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These DaysThe Negro's thletics—ChamberlainBy JOHN CHAMBERLAIN(Copyright. 1968. King FeaturesSyndicate, Inc.)Lew Alcindor, the seven-foot-one-inch Negro college basketball genius, attended the California meeting which proposed a boycott of the Mexican Olympic games by black U. S athletes, and, simply because of his fame, he has been shoved forward as a leader of the boycott cause He now says that, though he is interested in what the boycott is designed to do. he shouldn t be singled out as the Field Marshal of an intransigent army.Alcindor’s quite evident qualms about the utility of a boycott may indicate that the whole proposal is about to collapse If this is indeed the case, it is ail to the good For a boycott would hurt athletics, which is one area of American life that has been supremely good to the Negro. It would, moreover, hurt the 1968 Olympic host state of Mexico, which happens to be a nation that has been through a long revolution designed to give all its racial components, whether Indian, mestizo or white European, an equal chance in life.Whatever the gripes of the Negro about his place in a white-dominated U. S. society in general, he has no call to take out his frustrations on the world of athletics. For more than twenty years I have served as a judge of the ‘‘best sports stories of the year ’ for sports editor Irving Marsh, formerly of the lamented New York Herald Tribune It's been a pleasure to watch the development of the American sports writer over the span of two decades in his guise of keeper of our collective social conscience. Back in 1947 Jackie Robinson was just breaking into major league baseball, and Kenny Washington was the only Negro player in the National Football League. Basketball was becoming a game for giants, but they had to be white giants But things were ripe for a change, and the sports writer dug in to help give the Negro his breakThe result is very much apparent inthis year’s selection of prize stories for Mr Marsh's anthology One of the best pieces looks at Lew Alcindor as the beneficiary of the sports revolution which Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers started wher he brought Jackie Robinson up fromMontreal in the not-so-color-conscious International League Baseball set the pace for all athletics, with basketball not far behind. The first Negro to play in the National Basketball Association was Chuck Cooper, who joined the Boston Celtics in 1950. Today some fifty per cent of the players in professional basketball areNegroes Boston’s Bill Russell is the finestdefensive man in basketball history. Philadelphia’s Wilt Chamberlain, who once scored one hundred points in a single contest, is basketball’s best known star If and when Lew Alcindor quits the college scene to become a big money earner as a basketball pro, he will find the world more than anxious to accept him.Another good story to make the Irving Marsh anthology for 1968 focuses on the role which Grambling College, an all-Negro institution in Louisiana, has played in stock ing the professional football leagues. Itwas in 1947 that Kenny Washington, the sole representative of his race in pro foot ball, heard about a young fullback named Paul Younger who had scored twenty-five touchdowns in a single season for Grambling Younger, known as “Tank,’’ got his chance as a money making star with Kenny Washington’s Los Angeles Rams. Other Grambling players soon followed in his footsteps—Willie Davis of the Green Bay Packers, Ernie Ladd of Houston, Mike Howell of the Browns, Willie Williams of the Oakland Raiders By 1966 253 of the 960 players in the National Football League and the American Football League were NegroesThe Negro athletes who have called for a boycott of the Olympics are trying to show the world that the U. S. is “no better than South Africa.”m
Newspaper Details
Seymour Daily Tribune
Seymour, Indiana, US
Mon, Feb 05, 1968
Page 4
Full Page
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WV, USA 02 May 2020
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