http://www.edgeofsports.com//2008-12-29-399/index.html
Latter Day Protest? Proposition 8 and Sports
By Dave Zirin
As supporters of Gay Marriage are have discovered, it's never easy to
be on the Mormon Church's enemies list. The Church of Latter Day Saints
backed the anti-Gay Marriage Proposition 8 in California with
out-of-state funds, and gave the right a heartbreaking victory this
past election cycle. But the Mormon Church has been challenged in the
past. Just ask Bob Beamon.
If you know Beamon's name it's almost certainly because he won the long
jump gold medal in legendary fashion at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
Beamon leapt 29 feet, 2.5 inches, a record that held for twenty-three
years. Great Britain's Lynn Davies told Beamon afterwards, "You have
destroyed this event." This is because Beamon was not only the first
long jumper to break 29 feet, he was the first to break 28.
But you may not know that Beamon almost never made it to Mexico City.
Along with eight other teammates, Beamon had his track and field
scholarship revoked from the University of Texas at El Paso, the
previous year. They had refused to compete against Brigham Young
University. Beamon and his teammates were protesting the racist
practices of the Mormon Church, and their coach at UTEP, Wayne
Vanderburge, made them pay the ultimate price.
They weren't alone. As tennis great Arthur Ashe wrote in his book, Hard
Road to Glory, "In October 1969, fourteen black [football] players at
the University of Wyoming publicly criticized the Mormon Church and
appealed to their coach, Lloyd Eaton, to support their right not to
play against Brigham Young University. . . . The Mormon religion at the
time taught that blacks could not attain to the priesthood, and that
they were tainted by the curse of Ham, a biblical figure. Eaton,
however, summarily dropped all fourteen players from the squad."
The players, though, didn't take their expulsion lying down. They
called themselves the Black 14 and sued for damages with the support of
the NAACP. In an October 25th game against San Jose State, the entire
San Jose team wore black armbands to support the 14.
One aftershock of this episode was in November 1969, when Stanford
University President Kenneth Pitzer suspended athletic relations with
BYU, announcing that Stanford would honor what he called an athlete's
"Right of Conscience." The "Right of Conscience" allowed athletes to
boycott an event which he or she deemed "personally repugnant." As the
Associated Press wrote, "Waves of black protest roll toward BYU,
assaulting Mormon belief and leaving BYU officials and students,
perplexed, hurt, and maybe a little angry."
On June 6th, 1978, as teams were refusing road trips to Utah with
greater frequency, and the IRS started to make noises about revoking
the church's holy tax-free status, a new revelation came to the Book of
Mormon.
Whether a cynical ploy to avoid the taxman or a coincidence touched by
God, the results were the same: Black people were now human in the eyes
of the Church. African Americans were no longer, as Brigham Young
himself once put it, "uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable, and low in their
habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the
intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind." The IRS was
assuaged, the athletic contests continued, and the church entered a
period of remarkable growth.
Similar pressure must be brought to bear on the Mormon Church today for
its financing of Proposition 8 in California. One nonprofit crunched
the numbers and found that $17.67 million of the $22 million used to
pass the anti-gay marriage legislation was funneled through 59,000
Mormon families since August. It was done with the institutional
backing of the church, though many pro-gay Mormons have spoken out
defiantly against the church's political intervention.
The question now is whether this latest tale of social conflict and the
Church of Latter Day Saints will also spill onto the athletic field.
Men's athletics have been one of the last proud hamlets of homophobia
in our society (although the attitudes of male athletes is more
progressive than you might think). But women's sports has been
historically more open around issues of sexuality.
Will any women collegians raise the specter of Proposition 8 if they
have to travel to the schools of Utah? Will we see the ghosts of Black
14 emerge from the past?
If any athletes choose to act, the ramifications could be
"Beamonesque."