Presenting “The Russell Rule”
By Jeff Faraudo
#WCChoops Columnist | ARCHIVES
2020 WCC HALL OF HONOR PROFILES
When
Lorenzo Romar was six years old, his father helped boost him and his brother up the side of their house in Compton, California for a first-hand view of history. “What we saw were the flames from the Watts riots,” Romar recalls. “When you saw it on television as a kid it felt like it was 5,000 miles away.”
In reality, it was barely 3 miles away, and for young Lorenzo the scene had lasting impact. “I didn’t understand racism,” he says. “But you could see, `Wow, this is something intense.’ “
Sparked by a confrontation arising from a traffic stop by a highway patrolman in the predominantly Black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, riots raged for six days in August of 1965, leading to 34 deaths, more than 1,000 injuries and 3,400 arrests.
Fifty-five years later, Romar is in his second stint as basketball coach at Pepperdine. He has spent 23 seasons as a Division I head coach at three different universities, winning more than 400 career games. He considers himself blessed.
He is also a Black man in America and that is rarely a road without bumps.
“There have been times,” Romar says, "when we didn’t have as good a season, and donors would say to me, `Maybe it would help with attendance or contributions to the program if you had more white players.’ That has literally been said to me. It hits you between the eyes.
“Unfortunately, this is the world we live in.”
The West Coast Conference is doing its part to try to change that. The WCC early this month introduced the Russell Rule, the first conference-wide diversity hiring commitment in Division I.
The Russell Rule requires each conference school — and the WCC office itself — to include a member of a traditionally underrepresented community in the pool of final candidates for every athletic director, senior administrator, head coach and full-time assistant coach position in the athletic department.
“The murder of
George Floyd happened and the very next week we had our annual governance meeting,” WCC commissioner
Gloria Nevarez recalls. “We put social justice at the top of the agenda and we had really powerful, thoughtful discussions.”
Ultimately, Nevarez says, the conference wanted to do more than issue a statement. “The Presidents wanted something that has meaningful, lasting change. It seemed like the perfect time and place.”
The Russell Rule became the perfect name. Now 86,
Bill Russell led the University of San Francisco to back-to-back NCAA championships in 1955 and ’56, then was the backbone of Boston Celtics teams that won 11 NBA titles.
More than that, Russell was a voice for racial and social justice in the 1960s, part of a generation of outspoken African American athletes that included
Muhammad Ali,
Jim Brown and
Tommie Smith.
Nevarez calls it “surreal” that Russell agreed to lend his support and his name to the initiative. “He is one of our most prominent alums,” she says, “and he is the ceiling-breaker on this,” a reference to Russell being named in 1966 as the first Black head coach of any major professional team (the Celtics) in the country.
University San Diego President
James T. Harris, chair of the WCC Presidents Council, says the conference could no better than to enlist the aid of Russell.
“He is the living embodiment of what we’re trying to accomplishment,” Harris says. “He was a strident activist, a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner. He has spent his life dedicated to this work and he set a standard our student-athletes would want to emulate.”
Romar welcomes the Russell Rule as a gateway far better than a quota system.
“The main word that comes to my mind is opportunity,” he says. “So many people of color over the years were very qualified, but just weren’t given opportunities.”
For Pacific coach
Damon Stoudamire, opportunity may have come more easily following a 13-year playing career in the NBA. But it didn’t come without pressure to deliver. He has worked the past 12 years at six different coaching assignments — the first two in unpaid positions that allowed him entry into the profession.
“I have no illusions about the color of my skin as a Black man. And the thing that gets me through the door could be a curse at the same time,” Stoudamire says. “A lot of times former NBA players get a knock for not working. We just have stuff handed to us. That’s not the case for me.
”
“That’s why I left (coaching in) the NBA. I wanted to create my own lane and wanted to show people that I’m serious about this.”
Stoudamire recalls “hundreds” of people questioning why he would take the job at Pacific, which won just eight games the year before he arrived. His answer: It was an opportunity, his first as a head coach.
“Where I come from, we take opportunity and run with it and try to seize the moment,” says Stoudamire, whose Tigers won 23 games last season in his fourth year. “In the fight for equality, you’ve still got to be good when you get your opportunity. That’s the one thing I never lose sight of.”
Nevarez, the first Latinx to serve as a Division I conference commissioner, says the Russell Rule intends to address any type of profiling or exclusion.
“While I am a woman of color, there are some that don’t see me as ethnic or may not readily identify my ethnic background,” explains Nevarez, who says she and an “inner circle” of associates in the business often bounce job opportunities off one another.
“How many opportunities I may have tried for and didn’t get for those reasons, I don’t know. When we talk about it, it’s usually the gender question that comes up first.”
Nevarez and the Presidents Council understood that the Russell Rule would need teeth in order to accomplish its goals. And they decided accountability could be more effective than penalties.
The conference solicited the help of
Dr. Richard Lapchick, a respected human rights activist whose resume includes the fight against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s that eventually led to a personal invitation from
Nelson Mandela to join him for his inauguration as the country’s president in 1994.
Lapchick has a deep connection to athletics and basketball in particular. His father, the late
Joe Lapchick, as coach of the New York Knicks, signed
Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton to be the first Black player in the NBA in 1950.
Richard Lapchick founded the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University in 1984. Today, at the age of 75, he works at the University of Central Florida, where he established The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES).
Lapchick also produces annual report cards on American professional sports teams, grading their hiring performance in the areas of race and gender.
“We don’t do them
for the leagues, we do them
on the leagues,” Lapchick stresses. “When we started they weren’t really happy we were doing it.”
Lapchick will provide similar report cards on teams in the WCC, at the request of the league.
“We have been knocking on conference doors to get something like this going for quite some time,” he says. “It was definitely unique that they came to us.”
“A no-brainer,” Nevarez calls it.
Each school will get a report card with grades for each administrative and coaching category, and the WCC will receive its own report.
“Getting a `C’ grade is not something anyone wants. Anything below a `B’ is considered an `F,’” explains Lapchick, who already is working on baseline report cards for teams in the WCC.
Lapchick understands results can be manipulated by a school merely including a candidate among the finalists to seek a strong grade.
“The reality is even if it’s a bogus interview, people will be brought into the room that wouldn’t have been otherwise,” Lapchick suggests. “Someone might be impressed by them and might be in position to hire them later.”
USD’s Harris says his fellow WCC presidents welcome the challenge.
“Can we live up to this? Can we hold ourselves accountable?” he wonders. “I really think it’s going to be advantageous to the conference. Now that we’ve set the standard, I think we’ll be able to attract more diverse candidates and they’ll view us as a desirable conference.”
But Harris says the WCC doesn’t consider this a proprietary program. He and Nevarez hope other conferences across the country will adopt the principles of the Russell Rule.
“Every institution can do better,” Harris says. “I’m excited about it. I think it can be a game-changer.”
It took just 10 days, in fact, before both the National Association of Basketball Coaches and the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association publicly endorsed the Russell Rule.
Lapchick believes the timing is ideal for the Russell Rule. Mandela’s rise from political prisoner to South African president “showed me that anything and everything is possible.”
And while there is still much to do, Lapchick says, the protests stemming from Floyd’s killing on May 25 feel different to him than those of the 1960s. He points to not only greater staying power but more diversity among those asking for change.
"Four years ago when
Colin Kaepernick took a knee, most sports fans were against it,” Lapchick says.
Now, according to a study released late last month by Nielsen Sports, titled “Promoting Racial Equality in Sports,” nearly 70 percent of sports fans support Black Lives Matter. Among the general population, that number is 62 percent.
”It’s amazing what the change has been,” Lapchick says. “I believe white people are actually listening now for the first time in large numbers, not just assuming they know what racism is.”
Kaepernick’s protest against police treatment of people of color gained mainstream traction following Floyd’s death.
“Bill Russell is one of the people who paved the way for athletes to do that,” Lapchick says. “His name is magical in the world of sports and social justice.”
Now, Bill Russell and the WCC hope to take another step forward together.