The Complexities of Complexions

By Tom Callahan

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.

But Bird is an unprofitable example of a white basketball player, whiter than Elmer's Glue. As he said in the course of reaching out generously to Thomas, "He knows I'm a baaad player." Certainly everyone does. However, this year Magic Johnson took the trophy emphatically while the Lakers struggled for the prize. The critical shot in Game 4, when Boston could have evened the play-off at home, was a short hook that Johnson added only this season, "lifting his game" in his eighth year. That's the customary phrase, though it makes him wonder. "I was asked to score more this year, but it's wrong to say I've given more. I've always played the role I've been asked to play. The more responsibility I'm given, the more I show."

He is talking about opportunity. In 1966, determined to break up the black alliance of Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson, the Cincinnati Reds traded Robinson to Baltimore. (It is axiomatic in this situation that teams always move the wrong man; in the next era, Houston would separate Joe Morgan and Jimmy Wynn by sending Morgan to Cincinnati.) Baltimore's General Manager Harry Dalton had an idea that, since the city was predominantly black, perhaps a black superstar would stimulate black attendance. Robinson had a perfect year in 1966, winning the American League Triple Crown and prodding the Orioles to a World Series sweep of the Koufax-Drysdale Dodgers. He punctuated the final game, 1-0, with a home run. But Baltimore's blacks stayed away, seeming to care about baseball but unwilling to support it.

Two decades later, his time as an attraction expended, Frank Robinson has finished leading three black managers into futile circumstances and has taken his place of oblivion as an Oriole coach. Joe Morgan has declined a managing job in -- of all cities -- Houston. Looking at every major-league front office and seeing only Atlanta's Henry Aaron, Morgan figured out the chances of advancement and took his talents and flair to another industry.

Baseball merely discourages the black flair. Football actually legislates against it, restraining end-zone celebrators and individualists of every stripe. At a stadium distance, the shades of baseball and football players might be neutralized slightly. But a basketball player running around in his underwear cannot be pushed back inside a helmet. The game is too intimate, too sweaty, too bearded to be uniform and regulated. By the way, Johnson shot the hook because, at 6 ft. 9 in., he feared his jump shot might be blocked. "I don't take a jump-shot jumper; I take a tiptoe jumper," he said, a good description of Bird's as well. Imagine. Both black men and white men can think and not jump at the same time.