Profile of the founder of Northeastern University's Center for Sport in Society

The New York Times has published a fascinating profile of Richard Lapchick of Northeastern University's Center for Sport in Society:

In Richard Lapchick’s long battle against racial bias in sports, numbers have been his oral weapon of choice, reliable and irrefutable, though admittedly not the most effective means of commanding a room.

“Because I use a lot of statistics when I speak and that can bore people, sometimes I need to get their attention first,” said Lapchick, the author of the widely quoted racial and gender report cards that study hiring practices of professional and amateur sports.

At the outset of a September panel discussion on global multiculturalism in sports at the World Diversity Leadership Summit in Harlem, Lapchick introduced himself as he often does, with a haunting tale he once could not speak of without his heart racing to the point that he thought he might die.

In a voice measured and firm, he told of being brutally assaulted more than 30 years ago for asserting that sports was a vehicle from which to propagate change — and having the word nigger, misspelled with one G, carved onto his stomach with a pair of scissors.

On the panel that day were executives from Major League Baseball, the N.F.L. and professional tennis. In the audience were people linked to the business of sports.

In an instant, eyes widened. Jaws dropped. Mission accomplished, Lapchick unleashed his statistical barrage, aiming to quantify how far sports has come in the pursuit of racial and gender diversity — and how far the industry still has to go.

“The effect is very humanizing, to say the least,” said one of the panelists, Robert Gulliver, the N.F.L.’s executive vice president for human resources and chief diversity officer.

Wendy Lewis, the senior vice president for diversity and strategic alliances for Major League Baseball, had heard Lapchick’s story before. She said she always winced when he told it, though in part because he repeated the racial slur.

“I appreciate Richard’s story and his pain,” Lewis, who is African-American, said. “But as a rule I’d rather not hear that word. The word is a tragedy, too.”

Lapchick, who is white, says he abhors the word, but he decided it was fair to use because he had been a target of it himself.

Keep reading HERE.