When the Milwaukee Brewers named Ulice Payne president in September, he at once became a milestone for diversity and a symbol of how far sports still has to go before minorities and women gain equal footing in team and league offices.
Payne is Major League Baseball's first and only black team CEO, and one of only three among the 121 teams in the four major pro league sports. There are no Latino chief executives in the Big Four sports, and Payne replaced one of the four women CEOs when the Milwaukee-area attorney took over the Brewers from Wendy Selig-Prieb, who remains chair of the team's board.
Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig has been at the forefront of imposing guidelines for the hiring and promotion of blacks and minorities. In fact, some observers said executive diversity efforts put pro sports far ahead of other corporate citizens who are not as much in the public eye.
Yet, they said, equity is still only a goal.
"There's a concerted effort [out of league offices] to impress upon the various teams the need for diversity," said Charles Farrell, director of Rainbow Sports, an offshoot of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/Push Coalition. "But you can't legislate diversity."
Despite the efforts, SportsBusiness Journal research found that teams' executives suites were whiter in 2002 than three years ago, while team ownership remains nearly as monochromatic (see "Teams In Big Four Leagues").
Rainbow Sports is working to expand minority opportunities in the sports industry, mainly through a task force of former players, agents, journalists and others who alert team and league officials with job openings of qualified minority applicants.
Jackson himself is working publicly and behind the scenes to influence decision-makers. Farrell said he recently lobbied Notre Dame to hire Tyrone Willingham as head football coach.
Jackson has been tackling sports diversity since 1993, when then-Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott made inflammatory remarks about blacks, Jews, Asians and gays. As a result, Farrell said, the group is being heard, and he has seen increasing success since then.
Baseball spokesman Richard Levin said the league's efforts to diversify date back to 1989, when former Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Al Campanis appeared on a news program and said blacks did not have "the necessities" to manage teams.
"With each year you get more and more results," Levin said.
Still today, however, "we see, too often, African-Americans don't even get into the interview pool," Farrell said. "White males tend to hire other white males."
Since 1999, Major League Baseball has required all teams to interview minority candidates when hiring a general manager or field manager and when filling other high-profile positions short of the team's top business jobs. In 2000, MLB reported that 41 percent of executive and department head positions in the league and team officers were held by minorities or women, up from 37 percent in 1998.
Also in 2000, MLB sponsored an Executive Development Program, a seminar for future GMs, to which it encouraged clubs to send women and minority participants.
Those initiatives helped baseball raise its grade on the latest Racial & Gender Report Card from Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society. The rating measures the composition of players, coaches and key administrators in the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, NHL, Major League Soccer, WNBA, NCAA and its member institutions, as well as the U.S. Olympic Committee and its national governing bodies.
While all sports have made gains since 1987, the first year of the report card, only the NBA and WNBA scored marks above average in 2001, receiving grades of B-plus and A, respectively, for their combined minority and female staffing.
"They seem to have done a very good job of finding people who are qualified," said Peter Roby, director of the center. Roby also credited the NBA for creating the National Basketball Development League, which he called an incubator for future big-league coaches and executives.
Roby noted that the NBA has an aggressive internship program, as does the NFL, and said such entry-level opportunities are vital for nurturing future executives. The NFL also has a program in which minority college coaches are invited to training camps so they can rub elbows with pro coaches and executives and make a case to be considered for future coaching jobs.
Roby said that while leagues must develop their own candidates, they need outside economic and political pressure to move things along, a sentiment echoed in a report issued following the "Summit for Equity in Football Hiring" held in August.
The report, backed by the Black Coaches Association and the NCAA's Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee, among others, laid out goals for the next three years, culminating with a 20 percent success rate for minority hires for coaching vacancies at non-black schools.
The report also suggests offering incentives for schools and officials who pursue minorities, and recommends college recruits choose schools using the motto "Don't Play Where You Can't Coach."
Attorneys Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran issued their own report critical of the NFL's efforts to hire minority coaches, but withdrew threats to sue the league after officials agreed in October to review the report and its suggestions (see story, page 23).
The duo proposed that NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue reward teams for diversifying by awarding them extra draft choices, while taking picks away from those who neglect to look at minority candidates. This policy is already on MLB's books but never implemented.
As with jobs in any industry, who gets hired often depends on who you know. Payne, the Brewers' new president, was hired away from the local law firm Foley & Lardner, where current MLB president and CEO Bob DuPuy used to work. Organizations concerned with ethnic and gender equity make sure the right officials are aware of potential hires.
"People come to us with the old excuse, 'We can't find anybody,'" Farrell said. "We'll help you look. You tell us the criteria and qualifications you're looking for, we'll find them. They're out there."
The Black Coaches Association, Rainbow Sports, the Women's Sports Foundation and the Center for the Study of Sport in Society all have programs that pair women, minorities or disabled candidates with sports executives looking to fill jobs.
NASCAR, once the domain of Southern white males, is working hard to diversify its drivers, owners and fans. In January the organization hired Dora Taylor for the new post of senior manager of diversity affairs. Taylor previously had transformed the Denny's restaurant chain from a target of discrimination complaints to the best company for minorities in 2000, according to Fortune magazine.
Colombian Roberto Guerrero is a driver on NASCAR's Busch Series circuit as a member of the 3-year-old Hispanic Racing Team, and Brazilian Christian Fittipaldi will join him next year. But the sport has only four African-American team owners and one black driver on any level, and two female drivers, according to Taylor's unit.
NASCAR does sponsor an internship program to introduce minorities to the sanctioning body, teams, sponsors and track management.
Despite the efforts, it will take years for things to change, said Harry Edwards, a consultant to the San Francisco 49ers and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, and to simply blame racism or sexism is to oversimplify the issues involved.
Edwards added that league initiatives such as baseball's mandate to interview minority candidates are "fine" but have little effect in breaking up a "literal old boys' network." Change won't come until teams and leagues understand that their hiring practices risk alienating fans, something that has not yet occurred (see Market has yet to force change).
"Networks of relationships tend to overwhelm good intentions," he said.
Steve Carney is a writer in California.
