Sport: The Complexities of Complexions

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In 1980, not 1890, a curious circumstance struck Tony Perez as the great Cuban hitter chatted behind Boston's batting cage. "On the entire 25-man roster," he said, "the Red Sox have one black and one Latin, and I'm the one." Someone mentioned Jim Rice. "Disabled list," said Perez. "Mike Torrez?" That made him sigh. With a gaze of pitying forbearance that is becoming a familiar look in all kinds of sports arenas, Perez explained, "A Mexican from Topeka, Kans., is not a Latin."

In this area no lesson is too basic, as recent events proclaim loudly. Commemorating the 40 years since Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line, Los Angeles Dodgers Executive Al Campanis has remarked on how buoyant and fit for command blacks aren't, and he has been fired. Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and Presidential Candidate Jesse Jackson have joined forces in the cause of affirmative action, and black Sociologist Harry Edwards has hired on as a consultant. Baseball is publicly standing up to racism. And, one year after George Foster was derided and expelled for bringing up the subject, the World Champion New York Mets have three blacks on the entire roster, four counting Shortstop Rafael Santana, a Latin who is not from Topeka.

It is too simple to call Detroit Basketball Star Isiah Thomas the flip side of Campanis, though he squirmed similarly after endorsing a rookie teammate's view that the Boston Celtics' Larry Bird is a three-time MVP essentially because he is white. Later, Thomas claimed he was only joking when he said, "If Bird was black, he'd be just another good guy." But if by "just another good guy" he meant Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and himself, the statement is not so unreasonable, and his amplification about stereotyping ought not to have been lost in the apology. "When Bird makes a great play, it's due to his thinking," Thomas sighed. "All we do is run and jump. We never practice or give a thought to how we play. It's like I came dribbling out of my mother's womb."

The first black player in the N.B.A., now 75% black, was the Celtics' Chuck Cooper in 1950. Whenever there was no room at the inn, Bob Cousy used to walk the streets with Cooper, and as a result Cousy may be more sensitive than the average white basketball type to the racial undertones black players read into everything. "If I was black," Cousy says, "I would be H. Rap Brown. No, I would be dead." Neglected in all the euphoric stories of Bird's series-saving steal in the semifinals against Detroit was the minor detail that an indiscreet drive by Bird had given the Pistons the ball in the first place. Then last week in the finals, when he almost pulled out a critical Laker game with his dramatic three-pointer, the sequence that immediately preceded it -- including an especially ill-chosen shot and an almost unbelievably sloppy pass -- was forgotten.