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Guest Commentary: Cougars should continue pioneering path

Turn your television to any sports channel and you will see athletes of all ethnicities competing against each other. Diversity in sports is something we take for granted today, but I’m old enough to remember when segregation was the norm. I’m also old enough to remember how the University of Houston played a pivotal role in breaking color barriers in college sports.

I’ve always been a proud UH alumnus, and I’m even prouder after reading Cougars of Any Color: The Integration of University of Houston Athletics 1964-68, a new book by Katherine Lopez. Lopez recounts many of the challenges overcome by the first black athletes to play for our University. In telling those compelling stories, she also fills in details about how the University paid a high price for becoming the first major university in Texas to integrate its sports program.

When I received my first UH degree in 1961, the school (like most in the South) was closed to minority students. The next year, our Board of Regents voted to change the school’s policy and begin admitting black students. This effort was led by Phillip Guthrie Hoffman, the school’s new president, who worked behind the scenes with community leaders to ensure a smooth transition to an integrated campus.

The effort proved successful. Two years later in 1964, basketball coach Guy V. Lewis and football coach Bill Yeoman recruited the first black athletes to the University. As the "incoming class" of Elvin Hayes, Don Cheney and Warren McVey donned their Scarlet Cougar uniforms, they knew they were breaking the color barriers in basketball and football in the South. What they didn’t know was that their presence would ignite a firestorm fueled by critics of the school’s leadership in integration. The NCAA responded to these outcries by investigating how the University had recruited Warren McVey, and ultimately levied a severe (and, in retrospect, an unjust) penalty against the school.

I credit Lopez for working to set the record straight about the tenor of these times. Black athletes and UH supporters were often harassed, hectored and insulted when we played segregated universities. During a game against Ole Miss, black spectators were segregated into one section of the stadium, where state troopers taunted and threatened them for daring to cheer for our team.

Can you imagine such a scenario today? The answer, thankfully, is "no" – and UH clearly played a role in changing things for the better.

Despite turmoil and unjust attacks by everyone from Sports Illustrated reporters to NCAA administrators, the mid ’60s laid the foundation for our later athletic successes. From 1969 to 1985, the UH football team played in 10 bowl games – winning three out of the four Cotton Bowls in which we appeared. When our Phi Slama Jama Cougars played in the NCAA’s Final Four for three successive years, our team transformed basketball from a "methodical" sport into the flamboyant, crowd-pleasing entertainment it has become today.

All of this leads me to a single question: how has the University of Houston benefited from its leadership in (literally) changing the face of college sports? The answer, regrettably, is "not much."

When the University of Texas, Texas A’M University, Texas Tech University and Baylor University bolted from the Southwest Conference in fall 1996 to form the Big 12 athletic conference, Houston’s political and business leaders raised only tepid protests.

The University of Houston may be the third largest and most diverse of our state universities, but our path to the Bowl Championship Series now runs uphill all the way, and we face resultant challenges to improve overall support and attendance of our sports programs. Athletics Director David Maggard is working to change that as he leads a concerted effort to build a strong foundation for future success.

My favorite quote from our legendary Bill Yeoman is, "it’s hard being a Cougar." Despite the hardships imposed on us, every UH alumnus can take pride in the way our school helped establish Houston as a "can-do" metropolis free from bigotry and prejudice.

Today, our new president is the first foreign-born president and the second woman to hold the position of chancellor at a major university, and our new football coach is one of only eight minority coaches directing a Division 1-A football program. Once again, UH is setting a standard for other schools to follow.

Older UH alumni are sometimes accused of "carrying a chip on their shoulders" when it comes to Cougar athletics. After reading Lopez’s book, it’s easy to see how these chips derive partly from the sacrifices we made in pioneering the integration of athletics in the South. Perhaps, with the help of our alumni and Houston’s business and civic leaders, we can cash in some of those chips and collectively push our University to new heights.

Perdue, a UH alumnus and attorney for Perdue ‘ Kidd LLP, can be reached via [email protected].

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