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Athletes on Campus: A New Reality - Second of three articles.; Black Student-Athletes Find Life of Privilege and Isolation
By WILLIAM C. RHODEN Published: January 8, 1990

The pressures that affect all athletes' lives in the high-powered world of major college sports are often magnified for black athletes at predominantly white schools. Black athletes, because of their celebrity, their size, indeed, their blackness, are often the most visible undergraduates on campus. In the most competitive programs, they frequently make up four of the five starters on the basketball team, and sometimes 7 of the 11 starters on each unit of the football team. Still, despite their visibility, black athletes are a tiny fraction of the undergraduate community on many major college campuses. They are often revered as campus heroes for their athletic prowess, but many feel shackled to the pedestals on which they have been placed. They move between two conflicting worlds education and entertainment -without truly belonging to either.

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While increasing numbers of black athletes are going to college, many of them, like their white peers, have little time to participate in the intellectual or political life of the institution. Thus, the stratification that is taking place in general between athletes and students at schools with bigtime programs has also widened the gap between black student-athletes and other black students.

''A lot of our kids spend four years in a fantasy world,'' said Rudy Washington, an assistant basketball coach at the University of Iowa and the executive director of the Black Coaches Association. ''They don't get involved with the student government, they don't like to socialize with other blacks. Essentially we've created a subculture on campus: They're not accepted by whites and they're alienated from blacks.'' Leslie Fair, a black student who is a resident dorm adviser at the University of Michigan, said: ''A lot of times I feel that they are part of the football team, or the basketball team, but they aren't part of our team. They're indoctrinated as soon as they come here to be on a team, and it's not our team, it's not the black team.'' A study released last year by the American Institutes of Research, a nonprofit independent scientific research firm, reported that 51 percent of black athletes at predominantly white campuses (those whose black enrollment is less than 4 percent of the undergraduate classes) felt isolated from other students and racially isolated in general. At schools with a 4 percent or more black undergraduate enrollment, the figure was 39 percent. ''I was walking across campus a couple days ago and suddenly I looked around and I saw that there were no blacks anywhere around,'' said Bob Meeks, an offensive tackle at Auburn, where 3.5 percent of 16,914 students are black. ''Sometimes it's like you're the only black person on campus. I've gotten used to it, but still, sometimes it makes you feel a little uncomfortable on the inside.'' A number of black athletes complain that although the low number of black students affects the entire black community, it accents the athletes' visibility and compounds their isolation. ''If we walk into a night club or go to a party, unless it's a black fraternity party, or a group of black students who are having the party, 10 times out of 10, you're going to be the only black there,'' said J. J. Grant, a senior football player at Michigan. ''Either that or the other black there that you know will be another athlete. It's a lot easier for white student-athletes to blend in.'' Sequestered in Dorms The condition would seem to foster a bond between black student-athletes and black students. Instead, many athletes retreat into the athletic community. At a school where athletes are sequestered in athletic dorms, the isolation becomes more severe. And athletes, with a team-oriented mentality to begin with, often become a self-contained social unit. ''We would go to clubs instead of going to student functions or stuff,'' said Ellory Roberts, a football player at Stanford who spent two years at Miami before transferring to Stanford. ''We didn't seem to want to mix. It was sort of like a pro team that happened to be at a university, instead of a university that had a football team.'' Responsibilities: A Balancing Act Besides not having much free time, black athletes, like most top-level athletes, are often pampered and coddled by protective athletic departments and admired by fellow students. They have largely been insulated from incidents of racism that have cropped up on campuses. But in recent years black student leaders have been demanding more aggressive recruitment of black faculty and students, as well as protesting racial harassment on campus. And they have asked highly visible athletes to take sides, to speak at rallies or otherwise use their visibility to help publicize the causes of black student organizations. It is a kind of pressure that white student-athletes rarely face. When a Confederate flag appeared on a dormitory bannister at Auburn two years ago, several black football players called the university president and asked him to have it removed, which he did. Three years ago, the predominantly black University of Pittsburgh basketball team wore ribbons on their jerseys to protest the school's financial holdings in South Africa.

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