Merriwell by Baldwin

Calvin Hill, running back for the Dallas Cowboys, sat watching the Super Bowl on TV last January with thoroughly unmixed Demotions. Though he had just been named the National Football League's Rookie of the Year, he was rooting wholeheartedly for the Kansas City Chiefs, champions of the rival American Football League, to trounce the N.F.L.'s Minnesota Vikings. His reasons transcended league allegiance. Hill is black; the Chiefs are the first team in the history of major league football with more black players than white. It was a source of great pride to Hill that the Chiefs, 13-point underdogs, soundly walloped the Vikings, 23 to 7, to become the new world champions.

Hill is part of a vast black rooting section. He was born in 1947, the year that Jackie Robinson was accepted by the old Brooklyn Dodgers, thereby becoming the first black man to break the color barrier in modern professional sports. In the years since, black kids everywhere have grown up admiring an ever-growing roster of black stars. Indeed, with the possible exception of show business, no other field today is as fully integrated as sports. But while the sport establishment likes to congratulate itself on the increasing numbers of blacks in its ranks, black athletes react with a resounding "so what." Says Harry Edwards, the militant former discus thrower who almost succeeded in organizing a black athletes' boycott of the 1968 Olympics: "Sports reeks of the same racism that corrupts other areas of our society."

By the Back Door. The litany of grievances is long. Most blacks believe that they are recruited and paid like hired hands, trained to entertain the ticket buyers--and then asked to leave by the back door. At college, a black is awarded an athletic scholarship and then thrust into a situation for which he is culturally as well as academically ill prepared. As with white athletes, teachers will give him passing marks so that he can maintain his eligibility as a player. But once that eligibility is used up, black athletes charge that "it's strictly fend for yourself, black boy." As a result, about half of the black athletes fail to graduate.

Even then, if a black graduates to the pros, he will often find it hard to command the same salary--much less the same number of lucrative endorsements and public appearances--as a white player of equal ability. Fullback-turned-Actor Jim Brown has formed the United Athletic Association to help such stars as the Cleveland Browns' Leroy Kelly get their just due. Three seasons ago, though he had succeeded Brown as the N.F.L.'s leading ground gainer, Kelly was earning only $21,000 a year. The following season the U.A.A. negotiated a new contract for Kelly that will pay him $320,000 over four years.

Black athletes also complain about an insulting practice they call "stacking"--making blacks compete against one another by assigning them only to those positions that supposedly require more physical than mental skills. More than 95% of the defensive cornerbacks in pro football are black. "But tell me," says one black veteran, "how many times you've seen a black quarterback leading a team." The Boston Celtics appointed Center Bill Russell coach in 1966, and won two championships under his command. Yet he, and this season, the Seattle Supersonics' Len Wilkens and the San Francisco Warriors' Al Attles are the only blacks ever to head major pro teams. As Dallas' Calvin Hill puts it: "Explain to me why someone like Jackie Robinson isn't in some front-office job today? In fact, find me a black man in any front office or holding any managership."

Every Quality. At 23, Hill is in many ways typical of today's young black athlete. In the terse lingo of the Cowboys' scouting report, he brings to the game "size, skill, strength, speed, spirit--unlimited. He has every physical and mental quality." He is from the ghetto and he is "hungry"--but not in the usual do-or-die sense. "I never felt I had to prove myself as a black man in pro football," he says. "There's just too many other black players in the league now."

Hill wants to make it first and foremost as a man, a black man determined to change the system from within. "1 don't believe in violence," he says, "but I'm militant for black progress. It's just a question of method." That method is perhaps best summed up by the nickname bestowed upon him by his Dallas teammates: Calvin Cool. Though less strident than black extremists, he is in sympathy with most of their aims. "It's a cultural revolution. Black art, black theater, black history. It draws black people together. It is totemic--as with any ethnic group. Studying black history is just studying American history at its truest level."

For Hill, football is significant only insofar as it helps the black movement. Sooner or later--probably sooner--he plans to retire and go into the ministry or the law to "get involved in some way with the black community."

Memorable Sermon. Hill is well equipped for that role. He came to the pros from Yale, and his career is a kind of replay of the Frank Merriwell saga as told by James Baldwin.

Son of a construction foreman, he was raised in a tough steel-mill section of East Baltimore called Turner's Station. Calvin recalls his mother cheering Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X on TV with cries of "Get him!" and "That's the way to say it!", but little of her feelings rubbed off--at least right away. During grade school Calvin was transferred from one all-black school to another by being bused through a white neighborhood. "I didn't even think about the black-white business," he recalls. "I was just excited to be able to ride the bus across the bridge."

At 14, Hill won a scholarship to the predominantly white Riverdale Boys' School in New York City. There his athletic talents flowered; he pitched and batted over .400 for the baseball team, made an all-city basketball team with an average of 26 points a game and was named to a high school All-America team as quarterback. Graduating with honors, Hill went on to Yale, partly because they offered him "a needy-student scholarship, not a football scholarship. I liked the idea of not having to play football if I didn't want to."

Yale fans liked it even better when Hill decided to play halfback, though his exploits were mostly overshadowed by the publicity heaped on the team's star quarterback, Brian Dowling. Hill joined the BSAY (Black Students at Yale) and helped carry the fight that resulted in Yale's becoming the first university to offer an Afro-American major. He also served as a deacon at the Yale Chapel, where his superior was the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., an outspoken leader in the peace movement. Up to that time, Hill's thinking was largely un-formalized. Then he heard a memorable sermon by Coffin.

Recalls Hill: "He said the real Christians are not necessarily the people who believe the right things but the people who live the life Christ led. And I think this is true. Jesus Christ loved, he took abuses and he would love some more. He wore long hair and a beard, and when they hassled him, he taught more love. But he didn't just talk about it, he did it! 'You are what you are when you act.' Simone Devereux said that. In other words, talk is cheap. I don't know who said that."

Though the 144 points he scored in three seasons broke Albie Booth's old Yale record of 138, Hill was bypassed by most of the All-America teams as well as by most of the pro scouts. No one, it seems, was ready to believe that the tweedy Ivy League could produce a hard-nosed pro. No one, that is, except Dallas, which scouted and tested Hill thoroughly (he scored in the top 2% in the team's intelligence test) and made him their No. 1 draft choice. Hill, a 6-ft. 3-in., 212-lb. pile driver, rewarded them by leading the league in rushing, until he was sidelined in the ninth game of the season with an injured toe. Says Dallas Coach Tom Landry: "Hill might be the best ball carrier I've seen in 20 years of football."

As a black celebrity in a Southern town, where "people think only about money, God and football--and I'm not sure in what order," Hill is very conscious of his image. He now lives in Dallas and attends classes at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. To keep in touch with the black community, he seeks out the black militants on campus for discussions about local problems. He rooms with a white Yale graduate, a medical student, and lives frugally in a small garden apartment. Though he now earns more than $30,000 a year, he says: "I can think of only one thing I'd like to own: a Mercedes-Benz 2805. But I haven't bought one because there are some people who expect a black athlete to live ostentatiously. Well, I refuse to conform to their stereotype." Instead, he drives a Chevrolet convertible lent him by a local dealer.

Traceable Past. Hill mixes easily with his teammates, 32 of them white, 15 black. Everybody needles him good-naturedly about his Ivy League ways. "But frankly," he says, as with most pro teams, "there is not very much after-hours socializing between black and white players. The main reason, I think, is because they date white and we date black. And, too, there are certain cultural differences."

A history major at Yale, Hill says that such differences are clearly traceable in the past. "I have a theory about why so many pro stars are black," he says. "I think it all boils down to survival of the fittest. Think of what the African slaves were forced to endure in this country to survive. Well, black athletes are their descendants, the offspring of those who were physically and mentally tough enough to simply survive."

Eventually he plans to return to the Baltimore ghetto where he was born and work with black youth. "No matter how high you are," he says, "you are only as high as the lowest of your people."

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