Last week on TSL Sports Talk, former NFL RB & Grant Hill's father, Calvin Hill, joined us to talk about student athletes and professional sports. TSL Sports Talk host, Mark Gray, opened up the discussion by asking Hill what his experience was like being an African-American Ivy League student-athete at Yale in the late ‘60’s.
Hill:
“It was a very interesting time [the 60’s]… The ‘60’s was the decade of civil rights, with Dr. King and all the things that were going on with voter rights… If you grew up in that decade and you lived in that decade, you don’t take things for granted, like voting. Yale was a wonderful place for me. When I first went there, there were not a lot of Black students. My class had about 14 or 15 [Black students] out of 1000-1100 in the freshman class. The president of Yale was a guy named Kingman Brewster. He and the director of admissions, a man named Inslee Clarke decided that Yale, if it were to continue to attract the best and the brightest, needed to make sure that there was diversity on campus. I think they understood that the best and the brightest weren’t necessarily of one hue. Athletically, we were pretty good in football and I ran track and was successful in track. Academically it was challenging. Yale made me feel that if I could handle the academic part of it, the athletic part and even the social part of it, I could do whatever I wanted to do. It was a great four years for me.
Later on during the interview, Gray posed this question to Hill:
Has MLB forgotten about Black baseball players in America because of the opportunities for so many players of color from the Caribbean or do u have a sense that African-American kids just aren’t interested in the game right now?
Listen to the full interview below to hear Hill’s response, his thoughts on Michael Jordan, and more.
TSL Sports Talk broadcasts live every Thursday from 3-5PM. Follow us on twitter: @TSLSportsTalk or write us at: [email protected].
