Athletes for fair play: Lipsyte

Football players joining students to protest American racism while Russian athletes are accused of doping in a track-and-field scandal that could involve sneaker money were all exciting stories when I covered them 50 years ago. They also seemed harbingers of progress. Why they weren’t is a cautionary tale.

To get it right this time, we’d have to agree that a football coach helping topple a university president or major powers using drugs and Olympic threats are old stories and a step backward.

The football players at the University of Missouri-Columbia, almost half of whom are African Americans on an overwhelmingly white campus, came late to the protests against racism. But they came with the clout of big-time college sports, and they were supported by a coach whose $4 million salary was emblematic of his status vis-à-vis the $460,000 university president, who resigned under fire.

Was this a sign that racism was losing ground, or that athletics was king? After weeks of activism by students, it was a threatened football player strike, which would have cost Mizzou and its powerhouse Southeastern Conference$1 million, that finally moved the needle.

Meanwhile, the International Association of Athletics Federations, track and field’s governing body, was accused this month of corruption, money laundering and the suppression of positive drug tests. The past president of the IAAF has been accused of covering up those crimes. His successor, former British Olympic champion Sebastian Coe, has been criticized for being a highly paid ambassador for Nike, arguably a conflict of interest.

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The Russians have promised a full investigation in hopes of keeping Olympic eligibility. The 1980 Moscow Games were boycotted by the United States in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union retaliated by refusing to show up for the 1984 Los Angeles Games. We know how well that all worked out in the interests of world peace.

Alas, these stories never go away. Back in the '60s, the college football cartel, the Olympic movement and the shoe companies managed to crush, then buy off, reform. The news media and fans were guilty bystanders who wanted their games more than justice. College athletes were often kept from joining civil rights and anti-war demonstrations by threats against their scholarships and the chance to play in the pros. At some schools, football players were even used to guard buildings from being occupied, widening the gap between athletes and their fellow students.

Meanwhile, the use of performance-enhancing drugs, institutionalized in the Soviet bloc, were enthusiastically taken up by many American and European Olympians. Once television and the sneaker companies became the true governing bodies of sports, the corruption of athletics became almost total. Professionalism might have ended the hypocrisy of so-called shamateurism, but it ushered in our current eras of Frankenjocks and Just Do It Like Mike — athletes going only for personal gold.

Not that there weren’t '60s heroes who can still inspire. At the 1968 Olympics, while the Soviets were cheating and the precursors to Nike, Adidas and Puma competed at slipping $100 bills under the innersoles of athletes’ shoes, two medal-winning American runners — Tommie Smith and John Carlos — raised their black-gloved fists in a mild yet powerful protest against racism.

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But the draconian reaction — Smith and Carlos were suspended from the Olympic team and for many years denied the perks of champion athletes — had a chilling effect. In football, the campaigns against authoritarian and racist athletic departments stalled; it was years before the emergence of the black college quarterback, much less the black head coach.

The dynamic in college sports has changed, not always for the better. At many major colleges, new arenas, jock dorms and tutoring halls are far better funded than classrooms, labs and libraries. There are assistant coaches who make more than assistant professors.

The events at Mizzou suggest it’s time to build on those changes, even the ones we may decry. But if we are really trying to purge racism from the campus, let’s make sure we’re not reinforcing it by giving the athletics department the power to create a gladiatorial class of black athletes that doesn’t reflect the student population.

The corruption of TV and sneaker money, as pervasive as it might be on campus, is even more influential in the wider world of sports. As the stakes get higher, so does the drive to win, drugs and all. Unless we decide that justice and fair play are more important than our entertainment, it’s going to be a never ending story.

Robert Lipsyte, a former New York Times sports columnist and ESPN ombudsman, is a member of the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.

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