Players put students ahead of sports
The Missouri boycott showed power college athletes can have in sports and in community
Tim Wolfe resigned as president of the University of Missouri on Monday, stepping down after a month of protests from black students calling for his dismissal for failing to react to racism on campus.
The move prompted both celebration and backlash — two white students face charges after threats of racial violence at the university were made over social media. And it spurred further protests at universities across the U.S., some in solidarity and other hoping to force administrators to act against racism on campus.
The demonstrations recall the student activism of the 1960s but they owe much of their momentum to the commercialization of modern college sports.
Missouri grad student Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike had already lasted a week, and on-campus protests even longer, before a group of black football play- ers decided last Saturday to boycott games and practices until Wolfe was fired.
Quickly racism on the MU campus became national news, and when football head coach Gary Pinkel supported the boycotters, Wolfe found himself in an economic power struggle he wouldn’t win.
Wolfe made $459,000 last year; Pinkel, who announced Friday he will resign after the season due to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, made more than $4 million (all figures in U.S. dollars).
Cancelling Saturday’s game also would have meant forfeiting $1 million to opponent Brigham Young University, and threatened a major revenue stream for an athletic department that brought in $83.7 million in 2014.
Wolfe’s resignation and the school’s subsequent pledges to address racism on campus can be seen as either victory for principle or a triumph of capitalism.
Or we can view last week’s events as a signal that athletes in revenue sports have clued in to the economic power they possess and the political influence it imparts.
The development could change the landscape of major college sports, and prompt other athletes to push for further social change.
“It’s important to see those black men standing up as athletes and leveraging their power,” says Dr. Drew Brown, a Windsor native and visiting professor of African-American studies at the University of Houston. “No other group has walked off the work force of a sport to stand up for the improvement in conditions for black folk. The question is, who is going to follow? Where are the NBA, NFL, WNBA?”
The prospect of further work stoppages has clear implications from an economic standpoint, and they’re unsettling for schools and TV networks who profit off college sports.
ESPN will pay $5.6 billion over 12 years for the broadcast rights to the football Bowl Championship Series, while CBS’s and Turner’s deal for March Madness is worth $10.8 billion over 14 years. Missouri, meanwhile, received a $31.2-million payout from the Southeast Conference last December, a figure boosted by TV revenue from the SEC network.
The push to pay NCAA athletes — exemplified by former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon’s successful class-action lawsuit — has gained strength recently, and could receive a massive push if football or basketball players were to withhold their labour.
“The candle was lit this past weekend,” O’Bannon says. “The balance of power has definitely shifted. The athletes are going to get sick and tired of being taken advantage of.”
The threatened boycott at Missouri is the most recent college athletes’ work stoppage aimed at effecting change, but it isn’t the first.
Two years ago the football team at Grambling State University in Louisiana refused to play to protest extreme budget cuts and unsafe practice conditions.
In 1970, three black players quit the University of Washington’s football team over racism, and the ensuing inquiry led to recommendations that the athletic department increase the number of black staff members. Two years earlier, black football players at Michigan State refused to participate in spring practice until the school agreed to hire black coaches.
Also in 1968, football and basketball players were among the black students who staged a 36-hour sit-in at the bursar’s office at Northwestern University. That activism spurred several measures, including creation of an African-American Studies department and increased black enrollment targets. To participate without missing practice, athletes hustled between sit-ins at the south end of campus and sports facilities in the north.
“I’m not protesting because I’m an athlete,” basketball player Don Adams told the Daily Northwestern during the sit-in. “But because I’m a member of the black race.”
Brown notes that balancing those disparate identities — athlete and member of the campus black community — is demanding and makes the Missouri boycott stand out.
Where most previous protests have focused on improving conditions for sports teams, the African-American players at Missouri used their clout to strengthen a campus movement unrelated to sports. In big-money college sports, where workloads and privilege often isolate athletes from their peers, that’s an especially rad- ical move.
“They’re recognizing the bigger picture, one that prioritizes their blackness over their identity as athletes,” says Brown, who was drafted by the Edmonton Eskimos in 2006. “They’re saying ‘We’re black students first, before we’re athletes.’ That’s important.”