ObituaryJack Scott
Radical race and sports campaigner tainted by Patty Hearst linkThe death of the American radical, Jack Scott, at the age of 57, came as defence counsel were seeking his testimony in a trial that revives the notorious Patty Hearst case. To his irritation, the episode overshadowed Scott's life, and his true legacy lay in his accomplishments in the fields of race relations and sports health.
He fought all his life against racism and drugs in sport, but it cost him dearly. During the 1970s, when blacks and women were excluded from sports management and coaching, Scott was a lonely and courageous pioneer. He wrote a book, The Athletic Revolution, that became a required text on exploitation in athletics, and established the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society in Oakland, California. Yet for years he was hounded by the FBI in a pattern of harassment of radicals that has become wearily familiar to Americans.
Scott was born in the conservative town of Scranton, Pennsylvania. He went to university at Stanford and Syracuse, New York, before getting his PhD in education at Berkeley. He specialised in the new subject of sociology of sport, and is now regarded as its founding father. In his early years, he was a superb sprinter, and he continued jogging into his 50s.
Scott's politics were formed in the turbulent 60s, during which he became sports editor of the left-wing San Francisco magazine, Ramparts. But he began to make real changes when a new and liberal chancellor of Oberlin College, Ohio, appointed him as athletics director and chairman of physical education in 1972. Scott immediately hired a black football coach, the first in a non-black university in American history, then a black basketball coach, a trampoline champion, and a woman to coach women's sports - appointments the like of which were unheard of at the time.
Amid great controversy, he next hired, as head track coach, Tommy Smith, who had created a sensation as one of two black American sprint medallists at the 1968 Olympics to raise clenched fists in a racial protest on the Mexico City podium. Smith was then a pariah in America - he was washing cars - but he turned out to be an excellent coach. The black football trainer, criticised as unqualified, fielded a Mexican-American as a key player and brought in Oberlin's first winning season for 25 years - the college has not had another since.
A conservative faction gained power and Scott was forced out of Oberlin, but not before he had broken the coaching colour barrier in American collegiate athletics. Back in Berkeley, with his lifelong partner Micki, he befriended survivors of the urban guerrilla group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, after six members were burned to death in a shocking 1974 police shoot-out in Los Angeles.
The group had earlier kidnapped the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst from Berkeley. Fearing more deaths on both sides, Scott smuggled Hearst and two comrades to a secret address on the other side of the country after persuading them to disarm. They stayed together for months, and Scott later said that Hearst had been an eager SLA convert and had declined his offer to let her go. "Patty was a rebel," he asserted.
At that time, Scott also met Kathy Soliah, who in 1975 allegedly placed bombs under two police cars to avenge an SLA friend who had died in the Los Angeles blaze. The bombs did not explode. Last year, police arrested Sara Jane Olson, a middle-aged mother and doctor's wife in Minnesota, and unmasked her as Soliah. She is to go on trial later this year, and Scott was to have given evidence, although prosecutors had successfully delayed a request to videotape his testimony.
For years after the SLA episode, Scott was blacklisted in academia and was even refused a job at a steelworks. Both the FBI and the media harassed him, but he was never charged with assisting the SLA fugitives. "He challenged the FBI to try him," said Micki Scott, who married Jack last January. "But they feared what would come out in a trial and backed down."
Scott finally got a job treating sports injuries with a new therapy technique that used a micro-current machine called a myomatic. He and Micki became international distributors of the device, and formed a successful clinic in Eugene, Oregon, America's athletics capital. He also published scores of magazine articles dealing with the abuse of drugs in sport and its racism. Among athletes he treated for injuries was Carl Lewis, the Olympic champion runner and jumper.
Scott is survived by his wife and their three children.
Jack Scott, sports administrator and healer, born March 3 1942; died February 6 2000
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