Interview: Dr. Frank Guridy, author of "The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics"
This week Brenda speaks with Columbia University history professor Dr. Frank Guridy on his new book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics, which looks at the role that Texas business interests played in the hyper-commodification of sports in the second half of the 20th century.
This episode was produced by Ali Lemer. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Brenda: I am so excited to have with us today Dr. Frank Guridy, associate professor of history and African American and African diaspora studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, and co-editor of Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America. He is also the co-host of Say It Ain’t Contagious – it's a baseball and politics podcast, it's new, you should check it out. You can find him on Twitter @fguridy. Most importantly for our topic of conversation today, he is the author of the brand-new from University of Texas Press, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics. He likes tennis and he's one of my favorite people on the planet, so we are so thrilled to have you here, Frank. Thanks for coming again.
Frank: I am thrilled to be here, and as I’ve said before and will say again: I’ve long been an admirer of your work and the work of Burn It All Down, which is a truly extraordinary intervention in sports journalism and commentary.
Brenda: So, just to start with the basics, the book, The Sports Revolution – what do you mean by that?
Frank: What do I mean by “the sports revolution”…You know, in the United States there are these moments when we see the expansion of sports in our society. The 1920s for example is a moment when we're seeing sports become really popular – college football, Major League Baseball. I’m zeroing in on another moment in which we’re seeing the exploding popularity of sports, and that is the 1960s and 70s, really the 1960s until the early 1980s, in which we’re seeing in the United States and explosion of the sports industry. We’re seeing new professional franchises, we’re seeing new stadiums built across the country, around 50 at least from the 1960s until the late 1980s. We’re seeing television become a major factor in the ways in which the United States citizens and other folks who live here and other people around the world are consuming television, right?
So, this is a moment whence sports as we understand it now, as this gigantic industry, really takes off in the 1960s and 70s. It’s also the moment in the 60s and 70s when the civil rights and other freedom struggles including the second wave feminist struggles are happening at that time, when they’re achieving arguably their most significant gains politically but also socially and culturally, right? So you’ve got this major industry emerging around sports – sports media, professional sports, college sports – happening at the same time that marginalized peoples are fighting for and winning unprecedented political, social, and cultural space in the United States. So the book is really trying to bring those two elements together to understand that you really can't have one without the other, that sports plays a gigantic role in our understanding of American citizenship in this period and that the civil rights struggle has had an enormous impact on how we understand sports and how we’ve understood it to this day.
Brenda: And sticking with that then, one of the parts that I found really moving in the book comes somewhere towards the beginning and you say, “It’s temping to view the history of racial integration of college football,” – and I think you would say professional sports as well – “as a historical inevitability, a natural outcome of the great struggles of civil rights movements of the 1960s, when the arc of history finally seemed to be looming towards justice for Black people, and yet such such thinking minimizes the importance of the actual decisions made by historical actors to change what many thought to be the natural order of things.” So, I thought it was so interesting looking back and looking through this book at the ways in which you're trying to maybe preserve and interrogate a history that it would be really easy to say, hey, of course Jackie Robinson and now today, you know? So could you highlight for some of our listeners some of those things that you think we should know about the massive resistance?
Frank: Massive resistance, and also the struggles to create opportunities for Black athletes and other athletes from marginalized backgrounds. You know, part of the reason why I wanted to revisit this era, I think it’s really important for us now because we are sort of often saying, with good reason, that the current dynamic of white supremacy and exclusion dates from the earliest moments when this country was founded and conquered, from the conquest and colonization of Indigenous peoples. But as a historian who’s been trained in social movements, who understands that there's continuity and change over time, the 60s and 70s moment is one of those moments when there is a major break in the historic hierarchies that had guided sports, particularly racial hierarchies. So in the case of college football in the south, college football had been heavily racially segregated like everything in the south, right?
In the 1960s the Southwest Conference, which was a somewhat predecessor to today’s Big 12, was predominantly white of course, and it remained so until the mid 1960s when two programs, Southern Methodist University and the University of Houston, decided to recruit their first Black scholarship athletes. In the case of SMU it was Jerry LeVias, the talented kick returner and receiver/runner from Beaumont, Texas; and in the case of Houston it was Warren McVea, the running back from San Antonio. So, I’m zeroing in on that moment because I want us to understand that so-called desegregation or integration happens because of decisions that people make, because that head coach of SMU, Hayden Fry, decided to sign Jerry LeVias, and in his own way supported LeVias through a very very difficult, challenging, traumatic experience of becoming the first Black player to play in the Southwest Conference, right?
So, integration doesn’t just happen, it happens because people make decisions, and it doesn’t just happen when the Black athlete or the woman athlete shows up or the brown athlete shows up on the athletic roster, it happens because people are still struggling after the initial moment of integration, right? So, the chapter that looks at the integration of college football in Texas really takes the story deep into the 1970s when other schools decide that they're going to recruit Black athletes when they previously had not, and I’m really interested in understanding why was that the case. Why all of a sudden, finally, kicking and screaming, but nonetheless University of Texas eventually signs a Black athlete when they sign Julius Whittier in 1969.
Why is it that SMU and the University of Houston do it first before the other schools in the Southwest Conference, right? They do it because they want to win, which is something that coaches say all the time, that they're colorblind, it’s all about wins and losses. That's absolutely true, but it’s also because there are movements forcing them or at least compelling them to make these decisions that broke with the historical pattern, right? So, I’m really interested in that moment of rupture, as we would say as historians, to sort of understand why it happens and then understand the limits of that transformation. I think this book in a lot of ways really asks readers to interrogate the terms of inclusion, right? Why is it that certain populations are becoming included in an institution, or in this case in the sports world, when they had not been before? What were the gains as a result of that inclusion and what were the limits?
The real limits in this case was certainly as Black athletes and other marginalized athletes including women athletes – and I’m separating them here because in the sports world they’re thought of that way, separately – they have been excluded from certain athletic spaces that were reserved for white men, and why is that the case? Why do they become part of the scene, and who ultimately benefits from that arrangement? While certain very talented athletes benefit, and they benefit in terms of salaries and inducements in terms of college athletes, the primary beneficiaries are the growing white management class that makes decisions and controls and orchestrates this dynamic.
Brenda: So we’re talking about these people operating in a real particular time and place. Throughout the book you’re linking it with the emergence of the Sun Belt economically, also in the political imaginary and the power of Texas – not only Texas, it goes to Oklahoma, we go to Arizona, right? So, the Sun Belt as a powerhouse economically and politically. Is it just everything's bigger in Texas? [laughs] Can you talk about why Texas is such a compelling case beyond the obvious “it's big”?
Frank: Yes, it’s big and it's impactful. You cannot understand modern American sporting culture, the modern American sport industry, without understanding the impact of Texans, right? Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and Texas-based athletes. What is the National Football League today becomes that because of the efforts of Lamar Hunt and KS Bud Adams, both sons of oil barons – and this is a big part of the story, that much of this gets financed by oil money – and also Clint Murchison, another son of another oil baron, who essentially foist themselves on the National Football League. Adams and Hunt found the American Football League, 8 franchises that basically challenge the supremacy of the NFL. They do it successfully.
Clint Murchison forms the Dallas Cowboys in 1960, the same year that Hunt and Adams created the American Football League. Clint Murchison’s president, Tex Schramm, along with Lamar Hunt, who orchestrate the merger of the two leagues after the AFL successfully challenges the NFL's supremacy in professional football. So, if you're gonna understand the emergency of the NFL, Texas entrepreneurs are extremely important. If you’re gonna understand the way in which we understand stadiums today, you have to understand the impact of the Houston Astrodome, the first indoor stadium built in this country, the first stadium – which is something I highlight – that has luxury boxes, which is designed to cater to the affluent classes.
The Astrodome is interesting because they actually cater to a cross-class constituency, but it’s the first stadium that has artificial turf, the first stadium that has luxury boxes. It is a temple in a lot of ways, a tribute to the local energy oil elite in Texas, right? So, Texas-based entrepreneurs have a gigantic impact on not just the expansion of professional sports but also the popularity of college football. So much of that oil money is flooding into these athletic programs, and that money is used to recruit a new emerging class of athletic laborers, Black athletes who are becoming available to these white schools in the era of segregation, right? And central to the story of course is the impact of the talents and the skills of the athletic laborers from Texas, right?
So many legends in football, baseball, basketball and tennis are from Texas, that have a huge impact on the popularity of the sport. This is not just a story of far-sided entrepreneurs and businessmen, this is really the story of an alliance of capital and labor, to some degree, of athletic laborers who are emerging in the 1960s out of the shadows of the Jim Crow segregation, and certainly Black athletes, teaming with sports businessmen and coaches who understand that if they're gonna become successful they need their talent to win, they need their talent to make their cities viable and also identifiable in the Sun Belt. This is certainly the case with Houston and Dallas, and to a lesser extent Austin and San Antonio.
So, Texas’s case is interesting because it has this significant impact on the way professional sports and collegiate sports is understood and the industry operates, even to the level of sports media. A lot of people I mention in this book are prominent sports media people, from Dandy Don Meredith to Verne Lundquist to Phyllis George – who was one of the first women to become part of a sports network television cast, the former Miss America who has an interesting role in the story.
So, that’s why Texas becomes important. Obviously the south in general, the Sun Belt, becomes important really as the sports industry becomes nationalized, but I’m arguing that Texas’s impact is significant because really they're the first ones also to desegregate, you know, before New Orleans and Atlanta it is the Texas cities that desegregate first because, again, the sportsmen understand that they need Black laborers and Black citizens to support their efforts to put their cities on the map through sports.
Brenda: So, there's the argument about the talent and the winning. You show in a lot of places the way in which racism actually trumps the desire to win. [laughs] We know, the Boston Red Sox. So, you’ve got this other argument that I wanted to ask you about and that I think is important, which is always going back to the contradictions of the influx in capital that’s happening. You’ve got the abandonment of, and I’m quoting here from page 84, “the abandonment of Jim Crow college football in Texas occurred in part because of the massive influx of capital into the realm of inter collegiate athletics.” That certainly seems, you know, if you read The Sports Revolution, and to my mind there's many revolutions going on in that, sort of like the industrial revolution of the sports complex! [Frank laughs] But so, could you talk a little bit about writing that and thinking through that, and how it seems difficult and right?
Frank: Yeah, I had a lot of ambitions for this book, and one of them is to at least get the reader to appreciate that the story of integration, the story of inclusion – the story that leads us to believe that sports is an equal playing field because of the prominence of Black athletes, athletes of color, women athletes – is not just a moral story, right? It’s not just a culture story. You have to look at it in the economic and political transformations of that time. Certainly we know that in the case of Jackie Robinson’s becoming the first Black player to play in the major leagues after the Second World War, right? That part of what’s going on there is the Brooklyn Dodgers are looking for talent, Branch Rickey is looking for talent, and he sees the talent in the Negro Leagues and he decides that he’s gonna start the process by which the Negro Leagues become talent suppliers for Major League Baseball. That’s an economic calculus as much as it is a moral one, as others have highlighted.
We see a similar dynamic going on in Texas and other parts of the country in the south eventually in the 1960s, right? A big part of the Texas story of course, those who know this well, is the energy economy. The oil economy makes so much of what modern Texas becomes to this day, and it's not by accident that so many of these guys who wanna buy franchises are oil men in one way, shape or form, right? So that’s certainly the case with professional sports franchises in Texas, particularly the NFL, but also those who come together around the Houston Sports Association, the group that founds the Houston Colt .45s, which eventually becomes the Houston Astros, and also all these boosters who are really loyal to their universities, right? This comes through very clearly in the great 30 For 30 documentary called Pony Excess, on the SMU football scandal of the 1980s.
One of the stories that I see in that film that I see in my evidence as well is just the prominence of oil men pumping money into their alma maters because they want their schools to win, right? And they don't care if the coaches recruit Black athletes. Now, some programs are more far-sided on that front than others. The University of Texas were one of the last schools to integrate in the Southwest Conference, whereas other schools go first. The University of Texas actually pays for that, because they wound up slipping behind and they’re not as competitive in the 1980s as a result of their recalcitrance on integration. But you can’t understand that dynamic without understanding oil money. You can't understand the birth of the women's professional tennis tour in 1970 without understanding the entanglements that the tennis players had with Phillip Morris tobacco money which finances the creation of the Virginia Slims tour in Houston in 1970.
So, I wanted that to be part of the story, right? And you can’t understand why the sports revolution peters out without understanding the collapse of oil economy in Texas in the 1980s which has a gigantic impact on sports ownership in Texas and on the decline of a lot of these teams that were really flourishing earlier as well, right? So, oil energy, the financing from businesses that profit from toxic commodities, ironically, are very much part of this story, they are.
Brenda: Absolutely. [laughs] There’s another revolution going on that you call in this chapter “Sexual revolutions on the sidelines.” Tell us about that.
Frank: Sexual revolutions on the sidelines. When I first decided to write this book, one of the first chapters I started to envision was a chapter on cheerleading and a chapter on the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. Part of that is because I wanted to make sure this is a book that as best as I could was really one that was as attentive to women’s experiences as it is men's experiences in the world of sport. Sports history, sports studies, until very recently, is a predominantly masculinized genre. I could’ve written this book very easily about one sport. I could’ve focused on integration as it related to just men. But I wanted to really widen the analytic frame to talk about, well, where are women in this story? They're certainly in this story on the field of play, particularly after the passage of Title IX in 1972, but they’re also on the field as dancers and cheerleaders on the sideline, right, which I see as athletic activity.
It’s very clear that cheerleading, historically speaking, once it becomes feminized in the mid-20th century is a space where athletically inclined perceived-attractive women wind up congregating, right? It becomes a gigantic part of sporting culture, particularly in Texas, at all levels, from the youth all the way up to the professional level. So, the chapter on the sexual revolution on the sidelines is really about the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders as they emerged in 1972, the same exact year that Title IX is passed – which I don't think that’s by accident – and their role in popularizing the franchise that is known to this day as America’s team, right? The story of the Cowboys is often a story of far-sided management, Tex Schramm, Tom Landry; legendary football players like Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, and then later Troy Aikman in the 90s. It's a franchise that's owned by Jerry Jones now, who seizes the Cowboys brand in the late 1980s and he hasn't let it go since, when he fires Tom Landry.
So, that's a story we know well, but the story of the cheerleaders is just a side bar, and I wanted to make this part of the story. I see the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders as a parallel labor structure, right? The Cowboys have essentially a gendered labor structure where you have the men in charge and the players on the football side who are playing on the field, and then you have these cheerleaders who were formerly incorporated by the Cowboys, they become enormously popular in the late 1970s and they’re grossly underpaid and they’re exploited, right? So, that’s the story that I wind up telling in that chapter, but it's not just a tale of exploitation. I do want the experiences of the cheerleaders themselves to be part of the story. So, it’s very clear that many of those cheerleaders first of all, they weren’t all white. There was significant numbers of Black and Latinx and even Asian American cheerleaders on that team in the 1970s.
Vonciel Baker and her sister Vanessa are two Black cheerleaders who danced with the Cowboys for almost 10 years in the 1970s. For these women, Black women, working class and rural women, dancing for the Cowboys was a form of self-expression and they were willing to put up with the exploitation, the harassment, the toxic masculinity and the brutal labor regime that they trained under because they got something out of it. They got fame out of it, right? But the Cowboys got a lot of money out of them too, and I think of course this resonates with the debates around cheerleading in the NFL today, right? So, the origins of that dynamic, of an exploited and feminized labor force cheerleading which we see to this day, really originates in that period when cheerleading is becoming professionalized.
Brenda: And you also make the point…I mean, you have a wonderful section – just a teaser for readers – on the Battle of the Sexes, so do check that out. But I do wanna say, you also are discussing the ways in which perhaps the feminist movement made their own assumptions about these athletes in terms of the cheerleading teams and what the sexual objectification angle was in such a way that it seems like they really weren’t included in the feminist movement.
Frank: Yeah, and some of this I’m drawing from the great book by Susan Ware which actually centers Billie Jean King in her story, but it really situates Billie Jean King’s ascendance as a feminist icon within the context of the transformations that happen as a result of Title IX, right? It’s clear that when you read many second wave feminists, you know, sports was really not on their agenda. It was a very class-based agenda that was concerned with real substantive issues no doubt – the ERA, expansion of education, employment opportunities – then you’ve got queer feminists entering the fray and raising all sorts of questions around sexuality. But by and large in that moment, feminists sort of looked down on sports. Sports activists are kind of operating in a different sphere, and we see this pretty clearly in Ware’s book. Of course with the cheerleaders, cheerleading was seen understandably so as this retrograde practice of sexual objectification of the pre-Title IX era that had to just go away, you know? [laughs]
So the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and NFL cheerleaders in particular become a lightning rod for second wave feminists because they are seen as representing this class of women that are there just to cater to, to become eye candy for straight men. To some extent they’re right, to some degree, but again if you widen the frame and you incorporate some of the insights of feminism since second wave, when you think about the role of sexual fulfillment and sexual liberation, when you get beyond the kind of historical, white middle class orientation of that era, then you see that…I mean, I’m not arguing that the cheerleaders were feminists by any means, but within the sport context they were pushing back against certain assumptions of what entertainment should be.
If you watch Super Bowl XII, as the sport nerd that I am, so much of what I did in this book was to watch closely old YouTube videos of telecasts, because that provides enormous, amazing materials, particularly on the cheerleaders. You look at that telecast where the Dallas Cowboys are playing the Denver Broncos at Super Bowl XII, you know, the cameras are on the cheerleaders almost as much as they are on the men on the gridiron. By that point in 1978, you know, television executives understood that the cheerleaders helped them make a lot of money, and also probably provided a bunch of thrills for all the dudes who were the directors and cameramen for sure, and they were very open about that. But as far as they were concerned, the Cowboys were about the cheerleaders too, they weren’t just about the great Roger Staubach and Tony Dorsett and Randy White, etc.
So, that dynamic is important to take into account when we evaluate feminism in that period, and I tend to think that sports was a blind spot for them even though they rightfully were understanding the exploitative, objectifying nature of the cheerleading industry as it was emerging in that period
Brenda: Moving away from football for a moment, we have the San Antonio Spurs making an appearance, and in general in the 1970s I would say is really where you kind of start to talk about Latinx influences on sports culture in Texas in the fan culture. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Frank: I absolutely could. If I was you, Brenda Elsey, I would’ve had a chapter on soccer in Texas. [Brenda laughs] I originally thought that that'd be the case, but in the end I couldn't pull it together. I was committed to telling the story across sports and, like every book, some things have to fall out. I talk about Mexican Americans in the opening chapter so you can understand how Mexican Americans fit into the Jim Crow order, so I have some sections on the borderlands and sporting culture and the ways in which Mexican Americans experienced Jim Crow segregation. But I wanted to tell a story of Latinx fandom, which is seldom written about, and this is also a personal story because my in-laws live in San Antonio and I have experienced fandom firsthand and I've experienced the firsthand fandom of Latinx populations in Texas, and I also wanted to talk about San Antonio because it’s often overlooked in sport history. I mean, there really is no decent book on the San Antonio Spurs even though they're one of the most successful NBA franchises.
There’s a great history of the ABA by Terry Pluto which I leaned on very heavily to look at the ABA period. So, the Spurs emerges as an ABA franchise in 1973 and what makes them distinct is that they are emerging in this renegade basketball league that's trying to challenge, trying to create a revolution in professional basketball, trying to challenge the NBA’s monopoly over professional basketball. They understand that if they're gonna do that they need fans, and since they’re in San Antonio where the population is at least 50% Latinx, they understand that somehow they need to incorporate Latinos into their culture, and they do. It's very clear that Latino fans in San Antonio have a significant factor in the Spurs’ success culturally in San Antonio. So, I spent some time talking about Mexican American fans in that chapter. I look at the Baseline Bums, which was a longstanding – I think they're still around – club which was affiliated with the Spurs, that caused a lot of havoc in the stands.
Brenda: Sounds fun. It sounded really fun.
Frank: Yes. In fact I sat with the Baseline Bums in 2014 when I first started doing this book a looong time ago. What’s so interesting about that moment is not just their presence in the stands and their rowdiness, but the inability of the mainstream sports media to understand San Antonio. I mean, I found these just horribly racist passages in Sports Illustrated really denigrating San Antonio and its fans. This is the New York-based sports media that looks at San Antonio as this quaint ‘other’ place that's not American – and yet it is American, and it is part of Texas, right? So, it’s not by accident that in 2013 when Sebastien De La Cruz sings the national anthem at the 2013 NBA finals and receives a lot of hate from racists on Twitter and social media, he sings the national anthem wearing mariachi garb and the franchise and the fans rallied to De La Cruz’s support because for them this is normal, right? The Spurs certainly belong to all of San Antonio and all their fandom.
The Mexican Americans have a gigantic impact on their franchise. So if you travel around San Antonio today, I mean, the Spurs’ impact and the impact of Latinos on this sport is profound, it’s significant, and it’s not just a marketing ploy. This is not just something that originates in some Madison Avenue ‘Los Spurs’ marketing initiative. This is really grassroots sports marketing, sports fandom that emerges in a league that was really fledgling and needed their support. The Spurs were smart enough to realize that they needed that support and they incorporated it in ways that were really smart, I thought.
Brenda: For those of you who aren't historians, forgive me for 30 seconds. Is it a social history of culture, or is it a cultural history of social…? [laughs] Or where are we falling? How would you tag this?
Frank: And why do you ask the question as an either or cultural…
Brenda: I don’t – I throw it out as examples to give you a sense of where I’m going, which is how do you place this, for those of us who are doing history? It’s a really detailed study.
Frank: Yes. A lot of details, yes.
Brenda: You're talking about actual games, you're talking about actual peoples, details of their lives. Where do you see this in terms of historians reading this?
Frank: Yeah, I guess the short answer is that this is both a social and cultural history. I was trained, I think, as a social historian at the University of Michigan. My advisor was Rebecca Scott, a renowned scholar of slavery and emancipation in Cuba. My first book was on Cuba, Black experiences in Cuba as it intersected with African Americans. So, that legacy of that training is here insofar as you see, yes, details on individuals, absolutely. I wanna tell the story of people, people who make history happen, right? It’s not just these depersonalized forces that make things happen. But I also wanted to draw upon the work of cultural historians and performance studies scholars too, you know, probably because my partner is a performance studies scholar and I’ve read a lot of performance studies, and when it’d done right it really allows us to see how bodies in motion, how performance creates knowledge, creates identifications, right? That sensibility informs my attention to athletic contest.
This is also a book that's pitched for the general interest reader who likes sports, so yeah, I tell stories of touchdowns and curveballs and backhands and slam dunks. Absolutely. One, so that we can appreciate the kind of power and compelling nature of sport practice, and in that sense it's also a labor history, right? It is about how plays happen, how coaches come up with their strategies, you know? I’ve got stuff in there about the Veer offense that Bill Yeoman uses when he coached the University of Houston Cougars in the 1960s and 70s, right? Not just to appeal to the football fans, so that we could understand, particularly those who don’t understand sports, that there’s an intellectual component to sports practice, sports labor, sports performance, you know? So, it looks like cultural history in the sense that, yes, I’m talking about the cultural impact of advertising, I’m talking about the cultural impact of television, I’m talking about George Gervin’s finger roll, right? And I spend some time talking about what's required to shoot a finger roll. If you know basketball, if you don’t have long fingers – and even if you do, it’s a really hard shot to shoot, to pull off.
So, in that sense it is a blend, I think, of social and cultural history, and I spend a lot of time…I think academic writing about sports tends to overlook the stuff on the field, the stuff in the television truck, the stuff that happens in television booths. I wanted this book for better or for worse to sort of bring all that in and analyze it closely and not just tell it as a backstory. You know, George scored 70 points or 63 points and won the scoring title, and now I'm gonna go on and a talk about how racist the media was to him and their misunderstanding of the Spurs – which I could’ve done and it would’ve been fine, but that doesn’t interest me as much, and I think it’s an intervention in sports history. I’m pulling on the conventions that sportswriters have been doing forever, which is to talk about and write about what happens on the field. Messi is a compelling soccer player because of what he does on the field, right? On the pitch.
Brenda: Only so. [laughs]
Frank: Yeah, exactly.
Brenda: Frankly.
Frank: So, that’s what informs the kind of approach to the book, and I think in academic terms I would say it’s a combination of social and cultural history.
Brenda: Everyone’s gonna wanna know…This has been an unprecedented year of athlete activism. We saw really important movements towards resisting NCAA’s monopoly on unpaid student labor. We've had COVID call into question the very moral and ethical standards of administrations. We’ve had an increase in branding – Michigan State men’s basketball team not being presented to you by Rocket Mortgage, I’d like to turn in my diploma! [Frank laughs] So, we've seen an amped up year of all the criticisms in this book and that we have all the time, as scholars of sport, seen it just laid bare. When you're looking back, do you think that’s the case if you look back, that this is just perpetually the same story?
Frank: I don’t think it's perpetually the same story because I believe that social movements have impacts, you know? It is really tempting to look at the period I look at, the late 1960s, look at the repression that Tommie Smith and John Carlos faced and compare it to what Colin Kaepernick has faced, look at the absolute intransigence around amateurism that we see in the NCAA and say that, yes, this is just another part of that long, unbroken story of corruption and exploitation. In a superficial way, yes, that’s true. But I’d rather see it as, okay, we’re revisiting questions that have been posed before, and the athletic activism is part of the broader Black freedom struggle, freedom struggles of Mexican origin people, anti-war movements, second wave feminism struggles among other struggles, the emergence of a gay rights movement, etc. We're posing questions, struggling, produce some results, and then there was the backlash.
I think that’s how I see this moment compared to the moment of the late 60s, early 70s, when athlete activists – obviously Black athletes for sure – at the professional level and the collegiate level: Harry Edwards, Muhammad Ali, all the greats that we always talk about, are raising questions and insisting that the white sports establishment respond to their aspirations and desires and demands. Some of those demands were met, to some degree, and the demands that were met were those in terms of integration, inclusion. But because so much of this was hitched on commercialization and capital, the primary beneficiaries as I said earlier are the white men who run the show or who emerge in this period and become hugely successful and rich, including those in sport media, right? You can’t understand Brent Musberger’s career without understanding his emergence in this period commenting on NBA games that are played by Black laborers, right? So, his popularity is based on the labor of Black athletes in the NBA and to a lesser extent in the NFL, right? That’s the legacy of that period.
It’s also significant to understand that the notion of equality then was that we just include people, we don't transform the institutions, and when you look at some of the literature from athlete activists from that period…For example, I mention a couple of books in this book, not just Harry Edwards’ book but Gary Shaw, who was a second-tier offensive linemen who wrote a book, Meat on the Hoof, which is read as an expose of Darrell Royal’s Texas Longhorn college football program. He writes very eloquently and painfully about the exploitation he experienced, the brutalization that was involved in making sure that Texas players played or did not. He's raising all kinds of questions about masculinity in that book – stuff that we would call toxic masculinity now were being raised 50 years ago.
So, while the sports revolution produced significant substantive change, there were a bunch of things that were not addressed, and it also set in motion the hyper-profiteering that we see in collegiate and professional athletics, right? I talk about Jackie Sherrill's historic contract that he signs in 1982 with the Texas A&M Aggies, and there's a lot of debate about why this football coach is getting paid $1.6 million in 1982, and then of course now college coaches make almost $9 million a year and the salaries keep going. So, to some degree, you're seeing this ongoing history of struggle. That’s the social movement person in me, who recognizes that inclusion and significant change happen and other things have not changed, and what we see now in today’s athlete activist movement are a range of questions being raised by a range of actors – and not just men, that’s what makes this period significant, right? You know this as well, you folks talk about this on Burn It All Down all the time. Those questions were not posed and there were no demands on those fronts around trans identity, queerness, in the sports world at the time, not in a significant way that becomes taken up by people at least at the mainstream level.
So, yeah, I think that’s how I would answer the question. I think we revisit this moment not to tell us what we already know but we revisit the moment to see how were people raising questions back then, and how do we tell the story of that period differently that’s not just a story of the great men activists and maybe Billie Jean King who produced some change, right? There’s a whole host of people that I talk about in this book who were raising critical questions either through activism or just non-compliant refusal too.
Brenda: So on that and to end, one of my favorite summaries of the book is at the end of the introduction, and you say, “[this book] is a story of a unique industry that has facilitated the creativity and self-expression of talented athletes in the 1960s and 70s, many of whom emerged from the shadows of colonialism, Jim Crow segregation, and patriarchy, to provide glimpses of a better Texas and, by extension, a better United States of America.” I put in the margin when I was reading, “Awww!” [Frank laughs] Then I put, “Who would you put in that category, Frank?” It wasn't even an interview question, it was more like what one or two people when you thought of that, writing that sentence, and there's so many people in your book. Do you have an example or two of who gave us a glimpse of a better United States of America.
Frank: Well, okay, so many of the athletes I talk about in this book.
Brenda: For sure, for sure. I’m just asking you for a second to be...You know, the annoying question of cherry-picking a couple.
Frank: Yeah. So, certainly the women that we associate with the Original 9 who created the women’s professional tennis tour, right? The Billie Jean King story as well. One person I talk about is Nancy Richey, who’s an often overlooked figure. She’s known in tennis circles and I’m a tennis head so I knew about her. She's from San Angelo. I heard she was groomed to be a tennis star and she was, and she experienced all of the abuse and sexism of the pre-1968 era when tennis was amateur and it becomes professionalized in the late 60s. So, there's this Richey figure who’s a white Texas woman who becomes a major player in the creation of a professional tennis tournament.
Rosie Casals, a Salvadoran American who comes up from the public courts of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to become one of the best tennis players of the era, right? Tennis, this sort of country club sport, somehow is being intruded upon by this central American woman, central American – literally American, from the US – woman, to change the game and create this image of what a Latina looks like in the sports world. We don't often think about her in that way, but I do. I see the same even with the performance of the Black athletes. One Black quarterback that I talk about in this book is Danny Davis who I’d never heard of before I started doing research. He’s the Black quarterback of the Veer offense University of Houston Cougars and I talk very closely about him leading the Cougars to the Southwest Conference championship and the Cotton Bowl championship in 1977, and there he is after his team wins, crying in the locker room, talking about all the losses he experienced as a Black man growing up in Texas, you know, the cousin who died of…I think in his case he died of a disease.
I talk about the people he lost to police violence, right, talking about this as he's crying in the locker room after leading his team in 1977 when the notion of a Black quarterback is still novel, creating a story that is really inspiring. It's just a lot of inspiring stories like that, not just by the great athletes that we know from that period but these other folks who are emerging from a state that we often over-determine as a red state that’s conservative, that's just a bastion of white supremacy. But if you pay close attention to the people who emerge from the social movements of that state, the Black and Mexican American and other marginalized communities, there's some inspiring stories that we see that give a glimpse into what we want this country to look like.
Brenda: Thank you so much for being with us today, Frank, and to all of our listeners: I can’t recommend highly enough The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics. It is available at University of Texas Press and other places you get your books, so please do yourself a favor and get a copy.
Frank: Brenda, thanks. Thanks so much for chatting with me about my book. I really appreciate the chance to talk about it with you on Burn It All Down.