Situation Report

OVER the past two decades, the black athlete has come from nowhere to somewhere close to the very top. There are still some sports in which blacks have yet to make their mark. The fact that only six of the 300 golfers now on the Professional Golfers Association tour are black can possibly be explained by the fact that no one has yet built a country club in a ghetto. For equally obvious reasons, such expensive or relatively inaccessible sports as skiing, sailing, tennis and auto racing are almost exclusively white.

Conversely, in those sports that are free of such restrictions, such as boxing and track, the black dominates. Noting that black athletes accounted for all eight of the Olympic records set by U.S. runners in the 1968 Games, one European coach says: "If not for the blacks, the U.S. team would finish somewhere behind Ecuador."

The most dramatic strides have been in the three major U.S. pro sports--baseball, football and basketball. Twenty five years ago, there were no blacks on any pro team roster. The percentage of blacks in the pro leagues today:

Baseball--25% (150 out of 600)

Football--32% (330 out of 1,040)

Basketball--55% (153 out of 280)

Many black athletes contend that being as good as a white player does not suffice in the pro leagues--they have to be better. The number of blacks selected for the leagues' most recent all-star games seems to bear them out:

Baseball--36% (20 out of 56)

Football--44% (27 out of 61)

Basketball--63% (30 out of 48)

More impressive are the individual performances of black pros. A random check of the records shows that in baseball, for example, a Negro has won the National League's Most Valuable Player award 16 times in the past 20 years. The National Basketball Association's M.V.P. award has gone to a black twelve times in the last 15 years. And last season, all four Rookie of the Year awards for offense and defense in the two pro football leagues were won by blacks.

The only category, in fact, in which black athletes have consistently lagged behind is money. Those statistics now seem to be changing. As of this season, four of the six baseball players in the $125,000-a-year bracket are black.

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