UW And Its Black Athletes: A Special Report -- The Lonely Struggle

MANY AFRICAN-AMERICAN athletes at the UW find frustrations, obstacles, and nobody to turn to for help off the field. Now, the university seeks solutions to raise graduation rates and solve a complex problem.

Matt Jones looks for all the world like an ordinary college student, in his cuffed jeans, University of Washington sweatshirt and book bag, as he strides over the concrete bridge that for years has delivered Husky athletes onto the main campus.

Guys like Spider Gaines, before he worked the streets as a pimp.

Reggie Rogers, before he got into his car drunk and killed three teenagers.

Tony Dominguez, before he washed out of school in shame and confusion.

Mark West, before he became homeless.

Jones' soft brown eyes dart back and forth, keenly aware of his surroundings, as he cuts through the morning throng of students that has always swallowed the trickle of athletes spilling from the bridge.

Like Trevin Moore, before he went to jail for attacking four women.

Demouy Williams, before getting busted in a crackhouse.

Vince Weathersby, before he was penniless and begging for jobs.

Jason Shelley, before he ran from police and got kicked off the team.

Jones, co-captain of the Husky football team, has Shelley on his mind as he ducks into a classroom and takes a seat near the back. He sits up straight as the American Ethnic Studies professor begins to lecture on the "Horatio Alger myth, the rags-to-riches American Dream," which she argues is more like a lie to minorities and women.

Jones is proof to the contrary, a young African-American man from dubious beginnings who will graduate in the spring. He said he already has job offers waiting, if the NFL spurns him. But he does not like feeling so alone, as one of the few black athletes who made a healthy adjustment to campus life, realized his possibilities beyond pro sports, and forged links into the general community.

`Major, major advantage over blacks'

"A lot of white people say, `Well, I pushed myself through college. I did this and I did this,' " said Jones, who majors in ethnic studies and speech communications. "But most of them had a lot more chances than I did. They had a better education, a better lifestyle and they had better networking than I could ever dream about. The combination of those three gives them a major, major advantage over blacks."

Jones screamed from the gut earlier this month when Shelley was charged with burglary and sexual abuse, after previous arrests for punching an opponent in a pickup basketball game and running from police. He chastised the standout receiver, then tried to explain the reasons why some black athletes have trouble making the most of their college opportunity.

Although the problem is as complex as any individual, Jones' call for help stems from more than youthful emotion.

While the graduation rate at Washington mirrors the national average for black athletes at Division I schools, 37 percent, it ranks eighth in the generally progressive Pac-10 Conference, based on an NCAA study released last summer that considered the freshman classes from 1983 to '86. White athletes graduated at a 62 percent rate, given, like everyone else, six years to get their degree.

And, while administrators at Washington and around the nation have recently been able to significantly raise the graduation rates of white athletes in the revenue-producing sports of football and men's basketball, through new reforms and services, the rates for black athletes have remained largely flat.

At Washington, black women athletes are getting their diplomas more often but their male peers were having no more success after the fourth year of the NCAA study than they were after the second.

The results do not speak well for a university that next year encounters the 25th anniversary of one of its more painful athletic events - the racial unrest of 1969 when black football players were suspended after protesting their treatment by the program.

Barbara Hedges, Washington athletic director, said the school is scrambling to deal with the problem, which she considers as much social as academic.

"If we're going to accept at-risk student athletes, we need to have a plan for that person beginning as a freshman," Hedges said. "That includes an academic plan, which we already have, but also a faculty mentor, a position coach in place (for guidance) more than ever, and a peer mentor, an upperclassman who can help them when they encounter some of those problems."

Alienation on campus

The first step in breaking the gridlock is acknowledging that race matters when dealing with many black athletes, said Andre Hayes, a teacher and former Husky football player. He is co-founder of the African American Athletic Alumni Association, a non-profit organization that offers counseling services to high schools and colleges.

"I'm not saying the (UW coaches and administrators) are not sensitive to the needs of black players, because they are, but they need to bring in people who are more qualified than them to assess the needs of kids," Hayes said. "There comes a time when they're not able to make qualified assessments of these kids and they're not qualified to deal with the emotional baggage these guys bring to the U.

"It's like dealing with a Vietnam veteran, who would rather talk to a psychologist with war experience, because he's seen the battles.

"What's it going to take for them to do something about this - some football player to commit homicide?"

Some administrators and athletes are uncomfortable addressing race as an issue, because of the careless stereotypes that can result and the chance that athletes may use race as an excuse. "Anytime you try to obtain a goal, and race becomes an issue, you'll never make it," said Troy Morrell, former basketball player who now works in Seattle with kids at risk of dropping out of middle school.

But the obstacles facing many black athletes are different, Jones insists, and he plans to propose solutions to UW President Bill Gerberding in coming weeks. Gerberding approached him on the sideline after the Oregon State game earlier this month, expressed interest in the comments he made after the latest Shelley arrest, and, Jones said, agreed to meet after the season.

Through a spokesman, Gerberding confirmed his comments to Jones but said he wants Hedges to talk with Jones instead.

Jones could simply share with Hedges his own story of confronting the racial, economic and social barriers that greeted him at Washington. That he says he has never heard a racial slur there points to the subtlety of the problem.

Raised in a predominantly black area of Portland, Jones said his unemployed, alcoholic father beat him and his mother and abandoned the family. "My dad left my mom with nothing. He took all the savings, all the cars. He left her with the house, but she needed that to get on her feet."

His mother, Sandra, required Bible readings and blessed the home with love, but between being a teacher and holding two other jobs she had to leave Matt and his brothers - Mark, a former Husky linebacker, and Darius, a Husky freshman - to take care of themselves. In this regard, Jones considers himself quite common among African-American football players at Washington.

Where he differs, he believes, is that his mother sent him to a predominantly white high school.

At Portland's Central Catholic, Jones learned early "what white society expected of me." African Americans from suburban or rural high schools often have the same advantage. But for many athletes, their first immersion into the larger community comes as a freshman at Washington, where only 3.3 percent of the students are black, reflecting the state ratio.

"You take a kid out of Dorsey or Locke (high schools in Los Angeles) and put him in a white, middle-class environment, often it's just not going to work," said Hayes, who lettered for the Huskies in 1985. "Either he's going to get in trouble with the law or do poorly in academics because often the only white authority figures he's ever dealt with were the police, who usually harassed him."

Jamal Fountaine, a senior from San Francisco and like Jones a co-captain of the football team, recalls living in a dormitory his freshman year. He said students asked him "things like `Why does black people's hair grow like that?' or `Why do you comb your hair?' " He wondered if these were trick questions.

"There's a lot of ignorance in this state, but what's cool about it is people are willing to learn," Fountaine said. "They want to learn."

Fountaine said he tries to sit with other African Americans in class, which is difficult for him because he's the only UW black student in his major, construction engineering. "You find yourself searching for black people when you come here," even if some of those people are negative influences, he said.

However, a sense of isolation does not have to ensure failure.

At Oregon State, where 1.4 percent of the students are black and one of every three black males is an athlete, African-American athletes graduate at a rate higher than their white counterparts, as well as the student body at large. Black football players complete their degrees at a 67 percent rate, best in the Pac-10.

But the Beavers also aren't much of a farm club for the NFL. Washington had 32 former players on the opening-day rosters of NFL teams this season, fourth-most in the nation, a statistic that may depress their graduation figures but more dangerously fuels the notion among many athletes that school is a diversion to the important task of athletics.

"I have to work real hard with them," said Al Black, a UW sociology professor who takes a special interest in African-American athletes. "They come to school for a different purpose. Unless the material literally grabs them - and I'm generalizing, because there are guys, like Matt Jones, who work hard - the majority are not interested."

That singular focus on the sport is a reflection of larger societal forces, said Gertrude Peoples, director of academic-support services in the athletic department.

Speaking generally, she said, "In elementary school, maybe he's never done anything well in his life. Then all of a sudden he hits the ball across the field and for first time he feels good about himself. It becomes easy to perfect that skill because that's where he's getting good, positive attention.

"We try to turn that around. We try to make him feel good about academic achievement."

In the meantime, cynicism grows on campus.

Hedges sent out questionnaires last spring to faculty soliciting their input. About 40 of them said they were interested in working more closely with the athletes. But another group was vociferous in "questioning the role of college athletes in higher education," she said.

Hedges dismisses the faculty indignation as an issue that's "age-old" - but it feels like a fresh burn to players, who sensed more hostility in the past year. Jones said one professor told him that he, as a black athlete, had no interest in learning and would flunk the professor's class. That professor is African American. Jones passed.

Coaches encourage all players to avoid wearing Husky-insignia garb on campus, and to sit apart in class so they are not identified as football players.

But mixing into the crowd is less easy for black athletes, who make up one of every six black males on campus, than for white athletes, who are just one of every 52 males.

"I had a teacher actually confront me on whether I wrote a paper or not," Fountaine said. "I was like, `I had an 1190 SAT so I would have gotten in (to Washington), anyway. I had a 3.4 out of high school; how dare you say I didn't write a paper?' "

Denton Johnson, a 5-foot-8 receiver and criminology major, said, "Everyone assumes that I play football so I tell them I play soccer. No one asks me what I study, what I major in. You know, I'm more than a football player."

It's an identity crisis, on its most fundamental level. Those recruited for sports are seen, and often see themselves, as nothing more than athletes. And when the sport is gone, so goes much of their self-purpose.

But connecting the athletes to people and endeavors outside sports will not come easily.

Scholarship athletes at Washington exist largely in a world unto themselves. Unlike at other schools, they receive all of their academic and counseling services out of the athletic-department complex. The UW's Educational Opportunity Program, which provides an ethnic cultural center and helps find internships for minority students, takes a hands-off posture with athletes.

Few athletes are involved in the Black Student Commission, a campus organization. Johnson said he is one of only a few players on the team who belongs to a fraternity. No athletes, of any race, participate in the upper levels of student government.

Athletes say that they don't have time for extracurricular activities because of the time required by their sport.

Lack of black role models

One conclusion on which both sides agree is that there aren't enough African Americans connected to the department who can give athletes guidance and show that careers outside sports are possible.

"These players don't have a system to go by," said Quentin Young- blood, a senior basketball player who rejoined the Huskies this year after getting kicked off the team two years ago in a racial dispute with former head coach Lynn Nance. "The coaches don't tell them right from wrong, teach them about morality, teach them how to respect men and respect women."

Jones laments the loss this year of the alumni-mentor program, disbanded by the school over concerns about potential NCAA rules violations regarding extra benefits flowing from boosters to athletes. The athletic department lined him up with an alum who is white but also introduced him to black professionals.

"In white communities, you already have doctors and lawyers and others who are successful," Jones said. "You look at black neighborhoods and you see drug dealers, big-time entertainers - maybe - and big-time athletes - maybe. Then you expect us to network like that, see all those negative images and then come back (into the neighborhood) and get a job? It's not going to work."

Attempting to fill the void, Hedges wants to put African-American freshmen with black faculty mentors whenever possible. She also hired Ralph Bayard in October as senior associate athletic director, the first African American tapped for an upper-level position in the athletic department in 22 years, since Peoples. He is the first black ex-player from the school in a power position.

Bayard's primary job is monitoring NCAA rules compliance for Washington, but his other duties include being a resource for athletes. Gaining their trust, for administrators of any racial background, may be another matter.

"A lot of people feel like they're just another teacher, another monitor," Johnson said. "You just can't talk to them in that setting."

Bayard is hopeful, nonetheless. "I'm from another era when there were a different set of issues, but I graduated on time and got on with my life. To see someone do that, it serves as a visual aid, if nothing else."

Recognizing the problems

The issues indeed are different from in 1969, when Bayard, a receiver, and three other players were suspended from the team for part of the season by Coach Jim Owens after they voiced grievances about his treatment of African Americans.

According to Don Smith, senior associate athletic director and an African American who was hired as a response to the crisis, the players' concerns at the time were: the coaches' stacking players at positions based on race; summer jobs that were inferior to those given white athletes, and a lack of resources to help them graduate.

The last concerns about stacking dissolved when Don James stuck with Warren Moon at quarterback in the late 1970s. And, if the Pac-10 investigators are correct, the choice jobs were shared by both races.

On the third point, the university hired Peoples as academic services director. As Husky athletics has grown in magnitude, so has her budget, to $700,000. Few athletic departments in the country offer as many services, and even hire students at $7 an hour to take the class attendance of athletes.

What's changed, Hedges believes, are the environments many athletes grow up in - the inner cities where incidents of violence and addictions are more common.

"It's a matter of understanding the problem, then doing everything you can to help the young men do what they can to improve their chances in life," said Jim Lambright, head football coach.

"Hopefully, you find out their needs before something like the Jason Shelley (incidents) come up."

The athletic department several years ago began diagnostic testing on athletes, and last year started requiring scholarship freshmen to take a "Life Skills" class that addresses issues relevant to athletes, such as time management, the responsibilities of being an athlete, and drugs and alcohol.

Still, Shelley slipped through the net. As a result, the Huskies now will be more careful in the recruiting process about identifying and avoiding "explosive personalities" who can "sacrifice your program," Lambright said.

Lambright's sentiments come at a time when the NCAA already is making it more difficult for some high-school athletes to get into college, by raising academic requirements and cutting football scholarships.

Peoples shares a fear of many black educators, players and coaches: that the NCAA is giving up on at-risk athletes. They contend that many of the recent NCAA measures - supported by Washington - will disproportionately affect black athletes.

"To deny these kids an opportunity is wrong," Peoples said.

Said Jones, "Me, the person I am, in the circumstances I grew up in, if I didn't get a scholarship I was going to be a menace to society. I guarantee you I wouldn't have gotten a decent job."

Taking a more pragmatic view on the whole subject is Ron Sims, King County councilman and president of the Rainier youth-league football program, which has seen Greg Lewis, Mario Bailey and dozens of other Washington athletes pass through its system.

Sims said that unless Washington cuts out the "talk, talk, talk, talk, talk" and sends more athletes into the world with degrees, it will lose more of the top prospects who can survive the higher academic entrance standards. Last year, for the first time, the NCAA required schools to send information on graduation rates to recruits.

"If they want the African-American athlete with a 2.5 GPA and a 1,000 SAT, they're going to have to make changes," Sims said.

"Will I (steer prospects away from UW) in the future? It depends on what the UW does in the future. I'll advise kids to shop and tell their parents to look at the graduation rates. I want these kids to get college degrees, and that's the bottom line."