Editor’s note: This 20Q with Harry Edwards was originally published in the August 1988 issue of Playboy.
Bearded, egg-bald and huge (6’8″, 260 pounds), sports sociology professor Harry Edwards looks like a cross between Isaac Hayes and Paul Bunyan. The organizer of the black protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics—which climaxed in Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ black-power salute on the victory stand—Edwards has become the principal torchbearer for minority athletes in America.
In that capacity, he is kept busier than the Chicago Cubs bull pen. After long phone conversations with baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth and the front office of the San Francisco 49ers (he’s a consultant to both) and interviews with two TV news teams, Edwards addressed our questions with the casually ominous erudition that characterizes his demeanor. Says interviewer Robert S. Wieder: “My editors suggested that I ask tough questions to get a rise out of Edwards. Unfortunately, they neglected to ask where I wanted my personal effects sent.”
Q1: You correctly predicted the protests at the 1968 Olympic games, the violence in 1972, the African boycott of 1976, the U.S. boycott of 1980 and the Soviet boycott of 1984. What’s on tap for the 1988 Seoul Games?
EDWARDS: As I’ve said since 1983, an unmitigated disaster: a situation where people who plan to go to the games change their minds and people who are at the games leave. It wouldn’t take much to set that stampede off. South Korea is not recognized diplomatically by a substantial number of nations, it’s technically still at war with North Korea, it’s a country that has tremendous domestic problems and it’s a client state in a global ideological split. The demonstrations of 1968, the boycotts of 1980 and 1984 and the violence and terrorism of 1972 could all come to the fore in 1988, unless something changes radically and rapidly.
Q2: But the Soviets and the Eastern Bloc nations have already accepted the invitation. You still see trouble?
EDWARDS: Remember, in 1984, they sent the same message to Peter Ueberroth until the very last. By what logic would they tell the country they were going to boycott that they planned to do so? They’d let them go ahead and spend the money to provide for them, and then, as the games approached, look for an excuse to pull out–domestic demonstrations, a threat of terrorism. That now is a pattern. South Korea can hold the games by creating a virtual police state, but those aren’t the games of brotherhood that supposedly highlight one’s athletic career.
Q3: Ueberroth hired you to help increase the number of minorities employed by professional baseball teams in nonplaying positions. What’s in it for you?
EDWARDS: Each generation has its obligations in terms of “the struggle.” Jackie Robinson had his obligations. Curt Flood had his. I’m shouldering my part of the burden. It’s like embalming: Somebody has to do it. I’m glad it’s me.
Q4: Remarkably few baseball managers have been sacked since you were hired. Has the visibility of your efforts kept some inept managers in their jobs?
EDWARDS: We’re looking at a backlash here, but that can’t sustain itself for two years. I’m more concerned about the racial configuration of baseball two, three or eight years from now. In ten years, minorities will be a majority of the players. Baseball can’t remain stable with a plantation system of organization, where you have lily-white front offices and minority players. Then you get labor-management problems overlaid with race and class problems. If you have minorities in the front office, you can handle drug abuse without considerations of race, and you eliminate the problem that came up in the football strike, where Gene Upshaw stated flat-out, They won’t negotiate because I am black and they are white.
Q5: If there’s no real progress, what’s your recourse?
EDWARDS: There’s only so much that jawboning can do. At some point, the owners have to make the decision that giving minorities access to front-office positions isn’t just good, it’s good business. If they don’t make that decision, my exit will be as public as my entry.Q6: When a Jimmy the Greek or an Al Campanis blurts out some racist nonsense, are you indignant or are you pleased to see racism in sports reveal itself?
EDWARDS: I’m indignant only when there isn’t a reaction appropriate to the statement. For example, I am very indignant over the reaction to [Houston Astros pitcher] Bob Knepper’s statement that women have no place umpiring, that his religion says God intended women to serve plates, not work behind them. That was received in the media as a joke. If he’d said that blacks were meant to be on the field only as athletes, we’d have had another Al Campanis situation. But because we are an avowedly sexist society even more than a racist society, it’s a laughing matter. When I see Knepper’s kind of pathological sexism received with snickers, I’m outraged. We can’t go on reducing women to ambulatory incubators and vegetating intake valves. And I think Playboy has had a major role in perpetuating that image of women. I don’t buy the idea that a woman’s body is to be hidden, but where’s the goddamned balance? Keep the centerfold, but put as much emphasis on women’s legitimate achievements.
Q7: Proposition 48, the rule requiring a C average in high school and decent S.A.T. scores for college freshmen to play sports, is two years old. Is it working?
EDWARDS: To the extent that it can. The fact is, it has very little to do with the athlete’s academic success once he’s on the college campus. After your freshman year, you can have less than a C average and still compete. Proposition 48 was capable of sending the message, particularly to black communities, that we expect kids to excel in academics as well as in athletics. But it isn’t completely successful, and it may have provoked more cheating, in the same way that drug testing hasn’t really reduced drug abuse among athletes but has created a black market in urine.
Q8: Why should anyone who simply wants a pro sports career even have to attend a college? Where’s the connection?
EDWARDS: Ultimately, we’ll have to deal with that question. In the meantime, we’re stuck with the system we have: If you want to be a pro, you have to go to college. My argument is that under those circumstances, there has to be some commitment to academics. Otherwise, it’s utter exploitation of the athlete by the institution and utter self-delusion on the athlete’s part. Only two percent of athletes on scholarships ever make a pro sports roster, and 60 percent of those are back on the street within four years. Most pro players would be better off if they got a job they could do for the next 45 years. Then they’re not on welfare or in jail, and they’re not out on the street knocking you and me on the head for what we have.
Q9: As long as college sports do function as de facto minor leagues, generating big revenues for the schools, why not just pay college athletes?
EDWARDS: The first thing you’d do is eliminate probably 80 percent of the institutions involved in college sports. You’d no longer be talking about collegiate athletic teams but about colleges’ warehousing semiprofessional teams. Most colleges won’t go for that. At least under the present system, they can claim a legitimate kind of relationship, however remote. And the athletes, as 17-to-19-year-old freshmen, would be besieged by people who flocked around because there was money involved, and not just the money the athlete is making this year but the money he’s likely to make down the road. Not to mention drugs and all the rest. Burying the stench under money doesn’t diminish it whatsoever.
Q10: You make college and sports sound like a bad marriage that survives only because divorce is impractical.
EDWARDS: We not only have a bad marriage, we have an internal feud that is threatening to blow up into a racial conflagration, because the revenue-producing sports are increasingly dependent upon black athletes, particularly at institutions that do not hire black coaches and black athletic directors. Black athletes are going to overwhelmingly dominate collegiate revenue-producing sports. Basketball will be all black, football will be 80 percent black. When you turn on the bowl games and N.C.A.A. championship games, it’s going to look like Ghana playing Nigeria.Q11: Could you see, ten years from now, a nationwide walkout of black collegiate athletes?
EDWARDS: Oh, there’s a possibility of that coming down before then. Right now, I’m dealing with a frustrated, angry group of 157 black assistant coaches who are in about the same situation as black ex-major-leaguers who’ve had the door slammed in their faces for the past 40 years. They were brought on board essentially to recruit athletes out of the ghettos for traditionally white Division One institutions. They have no access to head-coaching jobs, to athletic-director jobs, to public-information-director jobs. They’ve made it very clear that if there is no movement in terms of opening doors for blacks in college athletics at traditionally white institutions, they are going to mobilize a walkout of black assistant coaches during bowl games and N.CA.A. championship basketball games, and of the athletes they’ve recruited. They are saying that unless this changes, then this year we are going to call for massive boycotts of bowl games and N.C.A.A. championship games. If the schools think they can win basketball games or go to the Rose Bowl and share in that $11,000,000 without black athletes, wonderful—we’ll give them a chance to prove it.
Q12: Last January, much attention was given to Washington Redskins quarterback Doug Williams—the first black man to guide a team to a victory in the Super Bowl. Was his race a real issue or just media hype?
EDWARDS: It was a genuine issue. Why did it take so long for there to be a black quarterback in the Super Bowl? We still have a tremendous racism problem in the N.F.L.: We’re going into another season with the longest-standing record in N.F.L. history intact—not a single black head coach. Where the media did go wrong was in hounding Williams and John Elway on the race issue, making the game such a black-versus-white thing. Both men deserved better. But the media have problems themselves. Of 658 beat writers in football, baseball and basketball, only 28 are black.
Q13: You’ve admitted that sport is regarded as “the toy department of human affairs,” yet you’ve devoted your life to the subject. How do you reconcile that?
EDWARDS: One reason people questioned my academic integrity was that I was writing seriously about what they considered to be fun and games played for money. The fact is that sport involves the most serious, deeply rooted values and ideals of a society. To the extent that we ignore what is happening in sport, we lose an advantage in understanding these values. Sport is as serious as any institution we have, and as the only mainstream institution where blacks participate in disproportionately high numbers—even if it is in a plantation context as the laborers—it has to be a central concern.
Q14: Do you view sports as a corrupting influence?
EDWARDS: Sports reaffirm the values that govern social behavior. Kids who are second-generation welfare are, all of a sudden, coming up with $12,000 to matriculate at State U, “paying their own way.” Of course, the boosters are just giving them the money. If fans then see college presidents winking at the cheating and lying that take place, they feel no conscience in terms of their business and social relationships. Then sports people see Ivan Boesky, the Bakkers, Watergate and Irangate and it becomes self-perpetuating, with the basic thing being to succeed, to be number one, irrespective of methods. When that is broadcast for the whole nation to emulate, the role of sport becomes malignant, because no society has ever accomplished anything of worth through the systematic violation of agreed-upon rules. You simply can’t say, “These are the rules, but it’s all right to do anything you can get away with.”
Q15: Can this be the same Harry Edwards who recently said he was optimistic about sports and America?
EDWARDS: I am, because we are having an open dialog about the situation. I’ve been to the People’s Republic of China, to the Soviet Union, to Japan and Europe, places where a debate this honest about these kinds of issues would never take place. Also, I’m convinced, given the past record, that Americans will move in the proper direction to resolve the situation. We have moved effectively as a nation to deal with segregation; that’s why I’m sitting here.Q16: Has there been one notable radicalizing event in your life?
EDWARDS: No. There has been a series of developments, going back to slavery, that made it clear that there was no way I would be able to account for my life to my children unless I became involved in that struggle. To this day, I do not understand black people who are not involved, and in a very fundamental way, I probably don’t like them.
Q17: You’ve talked of “a bankruptcy of black leadership” and differed with America’s black leaders on a lot of issues. What’s your basic disagreement?
EDWARDS: I think that this country’s black leadership operates on an agenda that was established decades ago. The whole notion of integration as the ultimate goal of black political struggle is a joke, a farce. No people have ever advanced significantly in America without their institutions intact. That means a black society developing its own culture and participating as a full and equal partner in America, not in becoming some component of white society. We must begin to realize that the overwhelming majority of blacks are going to be in black communities. We must forget about busing and develop black schools that meet our children’s needs. I don’t believe in black support of black businesses, I believe in black economic development to get some of everybody’s business. That’s the only way the black community will develop.
Q18: Did you join the black community in support of Jesse Jackson’s Presidential campaign?
EDWARDS: Everybody wants to know my perspective on Jesse Jackson, but nobody asks me about Gore or Dukakis or any of the other interchangeable faces. If you’re black and not supporting Jesse, that’s news! It’s also racist. Hell, I don’t support any of them. We’re in sad straits when these are the candidates we come up with for the Presidency. What really gets me is the lack of vision about where this country should be headed and what we should be as a people, and I have to believe I’m not alone. As in 1980 and 1984, I’m in the position of going into the damn voting booth holding my nose and trying to think of somebody I can write in. The only President in recent memory who’s even kept his pre-election promises has been Reagan. He promised us less government, and we wound up with no government at all.
Q19: So where do you stand on Jesse Jackson?
EDWARDS: I am not for running black candidates. I am for running candidates who have an appeal to everybody and who happen to be black. I am not a Jesse Jackson fan. There is a lot of lip service given to the Rainbow Coalition, but it’s made up of black people. And Jesse’s drug policy: When he says “Up with hope, down with dope,” he has 14th Street in Oakland confused with Sesame Street. I think that it comes down to not running as a black but running as an individual who has a controlling influence over political, educational, economic and religious institutions to such an extent that others want to hook their wagon to the horse. Jesse has done more than anyone since Franklin D. Roosevelt to get the oppressed, disregarded and dispossessed into mainstream politics; but if you’re going to be in politics, you’ve got to be political, and that means exercising power. You can hear the Republicans lip-smacking and chop-licking right now.
Q20: If Jackson doesn’t make the Democratic ticket, can he fill a role as the mouthpiece of the oppressed?
EDWARDS: If I want to hear a sermon, hell, I go to church.
the angriest man in sports tackles n.f.l. racism, cries foul at college corruption and predicts olympic mayhem
“When you turn on the N.C.A.A. championship games, it’s going to look like Ghana playing Nigeria.”