“It’s hard being black. You ever been black?” Larry Holmes, a former heavyweight world boxing champion, once asked his interviewer. “I was black once – when I was poor.”
That most tragic of sports always held out transformative potential for impoverished pugilists. Other avenues were denied them but becoming an athlete offered a chance to excel in a meritocracy and belong; they would be black no more.
Boxing matches, burnished in blood and bone, seemed to me, in the 1970s, to be racial sacraments. So when Alan Minter, the great white hope of British boxing, wrapped himself in the union flag and ducked between the ropes to face the African American Marvin Hagler in 1980, there could be only one winner in my mind: “Marvellous” Marvin. It wasn’t just that he was a fierce warrior, it was that he was black.
In No Win Race, however, Derek Bardowell, the British-born son of Jamaican immigrants, expresses equivocation. He wanted Minter (who allegedly pledged that “no black man” was going to take his title) to win. Minter survived three rounds before the referee stepped in to save him. That act released the primal animus of the white Wembley crowd: bottles and cans rained down on the ring, aimed at Hagler.
So begins Bardowell’s interrogation of the way sport serves as a microcosm of a nation’s health. That the Hagler-Minter clash revealed racial divisions in Britain was underlined months later, when, in the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton riots, the fearful and suddenly self-conscious eight-year-old Bardowell confessed to his mother: “I want to bleach my skin white.”
What finally gave him the confidence to assert his blackness, he writes, was sport, especially his admiration of the 1980s West Indies cricket team. No Win Race’s thesis – that sport serves as a tool for black people’s self-actualisation and challenges the perception of them by mainstream society – has been argued over for decades. Some, for instance, claim that the crossover success of the golfer Tiger Woods prepared the ground for the American public’s acceptance of Barack Obama as president. But Bardowell also charts the persistence of prejudicial archetypes. As West Indian cricketers transformed into a spectacular team of indomitable batsmen and fast bowlers in the 1980s, he notes English commentators’ catalogue of stereotypes, which shifted from seeing them as apparently carefree calypsonians to “devilish-looking, seven-foot monsters”.
This book is a painful reminder of the 1970s and 80s, when National Front members stood outside stadiums handing out bananas to be thrown at black players. But if white fans were irked by the sight of black footballers, their outrage crested when players such as Cyrille Regis were selected for England. Congratulations from one came in the form of a bullet sent in the post. Three decades later, Rio Ferdinand’s family also received bullets through the letterbox after some objected to the FA’s censure of the England captain John Terry for racially abusing Ferdinand’s brother Anton.
Discussing the activism of black sports stars and the risk in calling out discrimination, Bardowell critcises the apolitical billionaire basketball player Michael Jordan, contrasting him with the American football player Colin Kaepernick who in 2016 began kneeling during the US national anthem at games, saying: “I’m not going to show pride in a country that oppresses black people and people of colour.” Kaepernick has been celebrated and vilified in the press in equal measure.
Bardowell ably demonstrates the power of the media to determine the narratives around these sporting lives. He flags up the false binaries often promoted between good (patriotic) and bad (self-centred) black sportswomen and men; between, for instance, the avuncular, self-deprecating boxer Frank Bruno and the aloof Lennox Lewis (more expedient Canadian than true Brit).
Bardowell’s book would have benefited from delving deeper into the psychology of belonging. It’s easy to dismiss Bruno, the “know what I mean ’Arry” sidekick to boxing commentator Harry Carpenter, for his apparent sycophancy, but his was an old and wily strategy of survival (Jamaicans call it “playing fool to catch wise”), dating back to plantation slavery and disarming the overseer by appearing to be a simpleton. Compromised, perhaps, but a form of agency nonetheless.
No Win Race can seem a little pedestrian in the telling but it’s a valuable act of remembrance of sporting stars who put their careers on the line in pursuit of a moral right. The plight of the England women’s footballer Eniola Aluko prompts Bardowell’s most compelling analysis: after daring to expose to the FA the casual bias of the team’s coaching staff, Aluko, it appears, was rewarded with deselection.
Recent abuse of black players in British football highlights that, while wealth may confer privileges, it doesn’t rid you of melanin or exempt you from prejudice. No Win Race is yet another wake-up call to ensure that no child grows up feeling it wants to bleach its skin.
Colin Grant’s Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation will be published in October (Jonathan Cape).