In Black America; Blacks in Sports

Pel熊 In Black America, reflections of the Black experience in American society. Blacks have had a significant impact on sports in this country. This, despite the fact that many sports, Blacks were prohibited from competing with whites until the second half of the 20th century.

While Blacks are highly visible at athletes, Blacks reporting and covering those athletes in coaches in this nation's media are almost invisible. At the present time, there is only one full-time sports editor and no sports columnists at any of the major daily newspapers. I'm John Hansen, and this week, our focus is on Blacks in sports, with U-Lewis, sports caster, Lynn Elmore, professional basketball player with the New York Nicarbockers, and head basketball coach John Thompson of Georgetown in Black America. The intent of what I do is not intended to inconvenience folks, but it does inconvenience folks. It is intended to salvage enough time to fulfill the obligation responsibility other people I'm responsible for. Where I have a problem with it is when folks start, you know, you can say, hey, John Thompson is wrong. And if I listen to members of the media sometime, I would think that you responsible for educating the world.

Now let my kids talk to you, you will, in fact, educate them for me, which, in fact, is a fallacy. But what happens is that you go in dealing with John Thompson's personality. You know, you go in dealing with John Thompson, but you do get disturbed, too. This is not a disease that only the white media has. You know, you, and I think that's normal. Somebody said that in here before. How are you expected to treat me? I put Black Riders out. Imagine. Several of them, I refuse to give Black Riders interviews. You know, I don't discriminate against you. I give you trouble, too, if you interfere with what I am doing. And I expect you to deal and say, John Thompson coached poorly. John Thompson made a mistake, but where I have a problem with it is that when it starts to enter into all kinds of personality things, some of which have been brought up here. You know, because I think somebody puts you in it. I have problems if you don't express the same feelings about me that you express about your newspaper. You know, if you don't say that your newspaper is discriminating, you know, this man felt very free to say that the administration should question me.

You know, if he's freedom of the press now, he got out and around with athletics. When he started talking about color, he should dealt with his newspapers' problems, too. Don't just deal with athletics is convenient. The path to becoming a sportscaster for Black Americans is not a well-mouted road. If anything, sportscasters say that the best way to get a job as a sportscaster, especially if you're Black, is to either be a former athlete or be extremely lucky. Today, there are a few Black sportscasters in visible positions, but most of them at the network level are former jocks or performers, not journalists, school and covering events. For that reason, most of the ex-athletes in the broadcast booths are used as analysts, not play-by-play commentators. Several Black sportscasters around the country have rallied at the injustices of the system. A system that has a preconceived notion that a good athlete makes a good sportscaster or

sports analyst. I spoke with Uluas, sportscaster for KVUE-TV in Austin, Texas. I got into sports in the roundabout way. I played sports in high school in college, played basketball and football. When I was in college, I started realizing that there wasn't a pro career on the horizon. So I was a communications major, and I lucked out and got a job at WRC in Washington as a radio engineer. I stayed there for a year, my junior year, my senior year, they asked me if I wanted to work there in television, I worked in television as a running camera and videotape and sound. After that, I went into journalism, because that was my minor in college, I transferred within NBC from TV, from production to the news department. I worked in news for three years, writing news in Cleveland, Ohio at WKYC.

After sitting next to an anchor man who was making $200,000 a year and I was writing everything that he read, I decided that I wanted to get in front of the camera too. To do that, I had to go to a smaller market, so I went to Tucson, Arizona as a news reporter. The first day I reported to work, they asked me if I would like to try to do sports too, because they needed a weekend sports guy. I said, yes, naturally, and I've been doing sports for five years now, and I just sort of lucked into it, and now it seems like I found a home. You attended Howard University, School of Communication. How did that prepare you for your present position? It helped me, if I didn't go to Howard, or if I hadn't been in the right place at the right time, I wouldn't be where I am now. Howard had a great influence because of the school communications, I had teachers that had enough insight to make me get my third class broadcast license.

That opened the door for me to get a job at WRC in Washington, and everything else's history. If I hadn't started at Howard, I don't know what I would have done. The engineering background in your career, was that real beneficial to what you're doing now as far as knowing the electronic ends and all of the industry? Very beneficial for a number of reasons. One, it makes me appreciate what I'm doing now. It makes me appreciate everybody around me that helps in the production of my sports cast, and in the production of everything I do. The camera man, people like that, you can't take them for granted. A lot of people that are in front of the camera do tend to take the people that are behind the scenes for granted, and I can't do that. The other thing helps me, and it just helps me in the fact that it gave me the background for working in a TV station and working in a radio station. If I hadn't worked behind the scenes, then I don't think I would appreciate what I'm

doing now. You said that when you went to Tucson, I believe it was, you went in as a news reporter, but once you arrived at the station in one of the weekend, sports anchor, did you find it difficult being a black sportcaster and entering in the business? I think the hardest part is to get your foot in the door, and I think that regardless what color you are, black, white, or otherwise, that's the hardest part for anybody. Once you get in, the next hardest part is to stay in and to move up, and I don't feel that I've been discriminated against anything because of my color. I think that I've been fortunate to have the opportunities that I've had. Being black as a sportscaster, I think it's helped me because I tend to get interviews from black athletes. I'm going to ask you that. Are there more easily speaking with you since blacks make up a good number of our professional teams and collegiate teams around the country?

Usually, when they see me walking to a locker room, they're surprised. They'll say, wow, who are you? Because there aren't that many blacks that are doing what I'm doing. The athletes are pleasantly surprised, and at the same time, they feel like they can relate to me because they feel like I go through the same things that they go through. It's real easy to relate, and we can talk about other things besides just the sports. I think that makes them relax, and this is an advantage, being a former athlete, and you're still athletically inclined when you sit down and write to stories or go out and cover particular. Definitely. Like, event, I believe so. I've seen a lot of sportscasters that obviously have had no background in sports. In other words, they've never played in high school or college, and they tend to get down on the athletes a lot.

They think that the athletes are supposed to be superhuman. They forget that these guys are people just like. They forget that these guys are people just like everybody else. Because they are people, they make mistakes, and they have ups and down periods in their lives. I think you have to take that into account. I don't like to put anybody down because I know it's just like to lose, and I know it's like to win. And that's part of life, everybody wins and loses in some kind of game every day of the week. So I like to be positive about my approach to sports, and I like to show the athletes in a positive light. Do you think stations are reluctant to hire black sportscasters? We don't see a lot of black sportscasters. We see anchor persons. We see weather people, but sports, and when you think of sports in the back of your mind, the participation and blacks have had throughout the centuries. Well, sometimes I compare being a black sportscaster to being a black coach or being a black

quarterback. It's a new job that blacks are just getting the opportunity to do. And I don't know why that is. I don't know why management, the management of different stations won't take a chance and let some black guy try. Although at the same time that we say this, there's the Gumball brothers, there's Brian Gumball and his brother, and there's Jim Smith out in California, and there are black sportscasters around. I know I'm not the only one, and I know that I'm not the highest paid one by any means. So I think that that opportunity is starting, the door is starting to open for more black sportscasters. Do you have sole responsibility of your sportscasters? Are you the... I'm a one man band. Basically what I do is the night before I go home, I line up stories for the next day. Whatever time they happen, that's what time I go to work.

It's pretty tough for my family, but at the same time, like I said, I'm going to make the most of this opportunity. So I go into work, do a story, or two, and come back to the station, I edit them myself, write the whole sportscasters myself, time it out myself, I do everything. The only thing I don't do is shoot it, you know, I'm not the photographer. We have a station policy where photographers are assigned to reporters, and really if we didn't have that policy, a lot of times I would shoot my own sports because of our schedule on sports. Have you changed your own sports? Oh yeah, in Tucson, Arizona. But you know, that happens because sometimes I'd rather do it myself because you might have a photographer that doesn't know anything about baseball, and he'll get on the third base side, and he'll have a hard time following the ball, and he's hit the left field, or, you know, he'll go to a tennis match and sit right on the net and go back and forth instead of getting one into the quarter, or whatever.

So most of the time what I end up doing is directing a photographer and telling him what shots to get. So I'm basically a one-man band, but it's fun. Has it ever been a chance that sports was the least story that day? Oh yeah. Let's see, I'm trying to think of the biggest event like that recently. Well, the Super Bowl, when that comes along, that's a big story. We usually have something at the top of the show. I can't think of trying to think, the Texas Oklahoma game, I know we had something, you know, like, it's almost like a tease, you know, Texas beat Oklahoma today, we'll be back with more in the sports cast, or something like that. We'll just have a quick 30-second voice over, or when I say voice over, I mean, we'll show a little clip, a little highlight, and then just talk about it just enough to entice people, stick around and watch the sports cast, but it's only when there's something major that affects, you know, 80,000 people in Austin, or something like that.

When you travel around the city and visit schools in the area, do you find black kids more interested in becoming sports castes and seeing you on television? Yeah, I think that's one thing I do enjoy. The fact that I think I bring a fantasy to life for a lot of black kids, a lot of black kids, because they don't see black people on TV, they figure, well, you know, I can't do that job when I grow up. But then they see me come to the school, and they see that I'm just like their father and just like people they know, and I think that makes them feel like they have a chance to make it, and so I don't know how many of them want to be sports castes. I run into a lot of them that want to be other things, but, you know, I know that my presence helps them in some way, and that makes me feel good. The opportunity is there because you have been given the opportunity. Right, I want them to believe in themselves and that they can do it.

I never did aim to be a sports cast, and like I said earlier, I kind of lucked into the job. But, you know, if I had been 10 years older, I never would have had the opportunity probably. So I think that I believe in the American dream, and I believe that things are starting to look up for everybody. I want to believe that because I feel if you think on the negative side all the time, then you'll limit yourself. And so I try to be positive all the time and just keep moving ahead, and I believe that things will change. And I try to tell the kids that I talk to that they can make the world change because they're going to have to. And, you know, if they believe that, then they will get where they want to go. You mentioned in the earlier part of this interview that the players were easy to speak with. The reaction you get from the coaches. The coaches. No, not really. The coaches, well, at the University of Texas where I do a lot of interviews, the coaches

know me. So that's, you know, real easy. When I go out of town, the coaches are usually receptive to, you know, the media. They know that they're going to be interviewed. Now, if you come up and, you know, you know, and you ask the first question, I think that's the main one. And on the first way you present yourself to anybody. The coaches will react accordingly. If you come up and act like you don't know anything about the game or act like you don't know anything about what he's doing, then he's going to give you an off-the-wall answer and he's not going to want to be bothered. But if you seem to know what you're talking about and, you know, you're intelligent or whatever, they will pay attention to you and they don't, I don't think they think about my color one way or the other. New Louis sportscaster for KVUE TV and ABC Affiliate. I also spoke with Lynn Elmore, a ten-year veteran with the New York Nicarbockers. Mr. Elmore is the first professional basketball player to be accepted to Harvard's law school. Now, as we all know, black athletes, all of us, more or less, epitomize the star category

in a major sports. And it's also known that, although a lot of the endorsements and rewards escape many of us, the harsh reality and sometimes overly critical reporting, have seemed to visit the black player, coach, a manager and a disproportionate frequency. And that includes drug situations, mental health and financial problems. Now, you know, a lot of times people wonder, particularly athletes wonder, is it more newsworthy to chronicle the downfall or is more expected of us because of that, quote, inherited prowess or the seven-figure bank account or whatever? An example of that is in Boston, where criticism of Robert Parrish, because he was having a subpar game against probably the best center in the universe, Cream of Doology Bar. But yet, Kevin McCale had a very, very subpar performance against my particular team in New York Knicks and no one even bothered to bring that out. It seems as though we, the black athlete, can at times be juxtaposed against ourselves or a white counterparts to prove a point in some type of morality playing.

If anyone's ever read Dick Young, who writes for New York Daily News, you'll know what I'm talking about. You know, basketball is unique, obviously. A majority of the players are black and there aren't enough whites to more or less eclipse black accomplishments. So there isn't much replacement of this player for that player in the eyes of a reporter to more or less raise somebody to celebrate its status. But within the last five years that I've observed the NBA, it seems like a burgeoning number of black reporters have arrived on the beat. And this seems to have helped. Most reporters, actually all reporters, and Sheraton being an editor, he'll testify to this, that they're expected to do their job and expected to be objective. But in basketball, to me, it seems that black writers can view the world with some sympathy and even are able to relate off the record, so to speak, with the athlete giving insight to some of their stories. The black reporter may also balance that, quote, objectivity that white reporters always

like to use as an excuse for some really dirty story, or overzealousness of another reporter in trying to uncover or investigate some type of controversy. We all know there are various ways to present a truth, and of course it's all subject to the editor. We won't go into that either. Now, as I said, the rapport between player and writer is crucial, and to be fair and objective, they have to have developed some rapport with the people that you're dealing with. The White House correspondents have some type of rapport with the president and the press secretary, and I'm sure that influences their depth of reporting as well. Certain beat reporters will use an excuse, as I mentioned before, I don't have a feel for this team, or I don't really know this guy very well as an excuse for a poor, inaccurate story. And there's only really one remedy, and that is to make the attempt to know the subject and to develop your stories more than just the pedestrian from ghetto to stardom that we read about so much about us, because more or less if you recognize a cross-section

of plays in the NBA, more of us, most of us, have basic middle-class values, and we've always been like that. Obviously, it's not newsworthy, but it's still the truth, and I think America will probably be able to relate even more than just use the ghetto to stardom type story and say, well, that's an aberration in American life, and that's unique, that's a different. Now in the other hand, reporters aren't all the blame. A lack of communicative skills opens more or less on a player's part, opens up Pandora's box of stereotypes, ridicule and mistrust. For instance, Darryl Dawkins, when he comes up with his very eccentric rap, he has basic poor standard usage, but the content is substantive. For trail by the media isn't always the rightest fault, obviously, as I said with a guy like Darryl, but some reporters, and I'm sure it's mostly your counterparts, they like to quote the mispronunciations verbatim.

For instance, a lot of people with certain pronunciations of both that may come out both or your may come out yo, et cetera, we all understand this, but the printed verbatim knowing what the person meant, for instance, you look at any recent Moses Malone interview. These things are embarrassing, and these things are embarrassing, and it promotes some type of alienation between the player and the reporter, Bryant Gumball, who I happen to admire very much. He had an interview with Lester Hayes, I know when they won the Super Bowl, and he was aware that Lester Hayes had a speech impediment, and I don't know if he was just caught up in the celebration or whatever, but in that particular case, it was in happy ending because Lester Hayes, after being somewhat embarrassed, went to a therapist and is much improved. Unfortunately, a lot of other people react with a major amount of disgust and distrust. Now, we also as athletes, we have trouble with what we call equal comparisons. The one thing that I'd like to point out is that black role players are usually downplayed

and counterparts are sanctified. For every Kurt Rambus or Mark Iveroni, there are three or four black players in the NBA who fulfill their roles with as much elan as they do, yet I guess it's probably a direct result of the NBA's marketing plan, I don't know if that's the case enough. And the other problem is the negative comparisons. They always have some subliminal effect on observers, and it subtly perpetuates stereotypes. For instance, I don't know if anyone knows of a former NFL player, AFL player, Lance Allworth. He was called Bambi because of his, I guess, his good looks and his quickness and speed. Yet Alvin Garrett, who I don't know if he possesses good looks, but his quickness and speed is beyond compare, he's a little monkey. In this post-elympic type of furor when everyone is creating their own type of platform, so they can go out and try to garner all the rewards and endorsements, you know,

Carl Lewis and Cheryl Miller will probably put America to test, you know, if they can escape the stereotypes and they can be marketed like the Mary Lou Retens and the Bruce Jenners of the past, I think the thing that will help them will be accurate media presentation of them and accurate presentation by themselves. And all of you and myself included in any way shape of form can aid this process and promote some fairness as far as the media's relation to black athletes. Lynn Elmore Head basketball coach John Thompson of Georgetown University is in a class by himself because he puts education before athletics. He has been Georgetown's basketball coach since 1972 and is the first black basketball coach to win Division I in CAA basketball title. Mr. Thompson addressed his position on Proposition 48 and his policy on women in his locker

room. Basically with Proposition 48 my biggest problem is core curriculum with which he alluded to when he was sending and I think that when we live in a decentralized educational system it's very difficult to expect all young people. Some black kids don't take some low income white kids. Some low Spanish kids don't take Spanish, don't take English, don't take chemistry because it's not all for Tom. Not because they don't want to or that they are avoiding core curriculum because of athletics. And in my only contention with that is that an individual should be judged individually simply because of the fact that we don't live in a centralized educational system. Nobody once said that it's nothing more unequal than treating, it's nothing more, it's nothing as unequal as treating everybody equal who have not had equal opportunities and that's what I feel.

The spirit of it is good. I'm for kids getting a better education, I'm for preparing them but you got to see the opportunity they had. What happened is one of my assistants approached the lady, told us some of the kids we had no pre-warning that a woman was involved. The policies to let us know and requested to bring the person outside for her. I think that was a witch hunt to be quite frank with you. Frank with you was not handy. We've dealt with women reporters, I have two women on my staff and started it before Title 9. I think realistically, too, the Tom grills of the world have to realize something that's very, very clear that the John Thompson's of the world's primary responsibility is not your job, John Thompson is very much aware of the fact that you have a job and he was taught that by Robert Thompson. Now, I think it is very important for you to understand that my primary responsibility is so that you won't write in your newspaper that I have exploded some young man to get him back to a university that I've got 20 minutes to get him back to after traveling. He's got 20 or 30 minutes to dress, 20 minutes to get him back and the Ted teacher that's

going to give him a test the next morning. I think what I want to say in relation to this young lady is that I do understand your responsibility and your willingness to work and I think I've done things to do that. But my responsibility is not to you or to your job. My responsibility is to my players first. When I am being negligent is when I am purposely and deliberately inconveniencing you. But my primary responsibility as an educator, unless we be hypocritical, what is core curriculum about the Bruce is talking about? What is exploitation of the black, white, green athlete about? Exploitation is time folks. The biggest problem that college athletes and college coaches have today is not that they want that they don't have enough guts to provide time for the athletes to get an education because as much as you make a demand, a teacher makes a demand, the public makes a demand and the alumnus makes the demand. So the John Thompson's are the world who need to realize your work responsibilities has

a lot of responsibilities to realize but my primary responsibility is to the people who I'm responsible for and that's why kids don't graduate from college. We don't do anything secret that we get people every day asking us what do you do and why do the kids graduate? You know what I do? I provide them with enough time to get an education. The lady that was involved was not asked to wait until after other people were interviewed or other people got, I understand that whole problem, as I told you, I have two women or my staff. As I told you, I've produced two writers and I hear it from him and I refuse him. But I don't win theory in here. You know, I want to see your aggressiveness. I want to see your strength as it relates to other issues with the same aggressiveness that you attack a helpless athlete who cannot defend himself or a basketball. I want to hear these racial issues that you discuss in here aggressively spoken to. I want to know why you don't write about those things.

I want to know why I have to say them. That's what I want to deal with. But don't tell me that I'm supposed to, because of your job, when you won't speak up for your job and your own newspapers on racial issues, tell me that I'm supposed to exploit my kids' time for you, you crazy. John Thompson, head basketball coach at Georgetown University and Lynn Elmore, professional basketball player with the New York Nicarbockers and you Lewis sportscaster for KVUE TV in Austin, Texas. If you have a comment or would like to purchase a cassette copy of this program, write us. The address is in Black America, Longhorn Radio Network, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 787. 1-2. For M. Black America's technical producer Cliff Hargrove, I'm John Hanson, join us next week. You've been listening to In Black America, Reflections of the Black Experience in American Society.

In Black America is produced and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services at UT Austin and does not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or the station. This is the Longhorn Radio Network.