Black, white and green

Sporting News, The, July 13, 1998 by Shaun Powell

Owning a professional sports team isn't about the color of one's skin. It's about the color of one's money.

Crossing the color line in baseball was easy. It only took about five decades. And eventually a black quarterback won a Super Bowl. In every sport with black players, there are black general managers and coaches, and--it's hard to believe--even the NFL will figure a way to hire more someday.

Eventually, barriers are broken by time, political correctness or persistence.

But there is one area in sports resistant to change, an exclusive club that has yet to see a Jackie Robinson, Doug Williams, Sweetwater Clifton or Willie O'Ree.

There are no pioneers here. No mid breakthroughs. No "firsts." No blacks.

And for the most part, no racism standing in the way, either.

Owning a sports team isn't about skin color. It's about the color of the potential buyer's money. And the plain truth is, not many blacks are green enough, and the few that are aren't willing to buy $100 million ballplayers.

Had Al Campanis, rest his soul, said blacks lacked the necessities to own sports teams, Ted Koppel would have yawned and gone to the next question. Today's inflated prices are starting to squeeze out most white people. The Nets parceled out 65 percent of the franchise recently for $150 million. Hard to tell what was the bigger surprise, that some buyers thought the Nets were that valuable, or that $150 mil didn't fetch 100 percent.

Fewer individuals are wealthy enough to write checks to cover price tags starting at $175 million in football, baseball and basketball, so more teams are being bought by corporations or groups of millionaires. Since you won't find many black CEOs running Fortune 500 companies, or blacks with a spare $250 million in the bank, you won't find them in the owner's box.

A black person probably will run the country before he or she runs a sport team.

But does the race of the owner make a difference? Not as much as on the field or on the court. However, the front-office hiring practices of a team with a black owner likely would be more reasonable with jobs accessible to all, instead of to those members of the old-boy network who always seem to find work.

There also is the issue of image. A sports league with a black owner would be applauded for being progressive. A league craves that kind of public relations.

That's why the NFL is determined to place a high-profile black person in an ownership position, particularly in Cleveland with the reintroduction of the Browns.

There are two groups bidding for ownership rights, and both have black representation. The group headed by Harold Millstein includes Calvin Hill and Paid Warfield, and the Charles Dolan group boasts Bill Cosby. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue may be powerless to dictate the hiring practices of NFL teams, who have bypassed one black candidate after another while filling coaching vacancies. But Tagliabue does have a say in awarding expansion franchises, and that's why the two groups have a little color

The problem here is image distorts reality. None of the three--Hill, Warfield or Cosby--is a potential majority owner. Hill and Warfield don't have that kind of money, and Cosby is willing to invest $25 million, roughly live percent of the purchase price. The NFL's effort to invite black ownership, while admirable, reeks of tokenism.

"Twenty-five million," said Cosby, sensitive to the charge of being a part of window-dressing. "At that price, I think the token has probably changed considerably."

Not really. In the world of ownership, $25 million can't buy 25 percent of the Nets.

The right time for blacks to buy majority interest was 10 years ago, when you could get an NBA expansion team for a measly $32 million. The best chance was lost when Bruce Llewellyn, who made a fortune through a string of grocery stores and a soft-drink distributorship in Philadelphia, declined to buy the Seahawks and Cavaliers in the 1980s. Ironically, Llewellyn was in the race to buy the Vikings until he under-went heart surgery recently.

In an embarrassing episode, a bid by two black businessmen to buy the Nuggets in 1990 failed when Peter Bynoe and Bertram Lee were short on funds. Lee was even evicted from his Denver apartment. David Stem had to rind a buyer to bail them out.

So here we are, in the '90s, where a black person can quarterback, coach and manage a team. However, he's still unable to own one, not because he doesn't have the right color.

But because he doesn't have enough of it.