Why is this door closed? By Javier Palenque

Living in Miami, home of the Miami Dolphins, the past 10 days the news of the lawsuit filed by ex-coach Brian Flores against the NFL, the Miami Dolphins, the NY Giants, and the Denver Broncos were inundating all media available and especially sports programs and radio shows. Mr. Flores claims that the teams conducted “sham interviews” to comply with the “Rooney Rule” of the NFL. The Rooney Rule requires that every team interview at least two external minority candidates for open head coaching positions. It also establishes similar?diversity-based?interview requirements for other key team positions, such as coordinators, presidents, and other senior executives. Originally adopted in 2003, the goal of the Rooney Rule is to?promote diverse leadership among NFL clubs. It has been amended over time to strengthen its impact.

The moment I read the news, I made sure I understood what would drive Mr. Flores to effectively by his own doing exclude himself from future NFL jobs at the youthful age of forty and making $3M per year. I thought this man was not acting in his best interest as all others do, he was acting in the interest of the game, given his dismissal. Why would he do that? That is na?ve, and against his career. Is it not better to just “shut up and coach”? Now of course time will tell if he has a case or not against the NFL, or that what he did was simply foolish? Regardless of the legal outcome, one thing is true. What is playing out with Flores is not just a story about football. It is a story about the American workplace and the same issue can be seen in the country’s politics. (Gerrymandering has a cause). For diversity to become a reality in the nation’s workplaces, companies and institutions need to do more than recycle costly and ineffectual initiatives. Cyrus Mehri, a civil rights lawyer who successfully litigated discrimination lawsuits against major corporations including Coca-Cola and Texaco, says companies need to analyze metrics related to hiring, pay, promotions, and bonuses along racial and gender lines to detect and disrupt patterns of bias. “Everybody is quick to do unconscious-bias training and not interventions,” says Mehri, who, with the late civil rights lawyer Johnnie Cochran, is credited with devising the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which requires a diverse slate of candidates for coaching and front-office jobs. “When you keep choosing the options on the menu that don’t create change, you’re purposely not creating change,” he says. Also, when organizations parade LBJTQ, BLM, and others they are mostly taking a fake moral posture not an actual change in their organizations. Short-lived for perception mostly. To do this real change has to happen at the board level and the executive suite, which is then of substance.

Ok, so we will see what happens when this whole Brian Flores lawsuit is settled. But what does that have to do with the USTA Board? Well, the USTA is Americas’ best-funded sports nonprofit, and it just hired last year a new Diversity and Inclusion Officer who in an interview claims that the USTA wants to reflect the census society overall. So, I took the trouble of looking at the board of the USTA (141-year-old organization) and wanted to see how it compares to the 2020 census.

The table above will show you an interesting graph of the underrepresentation and over-representation of the USTA’s board.

Notice how Hispanics, which account for the largest minority group in the country and with the youngest population (tennis population) have no representation at the board level which sets strategy and policy for the years to come? This of course is a wonderful opportunity for the USTA board to look in the mirror and look at the population shifts and conclude if 1 in 4 kids under eighteen is Hispanic and 1 in 3 kids under twelve is also Hispanic, how come there are no Hispanic policymakers on the board? Or in the executive team? This seems counter to the position of the newly hired Diversity officer.

I do not like the notion of races or quotas anywhere; I think that way of thinking all it does is balance in the wrong way a population distribution in the name of fairness (It is more like moral posturing than reality). My interest is more on the game and having at the board level the most capable people who love tennis from as many backgrounds as is possible regardless of race. Here if the board is comprised of worldly people, it is much better than if it were made up of only locals. It is simply better for the sport in the long term. Tennis is an international sport in a global economy. Having global experience is of course a terrific way of improving the local way of thinking. I do not believe that we are all equal, because we are not, but I do believe that we should have all equally the opportunity to play regardless of the income level of our parents. This means the key question to answer is: how do we grow the game everywhere as a mission of the organization.? One key fact to note is that the white population in America is the oldest and of course, this means the one that controls tennis. There is only one slight problem, as technology and the country evolve, this ethnic group is shrinking in size, getting older faster and it is already up there in age (the most common age of a white person in America is 58 years old, the most common age of a Hispanic person is 11 years of age). So, if we intend to grow the sport, we will focus on the populations that are growing regardless of their color. Don’t you think? It just makes sense.

True progress will not come without discomfort, says Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, which allocates hundreds of millions of dollars annually to efforts promoting equality. “It requires incumbent leaders and managers to change their behavior and practices,” he says. “It means that institutions have to change incentive structures and to fundamentally interrogate their behavior.” ?In the end, racial diversity, and the opportunity to play our beloved sport will not be ushered in by pledges, slogans, or czars. It will be achieved only once white America has weaned off a prevailing narrative of racial pre-eminence, which can still be glimpsed in historical narratives, film, and literature, and elsewhere in our culture. The seeds of this elitist ideology are planted into the culture and are old, very old, and a paradigm shift will require courageous leadership, new thinking, and open market policies. Yes, change will require resources and resolve, but no amount of money will succeed alongside a willful negation of our shared humanity and our need for equal access to our sport for the future of the nation. In the end, the markets always will win, if our population is changing and we want the sport to thrive, we need to adapt it to the marketplace. Otherwise, the sport will turn into a death spiral that will make the old folks remain in control of a dying sport and waste everyone’s time. The mission to let the beauty of the game be enjoyed by as many people as possible must prevail, in the end, that means opportunity for all our citizens. How can anyone disagree with that position?

My name is Javier Palenque and I want to be the next CEO of the USTA, I want to be the leader of the organization in the most important decade in its history to help position the institution and the sport at the top of tennis in the world under these three objectives.

1.- Making the USTA the best-funded sports nonprofit with the greatest number of kids and adults.

2.- Transforming the USTA to become the leader of tennis in the world (professional and community)

3.- Through the USTA have the magic of tennis reach as many people of all ages as is possible. One zip code at a time.

Those three points can only be achieved if we work together towards a loftier goal and understand where we are as a country and sport. We also need to understand where we want to go. We do not have time to waste, let us get to work juntos! VAMOS!

?I can be reached at [email protected]