The Black Dominance

To say that Julius Erving jumps is to describe Beethoven as a guy who wrote music. Dr. J. ascends. He springs into the air at the foul line, floats down the side of the lane, holding the basketball in his right hand. Still airborne, he swivels, turns his back to the basket, switches the ball to his other hand and cleanly flips a soft, lefthanded hook shot into the net. On the floor, play resumes at a dazed half-speed as opposing players stand in disbelief.

Arms open, legs churning, Buffalo Bills Running Back O.J. Simpson takes the hand-off and cradles the football in his arm. If there is a crease of space between the huge, straining bodies sprawled before him, he dashes through it, shaking off grasping hands. A linebacker collides with him, but O.J. simply caroms away. He shifts and feints, carving first one angle, then another on the open field. O.J. is now in a full gallop, and he has lost few foot races in the eight years of his National Football League career.

When Cincinnati Second Baseman Joe Morgan comes to bat, his eyes widen noticeably, a palpable sign to the man on the mound that Morgan is studying him with the intensity of a leopard crouching in a tree. On the bases, he measures the movements of the game just as keenly: taking the millisecond advantage, then streaking toward a stolen base, judging the parabola of a teammate's hit before springing around the bases, sliding in just ahead of the throw. Joe Morgan, the National League's Most Valuable Player for two years in a row, is surely the hardest out in baseball. Ask any pitcher.

Erving, Simpson and Morgan are the finest athletes in their sports, men of huge physical gifts, with great dedication to the honing of their arts and remarkable mental and emotional resiliency under pressure. They have much in common, most obviously that they are black. As superstars nonpareil, they are both inheritors and exemplars--the legatees of black athletes whose greatness moldered in Jim Crow obscurity, and the new idols of American sports culture.

Thirty years after Jackie Robinson broke the racial barrier in professional athletics, blacks have come to dominate major U.S. sports as no other American minority group ever has. Some examples:

P: Nearly 65% of National Basketball Association players are blacks. Says Jerry West, the former superstar who is now coach of the Los Angeles Lakers: "When I first came into the league [in 1960], it was just starting to turn into a black league. And let's face it. This is a black league now."

P: In the National Football League, 42% of the players are black. Twenty of the 44 first-line offensive and defensive players in this year's Super Bowl game were black.

P: Nineteen percent of baseball's major leaguers are black. The National League's Most Valuable Player award has been won by blacks 16 times in the past 28 seasons.

P: The growing black dominance in sports is evident in college athletics too. During the recent N.C.A.A. basketball playoffs, for example, Champion Marquette and Contenders Michigan and University of Nevada at Las Vegas each had only one white in their starting lineups. In N.C.A.A. football, most of 1976's top-ranked teams were loaded with black stars--in numbers far out of proportion to the percentage of black students on campus.

P: Of 30 medals won by American track and field athletes in the Montreal Olympic Games, 24 were garnered by black athletes. Blacks won all the U.S. gold medals in boxing.

P: Most of the records in major sports --rushing, slugging and scoring marks once held by such legendary figures as Grange, Ruth and Pettit--have been bested by Tony Dorsett, Henry Aaron and Wilt Chamberlain.

To millions of U.S. sports fans, watching in stadiums and arenas or on TV screens at home, the trend is obvious and incontrovertible. The image of the star athlete is, increasingly, a black image. Yet, while many Americans, black and white, wonder about the reasons for the overwhelming black presence in major sports, simply to remark on the fact makes some people uncomfortable. Racial differences --whether physical or cultural--have been employed in the past as excuses for discrimination. Throughout history, scientific findings have been twisted to serve the social theories of supremacists from ancient Greece to Nazi Germany to separate and unequal America. Racist arguments falsely claiming the intellectual superiority of one race over another can distort any discussion of racial differences.

For that reason, most U.S. scientists are reluctant to study the physical differences between whites and blacks. Says Dr. Peter Wolff, director of psychiatric research at Children's Hospital in Boston: "In the present climate, it is a touchy business because no matter what you say, people with one prejudice or another will immediately use your research to extract a value judgment."

Still, physical differences do exist: Orientals are generally smaller than Caucasians (and, incidentally, better gymnasts for it); certain diseases have been shown to be genetically linked to particular groups and races--Tay-Sachs disease among Jews and sickle-cell anemia among blacks. The shapes of eyes and noses vary as widely among the races as do skin colors.

Thus in the minds of both black and white sports fans--even those who insist that they are racially color-blind --the questions do arise. Does the obvious superiority of so many black athletes mean that blacks in general are better athletes than whites? If so, why?

To some of the men on the field, and those who coach them, the answers are clear. O.J. Simpson, for instance, has no qualms about describing the racial differences he has observed. Says he: "We are built a little differently, built for speed--skinny calves, long legs, high asses are all characteristics of blacks. That's why blacks wear long socks. We have skinny calves, and short socks won't stay up. I'll argue with any doctor that physically we're geared to speed, and most sports have something to do with speed." Joe Morgan also sees some differences: "I think blacks, for physiological reasons, have better speed, quickness and agility. Baseball, football and basketball put a premium on those skills. I don't know the reason why, but we are clearly superior in that way."

Wide Receiver Lynn Swann, of the Pittsburgh Steelers, whose acrobatic catches are reminiscent of ballet, feels that there is no question about it. "If I said that blacks were not athletically superior," he says, "I think I'd be kidding myself. There is something there. It seems like the black athletes are just able to do more things than the other athletes." One of those things is jumping, especially important in basketball. In fact, it is generally acknowledged in the N.B.A. that blacks have a great edge in jumping--so much so that, on the Philadelphia 76ers, a player who cannot jump well is said to have "white guy's disease." Superjumper Julius Erving notes jumping is an ability that can be developed through practice, and points to Denver's Bobby Jones and Buffalo's Gus Gerard as "exceptional jumpers for white guys." Yet he adds that "they aren't compared with other guys like myself who can jump and do something else while they're in the air."

Coach West sees "incredible physical differences" between black and white ballplayers. Says he: "It seems that all the black guys have bigger hands, they're so much quicker, they jump higher. They seem to do everything a little bit better." Chuck Fairbanks, coach and general manager of the New England Patriots, states flatly: "Blacks have the edge when it comes to speed."

Some black stars, acknowledging their better performance, have developed amateur anthropological theories to explain it. To former Baltimore Colt Tight End John Mackey, superior black speed is simply a matter of the opportunities and exposures of childhood. "I was chasing rabbits as a kid," he recalls, "and I could outrun any white guy who was just jogging up and down the street. When they turn loose African athletes who have been chasing, say, cheetahs, they will rewrite the record books. It's not because they're black but what they've been doing." Other athletes see explanations in the simple force of social pressure. In track, says Paul Warfield, the Cleveland Browns wide receiver, "I found just as many talented white performers with great speed or jumping ability as I did blacks. Yet in professional football, there seems to be an imbalance. For the white athlete, the alternatives have obviously been greater. He doesn't have to channel all of his energies into one particular area."

Warfield's thoughts echo those of many sociologists, who note that sports --and entertainment--have traditionally been used by minorities to fight their way out of the ghettos and into the mainstream of American society. In their turn, Irish, Jewish and Italian athletes and entertainers fought, ran, sang and joked their way into a society previously closed to them. The same journey is now being undertaken by blacks. Ironically, the very success of black sports stars has served to focus aspirations in the black community on athletics, a trend that social scientists--as well as thoughtful black athletes--feel is limiting the potential of many young blacks. Says Sociologist Corrie Hope of Morehouse College: "Unfortunately, I'm afraid that being successful in sports will remain for a long time the surest way out of the ghetto."

University of California Sociologist Harry Edwards, the theorist and leader of the black athletic revolt that culminated in open protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, emphasizes blacks' limited access to other careers and describes the process that follows. He told TIME Correspondent Edward J. Boyer: "With the channeling of black males disproportionately into sports, the outcome is the same as it would be at Berkeley if we taught and studied nothing but English. Suppose that everyone who got here arrived as a result of some ruthless recruitment process where everyone who couldn't write well was eliminated at every level from age six all the way through junior college. It would only be a short time before the greatest prose--the greatest innovations in teaching, learning and writing English--came out of Berkeley. It is the inevitable result of all this talent channeled into a single area. The white athlete who might be an O.J. Simpson is probably sitting somewhere behind a desk."

Still, although the social reasons for black athletic excellence may be perfectly sound, many scientists feel that blacks have some physical advantages too. Alvin Poussaint, a black psychiatrist who is dean of students at Harvard Medical School, attributes these advantages to the grim selectivity of slavery. Says he: "First of all, they selected for slavery only those with a lot of brawn and ability to work hard: only the best. Second, only the strongest survived the long voyage. We may already have a very selected group of blacks in this country." While recognizing that great physical differences exist between members of the same race--as is notably evident when 7-ft. 2 1/2-in. Kareem Abdul-Jab-bar and 5-ft. 10-in. Tiny Archibald confront one another in an N.B.A. game --scientists have also found that, on the average, there are measurable differences between the races. .

Pioneering studies by Dr. Eleanor Metheny, who conducted careful anthropometric studies of American blacks 40 years ago, broadly outlined the differences between whites and blacks. Metheny found that, in general, blacks had longer legs relative to total body length and that lower legs were proportionately longer, while thighs were shorter but more muscular than those of whites. "In jumping, the longer leg is evidently an advantage," Dr. Metheny wrote, "since [he] could raise his leg higher. Applying the principle of the lever, the longer lower leg can develop greater velocity at the end and serves as a longer lever with which to push off the ground, thus increasing the distance over which the force can be applied." The same general rules, Metheny found, applied to blacks' arms: on the average, blacks' hands are larger than those of whites, their arms longer, and a short, heavily muscled upper arm propels a long lower arm. Once more, the combination of leverage and musculature favors blacks in throwing.

Subsequent research, while limited, tends to confirm Metheny's findings. During the 1960 Olympics in Rome, J.M. Tanner, a British doctor, conducted X-ray and photographic studies of athletes. Tanner too reported that blacks had longer limbs and narrower hips, which for a runner provides a longer stride. According to Edward Hunt, an anthropologist at Penn State University, blacks tend to have lighter trunks and heavier bones. The average black's lungs are a little smaller relative to body weight. Then, too, young blacks carry less body fat than white youths. These characteristics, combined with relatively larger limbs and hands, he says, should be advantageous for sports that require quick movement. Yet they may well put blacks at a disadvantage in swimming, for example, where less fat and heavier bones make for less buoyancy. Dr. James Haines of Morehouse College tried a simple floating test on 841 students at the black school and found that 73% almost immediately sank to the bottom of the pool--"sinkers," he called them. In a similar test at nearby Georgia Tech, only 2% of white students showed the same tendency.

Yet another physician, Dr. Allan Ryan, editor of The Physician and Sportsmedicine, agrees that black athletes often have a greater leg-to-trunk-length ratio than whites, which gives them an advantage in activities requiring explosive force, such as sprinting and jumping. Dr. Lyle Micheli, director of the sport-medicine division of Children's Hospital, has made similar observations. In examining black children, he has found that they have relatively small muscle mass in their calves, but highly muscled thighs. Says he: "The combination of the two makes for very efficient running. But we don't know whether the development is a result of the running they do, or whether the better running is due to the physical capability." Other authorities, like Harvard Pathology Professor Gustave Dammin, go even further and insist that any physical differences that exist between blacks and whites have no significant bearing on athletic performance. Says Dr. Dammin: "I do not know of anything regarding blacks' physiques that would give them any special athletic advantage."

Whatever the reasons for black excellence in athletics, the surpassing skill is evident. The percentage of blacks in professional sports would probably be even higher were it not for the discrimination that still persists. Most athletes know all too well that in football, center, free safety and quarterback are still largely reserved for whites. In baseball, blacks are concentrated in the outfield. In basketball, some teams with largely black rosters will take on--or keep--a white player or two instead of hiring a more talented black, in an effort to maintain the interest of white crowds.

Blacks are particularly bitter about the lack of black quarterbacks in the N.F.L. Says Sociologist Edwards: "It's very interesting that a white man can be a quarterback regardless of what his intellectual reputation is. A black--I don't care what his intellectual reputation is--cannot be a quarterback."

The prejudice of white fans against a black man calling signals and directing the team does not help. Joe Gilliam was one of the first black N.F.L. quarterbacks, starting six preseason and another half-dozen regular-season games for the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1974. His record up to that point was 10-1-1, but his life was hell in a very small place. Lynn Swann recalls: "He would get anonymous phone calls. They said they could rip him off any time they wanted to, there were two guns pointed at him, that if he started the ball game, he'd never see another day." Gilliam's performance declined steadily under the pressure; Terry Bradshaw took over and led the Steelers to their first Super Bowl title.

Another reason that black athletes do not get a fair chance on some teams is that few front-office and head coaching jobs are held by blacks. There is one black major league manager, but no black has been trusted to send runners home from the third-base coaching box. Only the N.B.A. has blacks in major decision-making positions. Even the bench is a white preserve. Unlike some white athletes, blacks do not have the luxury of being marginal players. For them, it is stardom or back to the minors. According to a 1967 study, black players had higher batting averages than their white counterparts at every position.

Despite some of these difficulties, the black athlete has become folk hero to millions of Americans--particularly black youth. This disturbs Arthur Ashe, the only black among the top 100 professional tennis players. In an open letter to black parents, printed early this year in the New York Times, Ashe pointed out that there are only some 3,100 major positions open to athletes in professional sports, the annual turn over is low, and a black child has less than one chance in 1,000 of becoming a pro. "Unfortunately," Ashe wrote, "our most widely recognized role models are athletes and entertainers--'runnin'' and 'jumpin'' and 'singin'' and 'dancin'.' While we are 60% of the National Basketball Association, we are less than 4% of the doctors and lawyers ... less than 2% of the engineers ... less than 11% of construction workers."

Ashe urged parents to "instill a desire for learning alongside the desire to be Walt Frazier," and called on young blacks to spend two hours in the library for every hour on the athletic field. "We have been on the same roads--sports and entertainment--too long," he continued. "We need to pull over, fill up at the library and speed away to Congress and the Supreme Court, the unions and the business world." Then, in a humorous tone but still expressing what many blacks feel is true--and what whites are coming to acknowledge--he predicted: "Don't worry, we will still be able to sing and dance and run and jump better than anybody else."

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