|
Articles
|
Carroll and the Seven Dwarves By: Malamute, 29 October 2003
That’s the state of the conference these days, so call it Carroll and the Seven Dwarves, the Wildcats and Tree being up a tree. Since any dwarf can beat any other dwarf on a given Saturday, it’s possible for Washington, call him Happy, to win out its season and end up 6-2 in the conference and 9-4 overall after a win in a bowl game. The Dawgs were one of the pre-season favorites to win the conference championship because they had a senior quarterback and two of the best wide receivers in the nation. Assuming that some key players get well, like Charles Frederick and Rich Alexis, it’s possible for the Dawgs to fulfill part of the promise had for them at the beginning of the season. If Washington is ever to be a formidable power again, it must mine this wealth of southern California prospects more effectively, something former coach Rick Neuheisel failed to accomplish, and it showed on Saturday. Not bringing in highly-ranked players from high schools in southern California is where Neuheisel’s classes were lacking--nuggets like Winston Justice, Shawn Cody, Tyler Ebell, Reggie Bush, Lorenzo Booker, Whitney Lewis, Darnell Bing, Marcedes Lewis, and Hershel Dennis. It’s especially important these days because the recruiting services have pegged each player so accurately, where before many more mistakes were made in recruiting because of faulty evaluations--hence, the walk-ons who became super stars. Almost all of the schools that are highly ranked this season have brought in top-ten classes over the past few years. In that vein, Ted Miller of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes, "While few would assert the infallibility of recruiting rankings, the correlation between top-10 finishes in the national polls and top-10 recruiting rankings is clear...seven of the 10 winningest programs in the 1990s ranked in the top 10 in recruiting. Nine ranked in the top 15. "Prep All-Americans also are far more likely to become stars than the proverbial diamonds in the rough. USA Today reported that, through 1997, 43 percent of its high school All-Americans played in the NFL, with an average career of 57 games." That’s not to say, Neuheisel didn’t bring in some outstanding classes when compared with the UW’s northwest cousins. That’s why the Dawgs could close out the regular season with four wins, since two of their remaining games are against Oregon and WSU, both of which are at home. On the road, Arizona should be a gimme, while Cal is more like a four-foot, side-hill putt. What happened to the pills? I agree with Norm Arkans; the UW needs to find out what
happened to all of the pills and where they went. The statue For Husky fans, the unveiling of the Owens statue was the highlight of what otherwise was a bad day on Saturday. It will be placed in front of Husky Stadium as a symbol of an era that marked a return to football as played under Enoch Bagshaw, Jimmy Phelan and Gil Dobie, all eras when Husky teams overpowered their opposition, much like Owens' teams of the late fifties and early sixties. None of the protestors who decried the placement of the statue at a Friday news conference had been members of any of Owens’ teams. Racial unrest at the UW The sixties were a time of racial unrest and turmoil in the United States. In that decade, a popular president and one of his brothers were assassinated. Riots occurring in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in August of 1965 resulted in the death of 35 people who were mostly black. In February of that year, Malcolm X was assassinated. In April 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King met a similar fate and, on June 5 of that year, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Beginning in 1961, The Vietnam War, the most unpopular war in American history, lasted through the decade and halfway into the next. Many students of the sixties and early seventies "loathed the military," as then-to-be president Bill Clinton wrote in a letter to Colonel Holmes on December 3, 1969. To compound the racial problems at the UW, Jim Owens ran a football program that resembled a military boot camp at times. Three incidents of racial revolt, occurring over a span of three years, began in 1968. Unfair treatment of black athletes at the university surfaced after Harry Edwards, a black Sociology professor at San Jose State, visited the Washington campus in 1968. Edwards is the author of the book, The Revolt of the Black Athlete (1969). In that book, referring to gains made at San Jose State College in 1967 via demands by The United Black Students for Action, Edwards wrote, " So we called a rally to commence at noon on the opening day of classes for the fall, 1967, semester ... [for] the elimination of racism at San Jose State College. We invited all faculty members and administration officials. We outlined a list of demands and stated publicly what our strategy would be if our demands were not met. We, in effect, declared that we would prevent the opening football game of the season from being played by any means necessary...So we had carried the confrontation. But more than this, we had learned the use of power -- the power to be gained from exploiting the white man's economic and almost religious involvement in athletics." Edwards, along with Tommy Smith of San Jose State College, helped influence the black boycott of the 1968 Olympic games. The racial unrest at the UW was made public in March 1968 by Life Magazine. Thirteen African American players, who apparently were led by halfback Harvey Blanks, made four demands of the university and its athletic department.
Two of the demands were met. Carver Gayton, an African American player from one of Owens’ early teams, was hired as an assistant coach. The trainer was fired. Whatever gains were made were laid to rest when, on October 29, 1969, four black players, meeting with Gayton, protested the demotion of black halfback, Landy Harrell, to second string. Harrell then quit the team over his punishment, which required him to run the steps of Husky Stadium twice for fumbling twice against Oregon in a 22-7 loss the previous week. They had other grievances as well and said they wanted to boycott the UCLA game. After Gayton told Owens what had happened, Owens met with every player on the team and asked for their 100% commitment to the football program. Apparently, Blanks, Greg Alex, Lamar Mills and Ralph Bayard, all of them African Americans, said they could not. As a result, Owens suspended them from the team. The next day, on Friday, as the team was about to board the bus for the airport for its game with UCLA at the Coliseum, several hundred protesters, mostly black along with some white sympathizers, surrounded the team bus and demanded that the remaining eight black players boycott the game. They did. To make up for the eight African Americans who stayed behind, Owens brought eight reserves to the game, most of the them redshirts. UCLA beat Washington, 57-14, in what turned out to be one of the most disappointing Husky games I have ever witnessed in person. While Owens and his wife Martha were in Los Angeles, four men, two black and two white, assailed Owens’ 17-year old daughter, Kathy. They forced her car off the road and one of them, reportedly black, asked her if she was an Owens. Before she managed to drive off, the assailant pulled her head back by the hair and struck her in the face. Joe Kearny, who assumed the role of athletic director after taking over from Owens earlier in the year, met with Gayton, Owens, school administrators, the Board of Regents and student leaders later in the week. On Tuesday, November 2, Gayton’s brother, Gary, an attorney hired by the four suspended players, said that he would do everything in his power to see that Owens resigned or in someway be dismissed as football coach. That statement triggered a backlash of support for Owens among white fans, some of whom had been noncommittal until then or had been wavering because of Owens' poor season. On Saturday, at the Stanford game, Owens was given a standing ovation by the predominantly 50,000 white fans as he took the field. His team was 0-7 at the time. After meeting with the four suspended black players the next Friday, Owens announced that reinstatement of three of the African American players, Alex, Bayard and Mills. Blanks remained suspended; Gayton, caught in the middle of the suspensions, resigned as assistant coach the next Monday. Blanks, through his attorney Gary Gayton, threatened to sue the school. In April 1970, the school's Human Right Commission began an investigation into charges of racism in the athletic department. On October 20, 1970, Kearny said the relationship between the athletic department and black athletes was substantially improved. That afternoon, Owens suspended black halfback Mark Wheeler for missing two practices. Two days after the Washington State game, Wheeler (who had never returned to the team), Ira Hampton, Charles Evans and Calvin Jones left the team. Their leaving the team triggered an investigation by the Board of Regents into racial practices at the university. The Human Rights Commission, which had been working on the problems since April, recommended that Owens and Kearny be fired. On December 19, 1970, the group dominated by the Board of Regents, which had been investigating the situation for almost one month, recommended the hiring of a black assistant coach and a black athletics’ department manager. Early in January, Ray Jackson, who had been on Owens’ first Rose Bowl team, was hired as an assistant coach. Former Seattle sportswriter Donald K. Smith was hired as associate athletic director. Smith said that the firing of Owens and Kearny would not solve the situation, that its roots went much deeper than just those two men, and that it was a problem that existed elsewhere in the country. Calvin Jones returned to the team as a result of negotiations with Smith, Gary Gayton and Owens. Wheeler enrolled at Harvard; Hammon and Evans transferred to Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. Blanks never was reinstated nor did he file suit against the university. Later, Owens permitted him to play in an Alumni All-Star game to demonstrate his talent to pro scouts. He went on to pursue an acting career. The Black Athletes Alumni Club, which had previously discouraged black athletes from attending Washington, reversed its stand Smith managed to restore peace and order to the Huskies’ football program. [Rockne, One Hundred Years]. References: [One Hundred Years]. "One Hundred Years of Husky Football," Professional Sports Publications, New York City, 1990. [Rockne]. Rockne, Dick, "Bow
Down To Washington," The Strode Publishers, 1975. Richard Linde (a.k.a., Malamute) can be reached at malamute@4malamute.com |
|
|
Once upon a time, there was a handsome prince called Pete
Carroll, who mined for gold in southern California. He horded so many nuggets
that he made Silas Marner look like a philanthropist.