Mizzou Quiet About Honor Student Athletes Received for Racial Protest

It isn’t every day that a university can boast that a group of its students won a national humanitarian award for having taken risks and shown innovation to help the disadvantaged.

Throw in the fact that this award is named for a beloved celebrity who recently lost a courageous battle with cancer—and that it came with a $50,000 charitable grant—and one might imagine that the hometown hype machine would be whirring at full tilt.

After a year of difficult publicity, the University of Missouri–Columbia could be forgiven if it had gone wild in July over the exciting news that its 2015 football team had garnered the second annual Stuart Scott ENSPIRE award for its support of fellow students’ protests over race relations on campus. How nice to be recognized on the national stage along with tennis legend Billie Jean King and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, with Laila Ali hosting to boot.

To quote one of Scott’s signature lines: “Boo-yah!”

Well, maybe not. Mizzou might have more cheerfully embraced being named to a “10 Worst Universities in the World” list.

Neither the university nor its athletic department uttered a word about its student-athletes’ off-the-field accomplishments. From St. Louis to Kansas City, the ESPN award received scant media attention, and it appears that local reporters politely refrained from discomfiting Mizzou officials who wanted no part of it.

What an interesting non-commentary. Though the little-known ESPN award is hardly a coveted prize, it’s hard to imagine any other context wherein a major college athletic program would run for cover when presented with glowing praise from the top sports network. Athletes and athletic programs live to get on SportsCenter.

Not this time.

Obviously, the university and athletic department want to put behind them the events of last November, when the football team briefly went on strike—and threatened to boycott a game—in support of the demands of black protesters on campus.

There’s a reason: A consensus narrative has emerged from aggrieved parties that the boycott initiated by some 30 African-American football players last November will go down as an awful chapter in Mizzou history. That view—taken up by athletic boosters, state legislators, and the media—was encapsulated in this bit of editorializing by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in its fleeting coverage of the ESPN award on June 19:

“Simply put, a boycott that lasted less than 48 hours will reverberate on campus for countless years as the university, the athletics department, and the football program work to recover from the polarizing event that triggered months of rhetoric in the state legislature, helped cripple campus finances, and turned off legions of fans.”

Through that prism, one can hardly begrudge a beleaguered sports information person’s keeping his head down when the subject arises seven months after the fact. Chad Moller, who fills that role at Mizzou, gamely told me that ESPN had never directly contacted the school in advance of the award and that the school therefore knew little about it. Publicly avoiding the matter “wasn’t a conscious decision; [it] just never came up,” he said. Moller added that he had “a couple random inquiries” after the award’s announcement on June 16, but that was that.

But this isn’t about some cover-up. The fact is that the university, athletic department, and football team had nearly a month to react between the announcement of the award and its presentation. Here’s how they reacted: Not a single member of the current football team or Mizzou family appeared at the L.A. gala at which the award was presented, and not one syllable has been uttered about it. It’s some dreaded nightmare from the past that dare not be mentioned, so that we may “recover” from it.

Well, here’s another prism: Maybe, in the spirit of the world’s oldest journalism school (from which I graduated—barely), it might be helpful to look at more than one side of the story. In particular, consider what ESPN said about the Missouri football players in bestowing the award:

“Racial tensions were becoming increasingly strained at the University of Missouri last fall. Frustrations gave rise to protests—one of the most notable coming when a student at the school began a hunger strike. Students were demanding action, and the Mizzou Tigers football team stepped in and announced that they would boycott their upcoming game unless changes were made. The players took a huge risk—their scholarships could have been revoked and their futures hung in the balance. But their actions indicated it was a risk worth taking to help bring action to this critical issue.”

(To be fair, the Post included this in its story, but it twice labeled the passage ESPN’s “explanation” of the award. Talk about code words: When was the last time the glowing prose from an award was called an “explanation”?)

ESPN put forth a perspective that you don’t hear every day—or any day—at ol’ Mizzou: that the black football players put themselves at considerable risk to support what they considered an important cause. There was no selfish motive here: They had nothing to gain as athletes and everything to lose by standing up for what they thought was right. Doesn’t that count for something? It doesn’t matter whether you love their cause, hate it, or don’t care. This was an act of principle, made all the more stunning by who put it forth.

So often, major college athletes are notoriously pampered, self-absorbed, and aloof from the university that they represent on the field. There are exceptions, to be sure, but the phrase “student-athlete” is reasonably greeted with an eye roll. Personally, I think it’s great that football players were willing to take a stand as students, not as athletes. And I find it deliciously ironic that white legislators and boosters were incensed by the notion that the players threatened to use their economic power—by boycotting a game—to help achieve the outcome that they desired.

Let’s see now: threatening to use economic power to achieve a desired outcome. Who would stoop to such a heinous low?

“The perception is that there’s a lot of things that went wrong, and there’s going to be a price to pay,” Republican Senate President Pro Tem Ron Richard said in response to the players’ actions. He added that funding for the university is “going to take a haircut.”

Why, of course. If politicians want to score political points when the university makes them mad, it’s just fine to hold hostage the state’s higher education funding.

If athletic boosters decide to express their anger over something to do with the team—be it player conduct, coaching decisions, or win-and-loss performance—then their threats to cut monetary support simply reflect capitalism in action. Indeed, when donations to the Missouri Tigers Scholar-

ship Fund dropped in the aftermath of the racial protests, many people viewed that fact as proof positive that the protests were unjustified. But if students threaten economic consequences to their university in response to their concerns over long-standing racial injustice, why, that’s “mob rule,” in the words of Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder. I suppose the legitimacy of exerting economic pressure depends upon what mob you run with.

In the same vein, whether one appreciates ESPN’s honoring Mizzou football players depends on the narrative taken from the events of last November. For those convinced that it was the worst thing ever, it’s understandable to want to leave a dreaded chapter behind. Personally, I was happy to see ESPN recognize our kids, our team. Mizzou fans like me have long had a chip on our collective shoulder about Missouri’s not getting its due from the national media, and this wasn’t some tongue-in-cheek, backhanded compliment.

But regardless of what side one is on, the most important point going forward is to let it all go. It is what it is. Nobody died in the protests, the campus wasn’t burned down, and though no one knows whether race relations will finally improve, staying polarized won’t make things better.

The only thing that would certainly bring everyone together would be for the football team to go 12–0 and win a national championship, in which case all will be forgotten, even by meddling legislators and petulant boosters. But given that a repeat of last year’s 5–7 record is a more likely scenario, brace yourself for more angst about the sky falling on the columns in Francis Quadrangle.

I’ll stay true to my school in either case, and I’d even like to see that ESPN award that our team won. I wonder whether I’ll be able to find it on campus.