San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Sporting Green: How the Bay Area became the sports world’s center for social change.
How Bay Area became sports world’s epicenter of revolutionary thought
The Bay Area radiates a magnetic attraction for rebels and radicals who cannot abide the status quo, a phenomenon that permeates the sports world.
The poster guy for these free radicals, these agents of change, could be Harry Edwards, who began stirring the pot in the mid1960s and is still stirring.
Edwards, sports sociologist and UC Berkeley professor emeritus, did not come to the Bay by chance.
He grew up in roughand tumble East St. Louis,
Ill., the son of a thirdgrade dropout mom and a father who served 11 years in
Joliet Prison for burglary.
Harry was only lightly brushed with education in high school, but his enlightenment arrived in the form of a Jet magazine cover bearing the mutilated corpse of a Black teenager, Emmett Till. Then Edwards read a newspaper story about an assistant football coach at USC, a white man who re
ceived death threats for appointing cocaptains, one Jewish and one Black.
“So I said, ‘Well, hell, that’s where I want to go,’” says Edwards, who is also a longtime consultant to the 49ers.
A highly recruited threesport athlete, Edwards headed west. The USC plan didn’t work out, so Edwards veered north and eventually landed at San Jose State, where the clueless innercity Midwesterner became an influential and controversial agent of change, through sports.
Edwards is part of a long continuum. The Bay Area is the epicenter for revolutionary thought, speech and action in sports. Colin Kaepernick is only one of the latest manifestations of a movement that dates back at least 70 years. The list of these changemakers includes Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Curt Flood, Frank Robinson, Phil Woolpert, Bill Walsh, Stephen Curry and Al Davis.
They are part of the same rebellious vibe that gave us the Black Panthers, the Beat poets, the Free Speech movement, and labor pioneers like Harry Bridges and Cesar Chavez. Why here?
“It’s not something in the water,” Edwards says in his commanding baritone. “I think it’s something in the cultural heritage of this region, of this state. This is land’s end, this is where people seeking a new start, a better world, a better life, end up.”
After San Jose State, Edwards earned his doctorate at Cornell, then returned to San Jose, where his activism kicked into high gear.
“One of the reasons I came back is that you do have that ability to stretch out and explore and expand, and that’s so critically important,” Edwards says.
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Like Edwards, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was no accidental citizen of the Bay Area. Ferlinghetti, now 101, was a leader in the cultural and literary revolution of the ’50s and ’60s centered in North Beach. He opened City Lights bookstore in 1953, as a meeting place for the poets, writers and thinkers whose work aimed to change our world.
Why did Ferlinghetti choose San Francisco, when he could have opened his revolution-fomenting bookstore anywhere — say, Des Moines, Iowa, or Salt Lake City?
“They wouldn’t have known what we were talking about,” says Ferlinghetti.
He elaborated on that theme in an interview 10 years ago with Free Radical, saying, “I was from New York and I tried to settle down there at the end of the war. I tried to get a job at publishers and newspapers, but everything was sewed up. Whereas in San Francisco, it was still wide open. It was still the last frontier in the ’40s. It seemed like it was possible to do anything you wanted to out here.”
Ferlinghetti was, in essence, a 20th century 49er, seeking golden ideas rather than nuggets, and he wasn’t alone. There is a consensus among historians and sociologists that the Bay Area’s spirit of conventiondefying is a carryover from Gold Fever.
The Gold Rush not only drew adventurers, dreamers and desperadoes to our Bay, it changed those who came. San Francisco grew from 800 U.S. citizens in 1848, to 30,000 in 1852, the place got crowded and rowdy, and those who survived carried the spirit of the place in their DNA.
Bret Harte, the famed Western fiction writer, described the 100 men of his Gold Rush town, Roaring Camp: “One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless. Physically, they exhibited no indication of their past lives and character.”
Ferlinghetti is an example of the Bay Area’s ability to shape and change people who are drawn here. He has said he had few subversive thoughts when he settled in San Francisco, a family man and poet opening a bookshop, but he became a daring champion of free speech, a leader of a literary movement, and author of “Poetry as Insurgent Art.”
“It’s a bit of a stereotype, but people who move west borrow from that kind of frontier energy of the 1800s,” says James Zarsadiaz, associate professor of history at USF. “It’s like the Wild West, rugged individualists, you pursue what you want, that kind of attitude.
“Ultimately, a lot of the reasons why the Bay Area has this tie to radical or progressive activism or social movement goes back to the 19th century. There was that history of the Barbary Coast, where anything goes, and that’s kind of the milieu of the Bay Area.”
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The USC assistant coach who unknowingly lured Edwards to the West Coast was also drawn to the Bay Area. Al Davis, raised in Brooklyn, was first drawn to Los Angeles, which had its own magnetic pull and rebel culture. Then Davis ventured to Oakland, to coach (and ultimately own) the Raiders of the upstart American Football League, itself born out of rebellion. Davis, backed by an unconventional fan base, continued waging his oneman war on football’s — and society’s — racist and sexist traditions.
Davis, Edwards, Ferlinghetti, Kaepernick and the other envelopepushers found their fullest expression in the Bay Area, but it wasn’t just the intoxicating winds sweeping through the Golden Gate that filled their sails.
“The point that’s important to me is that it wasn’t just something in the air,” says Douglas Hartman, a sports sociologist and professor at the University of Minnesota. “These are actual relationships and networks. Kaepernick wasn’t just reading history books to learn about ’68 (the Olympic protests by Black athletes) and be inspired by that. He was talking with Harry (Edwards). He was talking with, I’m sure, other athletes who had lived this.
“These are real networks, it’s not just like freefloating ideas that vaguely started in the Bay Area that caused Kaepernick to start thinking like that. It’s real people he’s talking to. There are all these connections, from the ’60s to the ’70s to today. I think we kind of romanticize it so much, we sometimes forget about the actual networks and connections that people grow in.”
Connections. Edwards joined the Black Panthers, which were born and headquartered in Oakland. He still considers Bill Russell — a lifelong fighter for equal rights and basketball star at USF and Oakland’s McClymonds High School in the 1950s — the most intelligent athlete he’s ever met. Edwards praises the freethinking atmosphere of San Jose State. While teaching there, he helped form the Olympic Project for Human Rights, advocating a boycott of the 1968 Olympics. The boycott was not successful but Edwards’ activism did lead to the medalstand protest of Smith and Carlos, two San Jose State athletes.
San Jose State also shaped Bill Walsh, who played for the Spartans and briefly coached them. When Walsh coached the 49ers, he and Edwards formed the Diversity Coaching Fellowship, an internship program for minority coaches. All NFL teams participate in that program.
Edwards, a 49ers consultant since 1985, also has had considerable interaction with Kaepernick. The quarterback’s cultural and political awakening has roots at the University of Nevada, where he was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi. That is also the fraternity of Russell, who has publicly supported Kaepernick, and of Ollie Matson and Burl Toler, members of the ’51 USF Dons football team that famously rejected a prestigious bowl bid rather than leave its two Black stars home.
Through Bay Area connections, Kaepernick may have known of Russell’s fellow McClymonds alums Curt Flood and Frank Robinson, trailblazers in Major League Baseball.
Kaepernick and Curry, whatever their personal relationship, are connected in the spirit of Bay Area protest. In 2017, after Under Armour’s CEO referred to Trump as an “asset,” Curry said he agreed, “if you removed the ‘et’ from asset.” Curry threatened to abandon his endorsement deal if the company did not align itself with his values. Later that year, after President Trump said any Kaepernicktype NFL protester was a “son of a bitch,” Curry announced that he would not visit Trump’s White House, a decision the Warriors unanimously supported. This year, Curry and some teammates marched in Oakland as part of the protests over the killing of George Floyd.
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The web of connections feels endless.
Some restless souls lured to the Bay by the Gold Rush became Napa Valley winemakers, bottling the rocket fuel that helped the Beat poets jolt square America.
“They (the poets) came for the red wine,” Ferlinghetti says. “That’s what I came here for, it was the only place in the country that had cheap red wine.”
More importantly, as Ferlinghetti says, “This is the last frontier.”
Note his use of the present tense. Kaepernick, Curry, Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, Giants manager Gabe Kapler and others are still speaking out. The Bay Area’s next disturberofthepeace is out there somewhere, a rebel with a cause.
They tend to be hardy and persistent, these Bay Area gadflies. Edwards is 77, but when asked if he has plans to retire, sounded what might be the Bay Area’s battle cry.
“There is no such thing as retirement from The Struggle,” Edwards says. “My last words on my death bed will be, ‘I protest.’ ”
“It’s not something in the water. I think it’s something in the cultural heritage of this region, of this state. This is land’s end, this is where people seeking a new start, a better world, a better life, end up.” — Harry Edwards