In 1980 the real world crashed down upon DeFrantz and all of her Olympic teammates. She now had her juris doctor from Penn (`77) and a career to consider, but she was still rowing and looking to reclaim a spot on the women`s eight that would represent the U.S. in Moscow. Then, in quick succession, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter announced his boycott of the Games, and the USOC-the only body that could officially take that action-acceded to Carter`s wishes.
The lessons learned around her family`s dining-room table, the experiences endured while growing up in Indianapolis, the haunting memory of the departing Africans all coalesced now within Anita DeFrantz, and they allowed her to view that action in starkly accurate terms. It robbed athletes of an opportunity. It denied athletes an inalienable right. It abrogated the athletes` freedom of choice.
She quickly became one of the boycott`s most outspoken critics, and-with the help of a young lawyer in Princeton, N.J.-she eventually drew up a suit against the USOC seeking to overturn its decision. ”It was a very hard time for everybody,” recalls Graves, the `76 teammate of DeFrantz who was also on the `80 team. ”We all felt pretty much disenfranchised, and I was extremely grateful for what she was doing.”
”She took on the cross for the whole rowing team, if not the whole Olympic movement,” adds Brown, also a member of both teams. ”All of us who were part of it then were learning through her how deep the commitment to amateur sports had to be if it was going to survive. The time and energy she put in fighting the battle for all of us certainly could have cost her a spot on the team. That was a very big commitment on her part but a price she was willing to pay.”
”I accepted that,” concludes DeFrantz, who eventually did make the team. ”To me, the larger issue was the right of an athlete to make the decision once you made the tea
She was then called a militant, a traitor and worse while she waged her ultimately unsuccessful campaign, and in her mailbox she often found the inevitable hate mail. There were visits from people who claimed to be with the United Nations but who, she felt, were with the FBI, and a memorable interchange with the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ”Can you tell me that not having a team in Moscow will make one bit of difference in Afghanistan?” she recalls asking Air Force Gen. David Jones.
”No,” he said to her. ”I can`t tell you that because it`s probably not true.”
”He said that to me, and to say that this is all symbolic-it`s not symbolic!” she says. It is eight years later, but there is palpable emotion in her voice as she continues, ”It`s me. Or that person over there. That person over here. To me, it was very, very scary that this country could come to that. It was also very scary to me that people in this country didn`t stand up, didn`t say this is wrong, didn`t say at the very least that the athletes should decide as they did in other countries (including France, Italy and Great Britain).
”In some ways what Carter did in 1980 is really, I guess, a snapshot of what this country could become. Here`s a man who purportedly cared-and I think did care-deeply about people. Who wanted the world at peace. Who tried to bring the Middle East together. Someone who I think had very high standards, just deciding it was an easy thing to deny 500 people their dreams, their aspirations, their investment.
”Put it this way. I`d been down that road before, and I knew that wasn`t a profitable road to take. And in a country where you`re supposed to be free and able to pursue happiness and so forth, it seemed to me incredibly wrong that by fiat, simple fiat, the President says, `We will not send a team.` What do you mean, `we`? I`m me. I`ve invested in this enterprise. I have the right to make that decision. Everybody on the team should have the right to say, `I intend to compete in the Olympic Games.` ”
It is 1981, and Anita DeFrantz, retired from competition, has just been hired by Ueberroth to work on the staff of the LAOOC. She is still just 29 yet already sensitized to the political currents that could undermine the coming Games, and she reacts instinctively when she sees the news in the papers. The Harlem Globetrotters, whose headquarters are in Los Angeles, are planning a world tour that will culminate with games in South Africa. This does not look good, she thinks.
”By then,” she says now, ”I was a confirmed believer in athletes`
rights and their right to decide, and I wanted to make sure that we (the LAOOC) didn`t leave undone anything we could do to make sure the African nations were at the Games. I firmly believed that an athlete must decide to compete or not, but I also recognized that it wasn`t true in this country, so I couldn`t be too surprised if athletes in other countries weren`t given that opportunity. It`s sad. It`s sad. So I guess my goal was to make sure the organizing committee-to the extent we could have an effect on the policies of our country-didn`t do stupid things.”
The `Trotters` tour directly involves neither the country nor the organizing committee, yet her antennae make DeFrantz recognize the
repercussions that could result, and she quickly expresses her concerns to Ueberroth. ”This may not seem direct,” she says to him, ”but this is a sports team that`s famous, that everyone knows is an American team, that`s all black and is based in Los Angeles. We better do something about it.”
”Take care of it,” Ueberroth tells her.
”I was fortunate enough to make contacts with the right people,” she now recalls, ”who introduced me to other people who knew that I cared about this and was trying to take some action. Ultimately, the tour was stopped.”
Her success there averted a controversy, but one did arise three years later, in March of 1984, when Great Britain welcomed Zola Budd to its shores and quickly granted citizenship to that South African-born distance runner. The Sports Council of African Nations responded by thinking aloud of boycotting the L.A. Games, and that sent DeFrantz-the champion of the individual and the athlete`s freedom of choice-on a whirlwind courtship of African sports heads. ”We didn`t think it (Great Britain`s action) should affect us, but it could have,” recalls Harry Usher, Ueberroth`s top assistant on the LAOOC. ”And because of the nature of the African countries-they were both numerous and susceptible (to political pressures)-it became important for us to express our desire to have them in Los Angeles.”
By the time DeFrantz finished expressing that desire, 43 of them agreed to compete in L.A. Only Ethiopia, an ally of the boycotting Soviet Union, refused.
In those quiet moments, those rare moments when she is not in motion, Anita DeFrantz climbs into a single scull and rows to keep fit. But her existence is now defined by her activism, and her time is now consumed by those myriad organizations with which she is aligned. ”She has never been a quitter-just like me,” says her mother. ”Only now, as I`m becoming older, have I started thinking of quitting some of the activities I`m involved in.” Her daughter, in contrast, is still involved with the USOC. She has been on its executive board since 1980 and the chair of its eligibility committee since 1985. Her daughter, in addition, is involved with the U.S. Olympic Foundation. She joined it as a trustee when it was formed in 1985 and has raised strenuous objections to the investments it made (without her knowledge) in companies with links to South Africa. Her daughter is also involved with the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles. She became its president in June of 1987 and now sees that its $93 million endowment from the `84 Summer Games is used to provide opportunities for a huge cross-section of young athletes in Southern California. And finally, of course, her daughter is involved with the IOC, and during that group`s meetings, this remarkable great-great granddaughter of Alonzo D. DeFrantz sits just two chairs away from Prince Albert of Monaco.
She is the only black woman among the IOC`s 90 members, only one of five women overall. (A sixth will be inducted during ceremonies in Seoul: Princess Anne of Great Britain.) She has, in her two years on that body, generally acted as the proper newcomer should and has restrained her inherent sense of activism. The one exception came at the IOC meeting in Istanbul in May, 1987, and it reflected what she means when she calls herself-as she often does-”an advocate of opportunity.” For there, in an impassioned speech, she urged that the Olympics be opened to all athletes no matter whether they carry the label of amateur or professional.
”In Istanbul, speaking as an athlete who had competed in the Games, her speech was very well received and very helpful to reach agreement to have the best tennis players (rather than imposing an age limit) in the
next Olympics in Seoul,” says IOC president Samaranch. ”She is new in our organization, but already she has been very well accepted.”
”She has generally done pretty well,” says Canadian IOC member Pound.
”She`s done the right things in the sense that since being elected she`s participated but hasn`t jumped into everything with mouth wide open like some people do. She`s smart enough to realize not to speak too often and, when she does speak, to have something to say. She`s learning how it works and how to be effective in an often difficult international forum, and in time I think she will be one of the best IOC members the United States has ever had.”
”Anita`s never been impulsive. She`s careful,” adds her mother, a professor in the School of Education at the University of San Francisco. (She describes herself as a communications sociologist whose ”aim of life is to help people communicate across cultural, linguistic and social lines.”)
”Anita`s a quick study. She weighs situations and evaluates what she will say. You have to understand. Being a black woman makes doing things quite different from being a white woman, a black man or a white man. You have to understand the system and how it works so you can operate in it. Being a black woman helps her understand how systems work. Also, I think she has that indefinable `it.` ”
”Certainly she deserved to be elected,” concludes former teammate Brown, who is now the vice president of the U.S. Rowing Association. ”But I was surprised; because of what I had seen of the IOC, I had little reason to believe it always acts on merit. And talking to Anita now, even though she`s on the inside of the circle, I get the sense that there`s a long way to go until she`s listened to and heard and has much influence.”
”Yeah. It takes a long time for change to come. But, if you step back, it`s probably better because sometimes the quick changes in the world are not the right ones,” says DeFrantz herself. She is sitting now in a meeting room in the headquarters of the foundation she heads, and-over two hours-rarely touches the salad in front of her and often flashes the intelligence and intensity and sense of humor that characterize her.
”It seems to me,” she goes on, ”that we could have the perfect world today. But as long as everyone agrees that we can have the perfect world and is working toward it, I don`t mind waiting until tomorrow. But changes have been made pretty fast on the IOC as of late. It`s not just the Olympic movement that has to change. It`s got to be the American public understanding and caring for sports more than they do. Understanding sports more fully is very important.”
What does she want them to understand?
”That sports is not just football and basketball. That sports is an opportunity to learn a skill, to practice that skill, to improve upon that skill, to create perspective on what you individually can do, to experience success, the sense of accomplishment on any level. Self-assessment. These are all things sports provide as by-products-as central products. Understand that, and that sports is not something just boys take part in. That`s just not true. It`s something that`s part of our being as humans, and I don`t think just boys are human. I think women are human, too, and should have the opportunity to experience those things through sports.
”It teaches us about community and sharing and respecting one another. I don`t think sports necessarily breaks down color barriers. I think what it does is teach you to respect an individual, and as you begin to appreciate people more and more, you begin to realize it`s silly to have these racist notions that everyone black is like this or everyone white is like that. You begin to appreciate the individual, and I think we live in a world where the individual has to become valued.”
The two-hour interview is near its close now, and there is but a single, simple, curiosity question remaining. Does Anita DeFrantz have a hero?
”No,” she replies quickly, and her eyes twinkle mischievously. ”I have a she-ro. Harriet Tubman is probably the person in history I admire the most.”
Harriet Tubman was born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland in 1823 and, at the age of 25, escaped to freedom in the North. But she did not remain there. She instead returned to the South 19 times and helped her aged parents and more than 300 others gain their own freedom. By the end, she was so notorious there was a $40,000 bounty on her head-dead or alive.
”She was someone,” Anita DeFrantz finally says, ”who made her own opportunity and then realized what she had-her freedom-was so important that she went back and risked it to bring out those 300 people. The remarkable courage she must have had to, first, decide that she was going to gain her own freedom, and then to go back for others.
”And that`s not all she did. She was probably the only woman to serve as a scout during the Civil War. She saw combat. She used a gun. She was very active in the intelligence (unit) of the Union Army. She also worked as a nurse with the soldiers, and for years after that continued to serve the community. She died when she was 90, and her whole life was dedicated to others and serving others. There. She is my she-ro.”
