INTERVIEW, Page 62Fighting From the InsideFormer jock and campus radical HARRY EDWARDS now worksto put minorities into the front offices of professionalbaseballBy Harry Edwards, Dennis Wyss
Like many young black teenagers in the 1950s, Harry Edwards
saw sports as an escape from poverty. His father was a $65-a-week
laborer who served time in the Illinois state penitentiary. His
mother left home when he was eight. At San Jose State young Edwards
starred in basketball. But the trappings of racism he found in
fraternities, student housing, the faculty and staff radicalized
him. By 1967 he was a Black Panther urging fellow black athletes
to boycott white-sponsored events, including the 1968 Mexico City
Olympics. At Cornell, where he earned a doctorate, Edwards was a
mediator in an armed revolt by blacks on campus. Now a sports
sociology professor at University of California, Berkeley, and a
consultant to the San Francisco 49ers, Golden State Warriors and
Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, Edwards is challenging the
American sports establishment from the inside. On the eve of Bill
White's debut as the first black president of the National League,
Edwards, 46, talked with TIME's Dennis Wyss about his efforts to
break through the almost-all-white lineup of sports managers.
Q. When General Manager Al Campanis was fired by the Los
Angeles Dodgers for saying that blacks lack the "necessities" to
manage a big league team, Ueberroth brought you into major league
baseball. Why, then, have you hired Al Campanis to assist you?
A. Al Campanis has 40 years of experience in baseball. To sit
down with him and talk about the inside functioning of a baseball
organization and how to deal with owners and general managers has
been enormously helpful. The problem is in baseball. The problem
isn't Campanis. Al Campanis is merely an all-but-irrelevant symptom
of the problem. To allow him to be turning out there in the wind
makes him a scapegoat and ultimately impedes any progress in
dealing with the issues in a constructive way.
Q. Since you became a special assistant to the commissioner of
baseball almost two years ago, major league teams have hired 21
managers or general managers. Only one, Frank Robinson of the
Baltimore Orioles, is black. Has all the soul-searching following
Al Campanis' remarks led merely to more empty rhetoric?
A. The issue isn't as simple as whites in positions of power
not hiring minorities to run front offices or be field managers,
although that is the principal problem. There are corollary
difficulties. Some of the most competent and attractive minority
candidates are not interested in jobs they've been offered. Or you
have candidates like Joe Morgan, who can't just give up businesses
that gross millions of dollars a year to go off and become a
general manager somewhere. Also, in the post-Campanis era, any new
black manager or general manager will be under a microscope and
very likely second-guessed on everything he does. Quite frankly,
some people look at that situation and simply say, "I don't want
the job that badly."
Q. What you're saying, then, is that it's much easier said than
done.
A. That's why they call it a struggle instead of a picnic.
Q. So what is your strategy?
A. To gather two ends to pick up the middle. On one end, we've
worked to create a viable pool of candidates who are qualified now
to take over a managerial or front-office position. On the other
end, we're bringing younger minorities and women who are not
advanced in their careers into lower-echelon positions within a
sports organization. The idea is to get them into the loop,
learning the business and moving up through the system and into the
comfort zone of those who do the hiring. The individuals who tend
to be hired are usually those known to the people in authority.
Q. You recently warned that baseball faces demonstrations and
lawsuits because of its failure to integrate minorities into
meaningful positions of leadership. Under what circumstances would
that come about?
A. I believe the struggle at the interface of race and sports
should be one that is led, developed programmatically and
implemented by sports people with intimate knowledge of their
institution. If those sports people fail to meet their obligations
to move the institution ahead, in terms of broadening democratic
participation, then you'll begin to get the civil rights people,
protest interests and the lawyers stepping in.
Q. But you have stated that the problems involving race and
sport cannot be solved by affirmative action, the major tool to
redress racial inequality in American society. Why not?
A. This has got me into a great deal of conflict with the civil
rights establishment, but I hold that affirmative action is not a
universal panacea. It's a tool, and no area indicates that more
than sports. The N.B.A., for example, is 75% black, and there was
no affirmative action involved in it. But if you had an
affirmative-action plan in the N.B.A. based on society at large,
you'd have 10% black players and 90% white players. As a tool,
affirmative action would be counterproductive. The front-office
situation in baseball, in sports in general, is not amenable to
traditional civil rights remedies.
Q. Has anything really changed in the 20 years since your call
for an Olympic boycott?
A. Things have changed for the better, but the struggle is not
linear. It's dynamic and ever changing. Jesse Owens and Joe Louis
struggled for the legitimacy of black athletic talent. Later,
Jackie Robinson, Bill Russell and others struggled for access. In
the late '60s, athletes like Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John
Carlos, Arthur Ashe and Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar) fought for
recognition of the dignity of the black athlete. Now we're in the
struggle for power, and that's the most difficult of all. If we can
broaden democratic participation in sports, then there is at least
the possibility that we can devise credible strategies for
approaching the situation in society as a whole.
Q. What attracted you to sports?
A. My father always pushed me toward sports. The first thing
I can remember is my father buying me a pair of boxing gloves. The
Joe Louis phenomenon. It was something that was drilled into me for
as long as I could remember. The basic idea was, `Hey, Jesse Owens,
Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson -- they're making endorsements. They
got it made.' They've all proved that if you can make it in
athletics, you can make it in American society. Here was a way up
and out of the degradations that black people suffered. Later, of
course, I found out this wasn't the case at all.
Q. You have written that when you were growing up, your father
and your teachers constantly implied that because you were an
athlete, your body mattered more than your mind.
A. Well, the '60s was a time when it appeared that newly
integrated sports was going to be extremely rewarding to blacks.
As a black athlete, you had a special calling, and nothing else was
on par with that. Not intellectual development, not personal
development, nothing else. So teachers and parents winked at
academic deficiencies and a lack of discipline in the classroom
because the young man was on the basketball team or the football
team. There was this strong notion that sports had the capability
as an institution of raising the entire race. That's a hoax, the
greatest hoax that has ever been perpetrated on any people in this
society. And it's still alive and sick as ever.
Q. Does that mean, then, that poor black kids should not look
up to someone who comes out of a similar background and is
enormously successful in athletics?
A. No. It means that we must teach our children to dream with
their eyes open. The chances of your becoming a Jerry Rice or a
Magic Johnson are so slim as to be negligible. Black kids must
learn to distribute their energies in a way that's going to make
them productive, contributing citizens in an increasingly
