"Professional football is, without question, the most popular sport in America, and by a substantial margin. Yet few scholars who look at the role of race and sports in America focus on the NFL. Historically, racial relations in other sports--particularly baseball, boxing, and basketball--have attracted more attention from writers and scholars, who have tended to regard football as déclassé. Ironically, however, professional football has been a trend setter in racial relations despite its brutalism and its associations with political conservatism and militarism. The first African Americans to play in the NFL joined the league in 1946, one year before Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers. It had the first black union president (Gene Upshaw). And as Jeremi Duru argues in Advancing the Ball, it was the first league to systematically challenge America's most durable racial prejudice - the notion that African Americans are intellectually inferior to whites. By the mid-1990s, there had been only a couple of black coaches in the NFL, despite the fact that two thirds of the league's players were black. Taking on a hidebound and conservative group of owners, a network of aspiring black coaches eventually joined forces with the Steelers' owner, Dan Rooney, and their efforts produced 'the Rooney Rule.' The rule required every team to interview at least one black candidate when hiring a new head coach. Technically, football is the most complicated of all sports, and prejudice regarding aptitude did not wash away immediately. Indeed, many of the septuagenarian plutocrats who owned teams resisted the rule. A sea change did eventually occur, though, and the last few years have seen an influx of black coaches. The fact that two of the last Super Bowl-winning coaches (and three of the last six Super Bowl participants) have been African-American has proven the correctness of the rule"--Provided by publisher.
|
