“The Black Athlete” page 27, SI 7/1/1968

“The Black Athlete” page 27, SI 7/1/1968

graduation statistics, Texas at El Paso, Jim Padgett, Joe Novotny, Big Ten, black athlete

After zooming into various individual case studies of specific black athletes, Olsen returns to his initial conception of the ‘cruel deception’ that sport is transformative and beneficial to black youth and their communities. The purported benefits--namely, a college education--are largely mythical, and Olsen demonstrates this with a laundry list of dismal black athlete graduation rates from universities across the country. He notes that as black communities and ‘white liberals’ rejoice the victories of all black teams, they miss the barely hidden truth of the black athlete’s experience on college campuses. Rather than being granted social and economic uplift through a quality education, most black collegiate athletes are left to flounder, isolated, in an academic institutions they are not prepared for, and from which they will likely not even graduate. Olsen asserts that the point is that, all along, black athletes “were not attending college for that purpose. They were there as black hired hands to bring a national championship…” Therein lies the cruel deception: sports have not ‘done so much for the Negro’, rather black youth are being exploited by athletic departments across the nation. Olsen claims that the tide is turning slowly, and that white coaches are beginning to feel an obligation to better support the black athletes they recruit, but the broad system remains unsympathetic and unsupportive of the black players that bring victories and prestige to their universities. Olsen finalizing his point by quoting one ‘Big Ten basketball coach’ who acknowledges that “in order to succeed--which means to win--coaches are being forced to resort to what I would bluntly call nothing but the slave trade.”

Katherine Brown

Sports Illustrated, July 1, 1968

Time Inc.