In 1997, when Tiger Woods won the Masters and donned the green jacket that accompanies the preeminent title, golf became thrilling to watch for an entirely new audience. The hush of the announcers, the roar of the golfing fans (yes,roar, and yes, fans), the screaming headlines in the next morning’s sports pages, the discussions that surrounded the water cooler, and the unprecedented millions of dollars bestowed upon the young athlete by various corporate entities all indicated that something important had happened. On the hallowed (putting) greens of Augusta, where Woods would not have been allowed membership relatively few years...

In 1995, Robert Lipsyte initiated a public exchange with his tirade about what he described as the “emasculation of sports” in the United States, which provides a nicely summarized critical perspective of the athletic arena in American culture.

As a mirror of our culture, sports now show us spoiled fools as role models, cities and colleges held hostage and games that exist only to hawk products. The pathetic posturing of in-your-face macho has replaced a once self-confident masculinity. And the truth and beauty of sport itself—a pleasure of the flesh to the participant, an ennobling inspiration to the spectator—...

Tommie Smith first had to combat and denounce the prevailing myths of the black body, myths with roots that spanned almost a century. Early African American boxing champions illustrate the historical precedent for Smith’s predicament. In 1910, when Jack Johnson battled Jim Jeffries—“the great white hope”—while the ringside band played “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” it was, as historian Gail Bederman notes, “a national sensation.”¹ While he had refused to fight any black contenders during his own reign as champion, Jeffries yielded to national pressure and came out of retirement to bring the coveted title back to...

Scientific studies between the two world wars authoritatively worked to establish Negro as a separate category of physique that habitually existed outside national and ethnic classifications. But the construction of the black athlete, obviously, was not left entirely to those in the laboratory. Rather, organic political discourse actively positioned the athlete in wide-ranging civil rights efforts that accompanied the close of World War II, creating the important social and cultural transformation of a “Negro” athlete into a decidedly “black” one. Individual victories over Jim Crow in the early postwar period—what historian Brenda Plummer has called “the age of ‘Negro...

American media focused a lot of attention on the spectacles of the Mexican student uprisings, particularly when the furor regarding the Olympic Project for Human Rights began to subside. Most observers felt confident that African American athletes would fall into line and the U.S. team would compete as a single, cohesive entity. Indeed, Stan Wright, the only African American member of the U.S. Olympic coaching staff, commented, “As far as we’re concerned, the boycott issue is dead. We’re here to win medals.”¹

What Wright did not count on, however, was the possible alliances that could be built, conjecturally if not...

As Bob Beamon waited for the long jump to be called at the New York Athletic Club meet, his coach, Wayne Vandenburg, who had suspended team members for political activity in the past, reminded him that he did not have to participate, saying, “It’s your decision, it’s anindividualdecision.”¹ Vandenburg failed to recognize how Beamon’s decision to take part in the meet had consequences that extended beyond his own immediate future. Increasingly, the collective force generated by the OPHR ensured that such choices impacted everyone connected, voluntarily or not, to the designation “black athlete.”

Both the NYAC and the...

When the U.S. Olympic track team, seventy-seven members strong, arrived in Mexico, it faced many questions from the international press regarding the political role of the self-proclaimed black athletes on the team. As reporters descended upon the athletes with questions about political militancy, the Americans sang the national anthem in the Plaza de las Banderas in the Olympic Village while Ambassador Fulton Freeman and USOC president Douglas Roby raised the American flag. Although U.S. track coach Payton Jordan assured reporters that there would be “no trouble whatever” and assistant coach Stan Wright insisted “there will be no demonstrations,” the words...

The many classifications of the black power protest suggested that its legacy would not end in Mexico City. OneEbonyreader’s lament for the failed boycott, for example, saw the action of Smith and Carlos as a call to arms and pledged that “black people of these United States shouldn’t participate in the Olympics, shouldn’t be forced to pay income taxes, and shouldn’t be drafted to fight these racist wars until they are accepted as first class citizens.”¹ In Los Angeles, such propositions had an immediate effect. The city had drafted a substantial and welcomed bid to the IOC to...