Sports Media Review by Jonathan Weiler

Thursday, July 27, 2006
9:22:00 AM EDT
This, article (http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FA0E13FB34580C718EDDAA0894DD404482behind Times Select), from February 2005, details an interesting pattern: that Black head coaches in the NBA were fired more quickly from their jobs than White ones.

According to the Times, "Over the last decade, black N.B.A. coaches have lasted an average of just 1.6 seasons, compared with 2.4 seasons for white coaches, according to a review of coaching records by The New York Times. That means the typical white coach lasts almost 50 percent longer and has most of an extra season to prove himself."

Furthermore:

"The contrast in tenures might be most easily seen among coaches with the greatest longevity. Of the 14 N.B.A. coaches who have held jobs for at least five seasons since 1989, only one has been black -- Lenny Wilkens, in Atlanta, from 1993 to 2000 -- despite the fact that teams began to hire black coaches in large numbers in the late 1980's. The three active N.B.A. coaches with the longest tenure are all white, and they have been in place for about a decade on average. The pattern holds in almost any important category of coaches. Winning black coaches have been replaced sooner than winning white coaches on average, and experienced black coaches have served shorter tenures than experienced white coaches. The same is true among losing coaches, among rookie coaches and among coaches who played in the N.B.A. and those who did not."

It's naive to think that overt racism is no longer a significant fact of life in American society nowadays, but as I've talked about before, in sports in particular, race is often relevant in more subtle ways. Authors David Leonhardt and Ford Fessenden are particularly acute on this score:

"Even if the cause was rarely conscious racism, coaches said, age-old athletic stereotypes -- the black athlete as a prodigal talent and white athlete as hard-working gym rat -- can make blacks seem particularly unsuited to be good teachers. Some black coaches said they thought that team owners and general managers, a largely white group, were probably most at ease with people similar to them, just as most people were.

And players, both black and white, are still far more accustomed to seeing whites in positions of authority than blacks, coaches said. Some black coaches, including Cheeks in Portland and Byron Scott with the Nets, lost their jobs after clashing with a black player."

This morning's New York Times chronicles some of the early Black pioneers of Major League baseball, men like Frank Grant and Moses "Fleet" Walker who played professional baseball decades before Jackie Robinson. The sorts of racism those men endured, the most direct and hateful kind, are easiest to see. But, interestingly, the article about NBA coaches is among those linked to at the bottom of the Black pioneers profile.

There has, of course, been a revolutionary change in professional sports over the past few decades, with Black athletes at the forefront of that transformation. But big-time athletics, both college and pro remain, in important respects, a White world, and it's still important to understand how that reality shapes what we see.

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