Challenging the Mormon Church.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports - Viewpoint essay

A supporters of gay marriage have discovered, it's no walk in the park to take on the Mormon Church. It backed the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California with out-of-state funds, and gave the right a heartbreaking victory this past election cycle. But the Mormon Church has been challenged in the past. Just ask Bob Beamon.

If you know Beamon's name, it's almost certainly because he won the long jump gold medal in jaw-dropping fashion at the 1968 Olympics. Beamon leapt 29 feet, 2.5 inches, a record that held for twenty-three years.

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But you may not recall that Beamon, along with eight other teammates, had his scholarship revoked from the University of Texas at El Paso the previous year. The reason: He refused to compete against Brigham Young University. Beamon and his teammates were protesting the racist practices of the Mormon Church, and their coach, Wayne Vandenberg, made them pay the ultimate price.

They weren't alone. As tennis great Arthur Ashe wrote in A Hard Road to Glory , "In October 1969, fourteen black [football] players at the University of Wyoming publicly criticized the Mormon Church and appealed to their coach, Lloyd Eaton, to support their right not to play against Brigham Young University.... The Mormon religion at the time taught that blacks could not attain to the priesthood, and that they were tainted by the curse of Ham, a biblical figure. Eaton, however, summarily dropped all fourteen players from the squad."

The players didn't take their expulsion lying down. They called themselves the Black 14 and unsuccessfully sued for damages with the support of the NAACP. Other teams showed their solidarity. In an October 25 game, the entire San Jose team wore black armbands to support the 14.

One aftereffect of this appeared in November 1969, when Stanford University President Ken Pitzer suspended athletic relations with BYU, announcing that Stanford would honor what he called an athlete's "right of conscience."

As the Associated Press wrote, "Waves of black protest roll toward BYU, assaulting Mormon belief and leaving BYU officials and students perplexed, hurt, and maybe a little angry."

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