Of the blacks on the team, he was by far the most political and also the most anxious to test authority, any authority. Some of the other blacks, Ron Brewer and T. R. Dunn, for example, had grown up in the South and had gone to southern schools; there was, some coaches thought, a lack of assertiveness to their play, something the coaches suspected could be traced back to their childhoods, to that region where, despite significant social change, authority still belonged to whites and blacks remained tentative about expressing their feelings openly, whether in politics or sports.
