Although Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo are the players that I remember watching the most, John Thompson, Jr. is the biggest reason why I became a Georgetown Hoyas fan. Watching TV in the basement of our Southeast-D.C. apartment in the late 80s and early 90s, I vividly remember the rivalry games between Syracuse, Villanova, and Seton Hall that made the Big East one of the fiercest conferences in NCAA Division I Men's Basketball and Thompson's fiery personality fueled a lot of those rivalries. Little did I know back then that 1) he hailed from my hometown and was an All-Met, star center at Archbishop Carroll High School and 2) he was the first Black head coach to win a major collegiate championship when his team led by Patrick Ewing captured the title over the University of Houston in 1984. However, true to his character, Thompson gave the bigger perspective when asked about his place in history after the game:
I'm not interested in being the first or only Black doing anything because it implies that in 1984, a Black man finally became intelligent enough to win the NCAA title and that's a very misleading thing.
Reflecting further upon his initial statements in the "Requiem For The Big East" documentary, he elaborated:
"Oh, a Black man won the national championship!" Black, green, white or yellow...NOBODY had won a national championship in the Northeast in 30 years. That meant something other than me just being Black.
Considering that the Hoyas were the first Big East team to both play for the national championship (1982) and the first to win (1984) merely three and five years, respectively, after the initially underrated conference was formed, it's hard to argue with his premise. Either way, when you coach a predominantly Black team playing in a city that was 70 percent Black and led by a Black man, it's also difficult to deny the cultural significance. Even with a 27-year coaching career at Georgetown that included 24 consecutive postseason appearances and three Final Four appearances, one of the most impressive things about Thompson was how much he cared about his players. His intrepid approach in firmly standing up to the infamous Rayful Edmond after many of his players were getting too chummy with the notorious drug lord manifested not only his fearlessness, but also the importance of preserving the integrity of his team and protecting the futures of his young men--most of whom looked like him.
Unlike having the privilege to witness Thompson's Hoyas, I never had the opportunity to watch the legendary Hank Aaron live or on TV when he played right field for Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves and later the Milwaukee Brewers. Nevertheless, his dominance in Major League Baseball over 23 seasons between 1954 and 1976 preceded him before I ever got to witness one highlight. Before Barry Bonds' hit his historic 756th home run (arguably with an asterisk), "Hammerin' Hank" held the record for 33 years and is still the only player in MLB history to hit at least 30 or more home runs in at least 15 seasons. He also still holds records for total bases (6,856), runs batted in (2,297), extra-base hits (1,477) and the most amount of years as an All-Star (21) as well as boasting a .305 batting average, National League MVP honors, a World Series title with the Braves and numerous other accolades. Although Jackie Robinson is heralded for being the first Black to
play in the MLB, Aaron--a first-ballot Baseball Hall of Fame inductee in 1982 with nearly 98 percent of the vote--is celebrated as one of the game's greatest
players overall who is often spoken about in the same breath as Babe Ruth. However, what makes Aaron's story so remarkable is not so much his decorated career, but what he had to overcome in order to achieve these feats. As a member of the Indianapolis Clowns while still playing in the Negro American League, this was one of his experiences while he was sadly in my hometown:
We had breakfast while we were waiting for the rain to stop, and I can
still envision sitting with the Clowns in a restaurant behind Griffith
Stadium and hearing them break all the plates in the kitchen after we
finished eating. What a horrible sound. Even as a kid, the irony of it
hit me: here we were in the capital in the land of freedom and equality,
and they had to destroy the plates that had touched the forks that had
been in the mouths of black men. If dogs had eaten off those plates,
they'd have washed them.
Before he broke Babe Ruth's home run record in 1974, his life was threatened several times--including one piece of mail that said "YOU'LL DIE IN ONE OF THOSE GAMES [vs. Montreal, Philly, New York, St. Louis]" and "I'LL SHOOT YOU IN ONE OF THEM". It got to the point where the FBI wouldn't allow him to open his mail for two years and he and his family needed armed protection. In a 2014 interview with CNN's Terence Moore, this is how he said that he personally handled such ignorance:
I've always felt like once I put the uniform on and once I got out onto
the playing field, I could separate the two from say an evil letter I
got the day before or event 20 minutes before...that I could also concentrate on what I had to do as far as watch a fast ball or somebody throwing a ball 90 miles an hour rather than worry about a letter that somebody sent...God gave me the separation, gave me the ability to separate the two of them.
Although he later admitted that he probably could have hit more home runs instead of having to "slip out the back door" or worry about protecting his family, his ability to achieve what he did over two decades in the MLB in the face of such danger and living to talk about it is even more monumental than having gaudier statistics.
Before there was the dominance of the Williams sisters or Arthur Ashe's 1975 upset of Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon, there was perhaps one of the most important figures to the tennis world, especially as it pertained to the Black athlete, in the late, great Althea Gibson--who is often referred to as "the Jackie Robinson of tennis". In a white-dominated sport, Gibson was the very first to cross the international color line in the world of tennis when she began her amateur career in 1950 at 23 years old, playing at the U.S. National Championships that same year and then becoming the first Black to play at Wimbledon in 1951. Despite the difficulties to make inroads and nearly joining the military because of the blatant segregation in tennis, her perseverance in the sport allowed her to win twelve American Tennis Association-sponsored championships over a twelve-year span (including ten consecutive titles between 1947 and 1956); earn a sports scholarship to and graduate from Florida A&M University; hold the No. 9 and No. 7 spots in the United States in 1952 and 1953, respectively; win the French Open in 1956; conquer singles and doubles titles at Wimbledon in 1957; win the U.S. Open in 1958; and become the first Black woman to be voted the Associated Press' Female Athlete of the Year in 1957 and then again in 1958. If that wasn't enough, Gibson became the first Black woman ever to compete on the pro golf tour--although she was more successful on the tennis court. Although she infiltrated two predominantly-white sports and thrived in one of them, Gibson did not consider herself a pioneer as evidenced from this quote taken from her 1958 autobiography,
I Always Wanted to Be Somebody: "I have never regarded myself as a crusader. I don't consciously beat the drums for any cause, not even the negro in the United States." Perhaps, but considering the racial tenor of the country in the 1950s, I'm sure that many Black people felt much differently about and maybe more proud of her accomplishments for different reasons. Not to mention that her success is even more groundbreaking because she not only had to face the uphill battle of being Black in a predominantly-white sport, but she had the inseparable factor of being a woman--which surely paved the way for not only other Black women tennis greats like the Williams sisters, but one of her biggest supporters later in life in Billie Jean King.
Now we've seen plenty of great Black athletes in basketball, baseball and tennis, but try being the first Black to enter a sport that was all white at the time and in which very few Blacks are still largely uninterested to this day. That's the story of Canadian-born Willie O'Ree, a former winger who is often called "the Jackie Robinson of ice hockey". (Point of order: Art Dorrington was the first Black player to sign an NHL contract with New York Rangers, but he never played past the minor leagues.) Heralded for his speed on the ice by his Boston Bruins teammates, O'Ree's NHL career was limited to two appearances in 1958 and 1961--the latter year being his best with four goals and ten assists. However, he was a two-time scoring champ in the Western Hockey League between 1961 and 1974, played minor league hockey until he was 43 years old and was inducted into the New Brunswick Sports Hall of Fame in 1984. For most of his career, he was 95 percent blind in his right eye due to an errant puck injury in 1956--which, if it would've been disclosed, could've disqualified him from ever playing a game in the NHL. What makes O'Ree's story significant--especially in the United States--was that it would be another 16 years after O'Ree's NHL debut before a Black player would play in the NHL when Mike Marson--another Canadian-born player--was drafted by the Washington Capitals. This proved that the color line may have been crossed, but there was still a notable delineation--probably due in part to more Blacks being interested in the ball sports. Furthermore, the struggle for Black hockey players to earn respect in the U.S. was highlighted by 1) an incident at a Detroit restaurant where the establishment refused to serve O'Ree and 2) ignorant, racially-charged remarks that he encountered in the States that he didn't face in Toronto or Montreal:
Fans would yell, "Go back to the South" and "How come you're not picking cotton?" Things like that. It didn't bother me. I just wanted to be a hockey player, and if they couldn't accept that fact, that was their problem, not mine.
Today, J.T. Brown, Emerson Etem, Jarome Iginla, Evander Kane, Kyle Okposo, Ryan Reaves, Wayne Simmonds, Devante Smith-Pelly, Chris Stewart, Joel Ward, Dustin Byfuglien, Trevor Daley, Maxime Fortumus, Mark Fraser, Seth Jones, Johnny Oduya, Bryce Salvador, P.K. Subban and Ray Emery are the only players of "Black African descent" currently playing for NHL teams--only five of those players are from the United States while the majority of the rest are from Canada. While there are arguably more strides to be made for Blacks in ice hockey, particularly in the United States, I'm sure that past and current players are thankful to O'Ree for his small but significant knock that got the door opened.
Since I began this post with a fond childhood memory, it's only right that I end it with one involving my favorite sport of all and former favorite sports team. Many people only know Doug Williams for being the first Black quarterback to start and win a Super Bowl in 1988, but his story begins well before that when he was a first-round draft pick of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1978. Williams helped to turn the new but moribund franchise around by 1979 as they reached the NFC Championship that season and had three winning seasons out of his five with the team--including two NFC Central Division crowns. Regarded as the heart and soul of the team, he was the only starting Black quarterback at that time; what that meant was that he was also a target. He once received an anonymous package with a rotten watermelon and a note saying, "Throw this to the n------, see if they can catch this." After having milkshakes, eggs and rocks thrown at him and witnessing weekly cross burning ceremonies while growing up in Louisiana, racism was not new to Williams. However, it arguably manifested itself at the most insulting level in the NFL as he was the lowest paid starting quarterback--earning only $120,000 a year, which was less than twelve backup QBs at the time. After a contract dispute in 1982 when Bucs' owner Hugh Culverhouse would only go as high as paying Williams $400,000 per year--which still would've been among the lowest-paid starting salaries--he left for the short-lived United States Football League (USFL) for two years before the league folded in 1986. While the Bucs went 2-14 the season after his departure and suffered a 15-year absence from the playoffs, Williams didn't fare so well either until 1986 when he reunited with his former offensive coordinator in Tampa Bay and head coach in Washington, Joe Gibbs, and initially played second fiddle to Jay Schroeder. After a quarterback controversy arose in the strike-shortened 1987 season that led to Schroeder being named the starter, Williams still became the locker room favorite. Although he lost both of his regular season starts, he subbed for Schroeder three times, won all three contests and his overall 94.0 passer rating helped to earn him the starting job for the playoffs. After two close wins against the Bears on the road and the Vikings at home, his biggest test came against the John Elway-led Denver Broncos--who were favored by three points to win Super Bowl XXII. By the end of the first quarter, Washington's offense sputtered and Williams faced three uphill battles: 1) the Broncos quickly put Washington in a 10-0 hole from which no team had previously recovered from in Super Bowl history; 2) he gruesomely twisted his leg after being sacked; and 3) Jay Schroeder literally did nothing in Williams' absence. However, when he returned early in the second quarter and in what NFL Network voted as their #1 Super Bowl performance of all time, Williams completed 82 percent of his passes for 228 yards and a Super Bowl-record four TD passes in one quarter. Overall, he completed 62 percent of his passes for 340 yards, four TDs, one INT and a 127.9 QB rating--including one of the longest plays from scrimmage in Super Bowl history in an 80-yard TD to Ricky Sanders. Although his career numbers aren't overly impressive and his final two NFL seasons were riddled with injuries, his Super Bowl MVP performance is not only one of the greatest performances by a
Black quarterback, but by
any quarterback on the game's biggest stage. In fact, Williams made similar assertions as John Thompson regarding the Black issue:
[In the NFL] Every article that was written, every adjective was 'Tampa's black quarterback' or 'black quarterback Doug Williams. It was never just the way it is today...you don't read about Seattle's quarterback, you don't read about the Washington Redskins' quarterback, the Tampa quarterback being black. They just happen to be their quarterback, and I think that's the way it should be. Hopefully, that's the way it will be from here through eternity.
Considering that Washington only integrated due to media and political pressure and how the term "Redskin" has come under more fire in the past year than it has in a very long time, it's extremely difficult to ignore the irony of Williams' accomplishment. Nevertheless, that irony is what makes Williams' story--as well as the stories of Thompson, Aaron, Gibson and O'Ree--correlate with the overall Black experience of debunking stereotypes, tearing down strongholds and overcoming the greatest of odds in order to manifest our undeniable, God-given talents at the highest levels without the need for something like "pretty good for a Black [man or woman]" attached to it.
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