UW News

February 9, 2011

Stories of strength shine in ‘Better than the Best: Black Athletes Speak, 1920-2007

UW News

Sam Lacy was a well-regarded African-American sportswriter known for pushing major league sports toward integration. But when he got a chance to cover the 1949 World Series in New York, he was abruptly reminded of the racial realities of the day — they wouldnt let him in.

“I presented my credentials at the press gate, and the white gatekeeper wouldnt recognize it,” Lacy later remembered in an interview with the UWs John C. Walter. “The implication was, ‘I just dont know where you got that from, but you cant come in here.”

'Better than the Best: Black Athletes Speak, 1920-2007,' edited by John C. Walter and Malina Lida, was published in December 2010 by UW Press.

Lacy, who had recently become the first black member of the Baseball Writers Association of America, only got in the park when a white colleague from United Press International intervened. Clearly, being as good as any sportswriter in the nation wasnt good enough, in 1949, to ensure fair treatment.

Another time, Lacy was barred entry from a stadium when assigned to cover a game, and responded by taking a chair to the roof to work from there. Shortly, he was joined by several white colleagues, including a reporter from The New York Times, who all claimed they “needed some sun.” Lacy said, “This was something that showed that they respected me, and that pleased me no end … (T)heyd just come from a month in Florida. They didnt need any more sun than I did!”

Lacys story, in his own words, is one of 13 narratives of challenge and achievement against odds both personal and cultural that comprise Walters compelling new book, Better Than the Best: Black Athletes Speak, 1920-2007, recently published by University of Washington Press. His co-editor was Malina Lida, a UW graduate now studying at the University of Hawaii law school.

John C. Walter

John C. Walter

Walter said in compiling the book, he resisted the suggestions of some reviewers that he write a lengthy introduction about the experience of the black professional athlete. “That is pure sociology” he said, “and I thought the athletes were intelligent and perspicacious enough, shall we say, to tell their own stories.”

Those stories are powerful indeed. Lacy is joined in this volume by track and field stars Mal Whitfield and Mae Faggs Star, NBA player and coach Lenny Wilkins, tennis great Arthur Ashe, and several others. Walter also steps into issues of disability in a revealing interview with powerful Paralympic table tennis star Jennifer Johnson.

“Even against great odds — unlike the white athlete, who had alternatives — these men and women had hardly any alternatives at all that were, shall we say, commensurate with what it could be if they excelled in sports,” said Walter, a UW professor emeritus of American Ethnic Studies now living in Atlanta, who retains an accent from his Jamaican youth.

“And so, they had to work extra hard. Not only that, when they were signed by the sports organizations, it was expected that they had to be better than the best (white athletes). There were no second chances, and that was the original title of the book, No Second Chances: Blacks Who Broke the Color Line.”

Walter said the interviews that make up the book were at first intended for an oral history of black athletics. He was the recipient of a Ford Foundation grant in 1991 that enabled him to conduct about three dozen interviews in all.

The grant ran out, however, and it looked for years as if the interviews would remain unpublished. Walter said he was evaluating other manuscripts for UW Press years later when Julidta Tarver, an editor, suggested he make a book of the interviews. “She said, ‘John, lets do it. Dont wait until it gets too old,” Walter remembered.

Walter is a historian who, over a long career, has written scores of journal articles and reviews. In 1989 he published The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920-1970 (SUNY Press), which won an American Book Award.

Walter described the historical trend of white domination of sports that gained steam in the later Reconstruction years of the 19th century. The more successful black athletes became, the stronger grew the need among whites to minimize their prowess and bar them from future competition. White men didnt want to race against black jockeys or fight black boxers, Walter said, “because to lose to a black man would explode the myth of white superiority.”

Sadly, Walter suggests, many forms of racial prejudice lasted in sports throughout even the 20th century. “In baseball, as late as the year 2000, shortstop and first base positions were … sacred, not to be violated by someone of dark skin,” he wrote in the books introduction. “The majority of African Americans played outfield positions requiring speed and agility — not brains, it was thought.” He added, “Generally, the burden on the black athlete to be always superior existed in all sports, prompting one researcher to exclaim that in baseball, ‘mediocrity is a white luxury.”

As if to further prove his point, Walter offered an example well known to the UW community in the experience of Warren Moon. A Husky football superstar quarterback, he was not later drafted by U.S. football teams, as a white quarterback might have been. He moved to Canada and led the Edmonton Eskimos to an unprecedented five consecutive victories in the Grey Cup. “He was absolutely superior, and he knew it,” Walter said. He later returned to the U.S, and played successfully in the NFL.

Track and field star Mal Whitfield, looking back on a lifetime of competition, told Walter, “I see the black athlete as different from the white athlete. The black athlete has encountered the ills of a sick society for so long that their determination is far greater than any white athlete. I say that with the greatest sincerity. Only non-whites who have struggled under discriminatory and hostile conditions and ascended to the level of Olympic champions truly understand this.” He then added, “Former colonized people in Africa understand this as well.”

Asked which of the personal stories in Better than the Best most closely represents the overall theme of the book, Walter at first chose Lacy, the sportswriter (who also played ball as a young man).

“But if youre talking about a runner-up — you always have a runner-up in sports, I would say Jennifer Johnson. Because she is not usual, she is a Paralympian, and in a wheelchair. She has a very broad vision of the world.”

Then he began thinking of the contributions of Whitfield, who also opened the door to African runners in the Olympics, against the prejudice of the white establishment.

So he concluded with an equally sports-related thought: “I think I ought to say that its a tie.”