Dr. Schaller NEW BOOK OUT NOV 1st; COMMON ENEMIES

During the 1980s Black athletes and other athletes of color broadened the popularity and profitability of major-college televised sports by infusing games with a “Black style” of play. At a moment ripe for a revolution in men’s college basketball  and football, clashes between “good guy” white protagonists and bombastic “bad  boy” Black antagonists attracted new fans and spectators. And no two teams in  the 1980s welcomed the enemy’s role more than Georgetown Hoya basketball and  Miami Hurricane football. 

Georgetown and Miami taunted opponents. They celebrated scores and victories with in-your-face swagger. Coaches at both programs changed the tenor of  postgame media appearances and the language journalists and broadcasters used  to describe athletes. Athletes of color at both schools made sports apparel fashionable for younger fans, particularly young African American men. The Hoyas and  the ’Canes were a sensation because they made the bad-boy image look good.  Popular culture took notice. 

In the United States sports and race have always been tightly, if sometimes  uncomfortably, entwined. Black athletes who dare to challenge the sporting  status quo are often initially vilified but later accepted. The 1980s generation  of barrier-busting college athletes took this process a step further. True to form,  Georgetown’s and Miami’s aggressive style of play angered many fans and  commentators. But in time their style was not only accepted but imitated by others,  both Black and white. Love them or hate them, there was simply no way you could  deny the Hoyas and the Hurricanes. 

Thomas F. Schaller is a professor of political science at the University of  Maryland, Baltimore County. He is a former national political columnist for the  Baltimore Sun and is the author of The Stronghold: How Republicans Captured  Congress but Surrendered the White House and Whistling Past Dixie: How  Democrats Can Win without the South.