Impressions in Black and White

By Tom Callahan

, What is an A.W.B.? In football circles, this has long been shorthand for an "average white back." Coach Dan Devine of Arizona State, Missouri and other far-flung places happened to use the term in passing the other day, while reminiscing on the occasion of his induction into college football's Hall of Fame. He could say such a thing publicly now as comfortably as Pete Rose, throughout his historic baseball summer, kept noting "Not bad for a white guy." Is racism losing some of its subtlety, or is sport losing some of its racism?

Which college football team wins this year's national championship is a matter now largely in the hands of an 18-year-old black quarterback from Oklahoma named Jamelle Holieway. The reversal Holieway represents could not be more dramatic if he had been switched to the position from defensive back. There have been black quarterbacks before, even in the South, but this one is being praised less for his legs and arm than for his head. Opponents rave about Holieway's ingenuity, his resourcefulness, his ability to lead and make sudden decisions, almost invariably the right ones. As patronizing as this would have once sounded, almost nobody is meaning it or taking it that way now.

Then, most striking of all, consider the anomaly of the 1985 Boston Celtics, "South Africa's team." Either basketball or Boston must lead the free world in uncrossable boundaries, and yet the Celtics have turned the stereotype not just around but inside out. In a league that is 75% black, they are featuring eight white players on a twelve-man squad. It parodies the National Basketball Association's whispery days of racial quotas that Center Bill Russell once outlined with a sinister smile: "The general rule is you're allowed to play two blacks at home, three on the road and five when you're behind." Winning 19 games already this year before losing even four, the Celtics are seldom behind.

In Russell's day, the '50s and '60s, "a good white forward" was the N.B.A.'s notion of the Holy Grail. Everyone was out searching. The common anxiety over Caucasian attendance was as plain as the pale nose on every twelfth man's face. And it was expressed in the extreme whenever a team like the Atlanta Hawks traded Paul Silas, a great forward, for Gary Gregor, a white one. Sixteen years later, the mind still reels. "Now all the whites in the league can play," testifies Silas, an assistant coach with the New Jersey Nets. "Well, anyway, the majority of them. There are even a few fringe black players today. Rather, let's say there are black players sitting at the end of the bench. They are usually rookies with potential." The role players, those utility workers who "do windows," continue to be white.

In 1950 the Celtics drafted the league's first black player, Duquesne's Chuck Cooper, and in 1966 they made Russell the first black coach. K.C. Jones, the incumbent, is their third. While mindful of business considerations in a sports town that canonized baseball's most recalcitrant integrator Tom Yawkey, the Celtics have generally lived by the principle handed down from Original Owner Walter Brown to Red Auerbach: "I don't care if they're green, white, black or yellow, so long as they can play." Naturally, an element of the bleached crowd in Boston Garden (sold out for all of Larry Bird's years, for none of Russell's) regards Bird, Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge, Bill Walton, Scott Wedman, Jerry Sichting, Rick Carlisle and Greg Kite as instruments of vengeance.

Bird, who can play, says, "I never notice what colors there are on the floor or think very much about it." Trying not to laugh, he adds, "The only difference between black players and white players is that they get their rebounds above the rim and we get ours below the net." Guard Dennis Johnson, one of two black starters, says seriously, "Somebody's always going to think we have too many of something." When the black guard Carlos Clark was cut and Carlisle kept, Johnson admits that he mourned momentarily. Nothing against Carlisle; Clark was his friend. "But I'm for anyone who can help us win."

Winning's allure has made a happy role player out of Walton, 33, eight years and a number of foot injuries and lost seasons removed from his championship days as the Most Valuable Player in Portland. "I'm well aware of the tremendous opportunity I've been given," he says, "and I'm going to make the most of it." With four months left in the season, the Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers are already distancing themselves from the rest. Barring a natural disaster, they should collide again next spring for the third year running, and the relief that Walton offers Center Robert Parish, freeing McHale to be a full-time forward, is Boston's best hope of catching up to the world champions.

Some years ago, when a number of teams had a chance to win, not including the San Diego Rockets, the young black star Elvin Hayes sidled over to the Rocket bench once and whispered to Coach Jack McMahon, "Get some more of my kind in here." A newspaperman sitting nearby looked up from his typing and straight at the coach, who muttered, "Isn't this grotesque?" This month Hayes is winding up the 30 credit hours he had left undone at the University of Houston. As a special assistant to the athletic director, charged with counseling young athletes, he feels a symbolic necessity to get his degree. "I played 16 years of pro basketball," he says, "but this is the hardest thing I've ever done."

Reminded of the past, Hayes admits, "I came into the N.B.A. drawing a racial line at everything. I could say I learned it here, but I didn't really. I'm just learning things here now, and I'm teaching what I came to know in the league. Basketball isn't a black and white game any more than life is. A lot of times in both you make bad decisions and never have a chance to correct them. It's really lucky when you do." You win.