The best accomplishments don't occur during the game

By: Tommy Wright

Posted: 10/9/08

In my life as a sports fan, I have been lucky enough to tune into many great sports performances. Joe Montana finding John Taylor in the end zone for the winning touchdown in Super Bowl XXIII, Michael Jordan's "flu game" in the 1997 NBA Finals, Kirk Gibson's pinch-hit, walk off home run in the 1988 World Series.

At the time, I saw those events as heroic (despite my aversion toward the Dodgers) but looking back, they didn't have much meaning beyond the sports world.

I did watch Dave Dravecky's courageous return to baseball after he was diagnosed with cancer. But it seems that sports currently lack the heroes who were present in the years before my time.

Roberto Clemente is someone who died 10 years before I was born, but I have always admired him for what he did on the field and off. Clemente, a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, died in a plane crash while bringing aid to victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua.

There are also the people who have broken barriers in sports. Most people have heard of how Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball in 1947. But the barrier in professional football was broken twice before Jackie Robinson played his first game in the major leagues.

From 1920 to 1933, 13 African-Americans played in the National Football League. But it took until 1946 for another African-American to get back into pro football. That year, Marion Motley, Bill Willis, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode all made their debuts.

It took until 1950 for the National Basketball Association to integrate. Earl Lloyd, Chuck Cooper and Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton brought down the barrier in the NBA.

Billy Jean King, Babe Didrikson and Jackie Joyner-Kersee have all helped progress women in sports.

Other athletes made their mark by not participating.

Canadian boxers Sam Luftspring and Norman "Baby" Yak refused to attend the 1936 Olympics in Berlin due to the treatment of Jews in Germany under Hitler's rule.

The 1951 University of San Francisco football team went undefeated during the regular season. The team was invited to bowl games, but with the caveat that it leave its two African-American players behind. The team stood together and chose not to attend.

But when you want to single out one particular moment, it is the protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City that stands out as the most courageous event that transcended sports.

Smith and Carlos considered a boycott as well. The boycott of the '68 games was called off in place of a different form of protest.

By choosing to attend the Olympics, Smith and Carlos were able to participate and receive medals for their performance. But after they raised their fists in defiance, the two were suspended from the team and sent home. When they got back, they were denounced by the media, received death threats and struggled to find work.

Their silent protest for equal rights transcended sports. It is fitting that they are memorialized here at SJSU. Their protest was in the same vein of Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez, who both have structures named for them on campus as well.

Activism in sports is not completely dead. Joey Cheek, a U.S. speed skater, organized Team Darfur to protest conditions in Sudan. But Cheek had his visa revoked before he could attend the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

So the hope is not over for someone else to take a stand as Smith and Carlos did in 1968. But until then, their protest stands above the 1980 U.S. hockey team's upset of the Soviet Union, Lou Gehrig's farewell speech, and any other event as the most important, heroic and courageous moment in the history of sports.