Harris as VP harks back to another groundbreaker
One of the advantages of being really old, even better than the senior discount at Golden Corral, is being able to look back over the years and remember witnessing great moments of social impact and human progress.
Saturday night, watching Kamala Harris take the first step in bringing her Oakland/ Berkeley fire to the White House, I flashed back to the 1988 Super Bowl, one of the highlights of my career in sports scribbling.
I reflected on pioneers and progress.
The most important part of Harris’ legacy will be her performance, but her ethnicity and and gender are not insignificant. A sportswriter friend of mine, Sarah Todd, tweeted after Harris’ speech, “I did not expect to be this emotional. ( For) all the young girls watching Kamala Harris, this is such an important moment.”
That transported me me back to that Super Bowl, and I dug out the column I wrote.
Doug Williams quarterbacked Washington in Super Bowl XXII, against John Elway’s Broncos. Williams was ( still is) Black, a Grambling grad who started just two regularseason games that season, losing both, but fell into the starter’s job in the playoffs.
Williams threw four touchdown passes in the second quarter that day and led Washington to a 4210 win.
By kickoff, Williams’ skin color, one of the story angles that week, faded to a footnote ... at least for some of us.
Then Williams burned down the house, and I wrote about how he had ruined my carefully planned column angle, which was to rip the NFL a new one over what an overfed, waddling
pig the Super Bowl had become, “a holiday of greed, gambling, drinking and social insensitivity. ( Commissioner Pete) Rozelle should have had Marie Antoinette throw out the first ball.”
But four touchdowns in that quarter? I shifted gears.
Me: “Some called this the most overblown story of Super Week — Doug Williams carrying the Black man’s banner. ... But why, other than out of embarrassment, should we play down the fact that the first 42 starting Super Bowl quarterbacks were white?
“Williams himself wisely played it down because he knew it was more important, for this game, to be Black and good than to be Black and loud. His job was to think about football, and let the sociologists and racists and bleeding hearts hash out the Black quarterback business.
“He couldn’t say what he surely knew. He couldn’t say that a lot of Black Americans would be rooting for him. ... Early in his career, Williams got flak for mentioning that Black kids cheer for him, so he knew this was no time to mount the soapbox.
“He couldn’t say, ‘ I want to win this game for all the Black quarterbacks over the years who have been switched to another position, who have been cheated because of a pervasive belief that Blacks lack the necessities to quarterback.’
“He couldn’t say, ‘ I want to win this for all the Black kids who never even dream of playing quarterback, or becoming a dentist, or flying an airplane, because they don’t realize Black people are allowed to do those things.’ ”
That was 32 years ago, and you could pull a brain muscle casting your memory back that far, but looking back reminded me how powerful those symbolic moments can be.
Four years before that Super Bowl, I became aware of the power of those events.
I was working in Los Angeles. UCLA hired a new basketball coach, Walt Hazzard, a former Bruins star and 10year NBA player. It was just another coaching hire to me, until I attended a benefit dinner saluting the new UCLA coach, at a fancy hotel. The hundreds of guests, roughly 80% of them Black, hailed Hazzard as if he had been elected president of the United States.
Ohhh. This is a big deal, not just another new coach. It was a breakthrough, and a milestone, and an inspiration. It had not occurred to me that Hazzard was the first Black bigtime coach or manager in Los Angeles.
So we make progress, we grow more enlightened, we get woke, but sometimes the pace of change is so glacial that we forget how far we have come. This season, on opening day, 10 of the NFL’s 32 starting quarterbacks were Black.
Now Kamala Harris steps into a huge challenge. The job of vice president sometimes seems as vital as that of a firstbase coach, but indications are that Harris will be more like Joe Biden’s coprez than just someone who reminds him how many outs there are.
If Harris wants some tips on how to bring that OaklandBerkeley spunk and edge to her new job of coleading the country, she might hit up Gary Payton, Bill Russell, Rickey Henderson and Damian Lillard for some tips. For navigation, she could consider the groundbreaking careers of the late Joe Morgan, Curt Flood and Frank Robinson.
Harris’ role as pioneer will immediately take a back seat to her job performance, but for one night it was OK if little girls were in awe, and little boys, too, and Black women, and even some old sportswriters.