engulfed the campus of Oregon State University when black football player Fred Milton, with the support of the Black Student Union, filed complaints against Coach Dee Andros and the athletics department. Milton alleged that his civil rights had been violated when he was dismissed from the team for refusing to shave off his mustache. Andros had strict rules about facial hair and contended that Milton had openly broken the rules.
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The coach did not permit hair over the ears or collar, overly long sideburns, or any facial hair. Andros's rules applied to all of his players, with no exceptions. Milton contended that in the off-season he did not
have to obey his coach's rules. During a lengthy conversation in his office, Andros countered that his rules applied at all times and that this was part of the “deal.”
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Many black students decided to boycott all classes until the Milton affair was resolved. In response to this decision, the white athletes on campus presented a petition to university president James Jensen supporting the decision of Andros to remove Milton from the team.

There were, however, two white athletes who spoke out against the coach's actions. Dick Fosbury, the 1968 Olympic high jump gold medalist, and Bill Bryant, an All-American fullback, did not concur with the stance taken by their fellow white athletes.
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Fosbury supported Milton's right to wear whatever facial hair he wanted during the off-season, although he did believe that the coach was within his rights to insist that he not wear it during the season. Fosbury did contend that if one of the white players had grown a mustache or a goatee Andros would have reacted in the same way; for him this was not a racial issue.
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We see here an example of black athletes focusing on the perceived insensitivity of a coach to their cultural expression. With echoes of the Bob Presley affair at Berkeley, black athletes were charging discrimination and prejudice when in reality it was a clash between team discipline and self-expression.

For many, then, this issue was less about race and more about a conservative coach trying to instill discipline in a time of cultural change. Andros argued that the issue of facial hair was just one of his ways of maintaining discipline. “I'm fighting for a principle of education—the right to run my department,” he argued, adding that he could not “abandon the concepts of training, discipline, team unity and morale.” As if to assert that there was no racial element to his decision, Andros noted that he did not interfere in the social lives of his players, and this included refusing to stop his black players from dating local white girls whose parents complained to him.
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Milton, however, claimed that his coach's actions were insensitive to black culture and argued that wearing facial hair was part of his heritage and therefore he was being denied the ability to express his racial identity.
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To Coach Andros this was just an example of indiscipline, a manifestation of the declining standards of personal grooming.

In many respects this psychological transformation in the black community put a great deal of pressure on African American athletes, specifically black male athletes. They had to maintain loyalty to their coach as a member of a team and as an athletic performer but were pressured to engage in the political activism of other black students on white campuses. The most overt symbols of this new militancy were Afros and facial
hair, and there were approximately seventy-three different cases surrounding these issues in athletics departments across the country from 1967 to 1971.
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Harry Edwards summed up the dilemma faced by black athletes on white campuses. He argued that “the black athlete could conform to the dictates and expectations of the coach and be castigated as an ‘Uncle Tom' by his black student peer group, or he could conform to the demands of the peer group and be dismissed from the team.”
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In a sporting environment that was already heavily influenced by conventional constructions of masculinity, this pressure on black male athletes was very strong.

There were examples of more constructive approaches to the problems posed by the increased pressures on athletes to embrace the heightened emphasis on black masculinity. Dick Fosbury recalled that the track coaching staff at Oregon State did not take the same hard-line approach that Andros and others did. “When we had conflicts between what the black athletes wanted to wear and what the coach was assigning as a uniform we sat down as a team and discussed what we felt would be appropriate more as a team. The coach had the final say but he was more interested in listening to the athletes and encouraging a dialogue.” Fosbury gave an example of black athletes wanting to wear black socks; the school colors were orange and black. “We had team meetings and we discussed it, and we agreed that all of us would wear black socks and so we did.”
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Demands by black athletes to amend uniforms in this way were an expression of a new black aesthetic that was inspired by the Black Power Movement, but they also show the influence of events at Mexico City. Bob Beamon, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos all wore black socks during their protests on the Olympic medal stand.