Sport: The Black Dominance

To say that Julius Erving jumps is to describe Beethoven as a guy who wrote music. Dr. J. ascends. He springs into the air at the foul line, floats down the side of the lane, holding the basketball in his right hand. Still airborne, he swivels, turns his back to the basket, switches the ball to his other hand and cleanly flips a soft, lefthanded hook shot into the net. On the floor, play resumes at a dazed half-speed as opposing players stand in disbelief.

Arms open, legs churning, Buffalo Bills Running Back O.J. Simpson takes the hand-off and cradles the football in his arm. If there is a crease of space between the huge, straining bodies sprawled before him, he dashes through it, shaking off grasping hands. A linebacker collides with him, but O.J. simply caroms away. He shifts and feints, carving first one angle, then another on the open field. O.J. is now in a full gallop, and he has lost few foot races in the eight years of his National Football League career.

When Cincinnati Second Baseman Joe Morgan comes to bat, his eyes widen noticeably, a palpable sign to the man on the mound that Morgan is studying him with the intensity of a leopard crouching in a tree. On the bases, he measures the movements of the game just as keenly: taking the millisecond advantage, then streaking toward a stolen base, judging the parabola of a teammate's hit before springing around the bases, sliding in just ahead of the throw. Joe Morgan, the National League's Most Valuable Player for two years in a row, is surely the hardest out in baseball. Ask any pitcher.

Erving, Simpson and Morgan are the finest athletes in their sports, men of huge physical gifts, with great dedication to the honing of their arts and remarkable mental and emotional resiliency under pressure. They have much in common, most obviously that they are black. As superstars nonpareil, they are both inheritors and exemplars—the legatees of black athletes whose greatness moldered in Jim Crow obscurity, and the new idols of American sports culture.

Thirty years after Jackie Robinson broke the racial barrier in professional athletics, blacks have come to dominate major U.S. sports as no other American minority group ever has. Some examples:

¶ Nearly 65% of National Basketball Association players are blacks. Says Jerry West, the former superstar who is now coach of the Los Angeles Lakers: "When I first came into the league [in 1960], it was just starting to turn into a black league. And let's face it. This is a black league now."

¶ In the National Football League, 42% of the players are black. Twenty of the 44 first-line offensive and defensive players in this year's Super Bowl game were black.

¶ Nineteen percent of baseball's major leaguers are black. The National League's Most Valuable Player award has been won by blacks 16 times in the past 28 seasons.

¶ The growing black dominance in sports is evident in college athletics too. During the recent N.C.A.A. basketball playoffs, for example, Champion Marquette and Contenders Michigan and University of Nevada at Las Vegas each had only one white in their starting lineups. In N.C.A.A. football, most of 1976's top-ranked teams were loaded with black stars—in numbers far out of proportion to the percentage of black students on campus.