Leadership Spotlight

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"There has certainly been progress," said Shropshire. "I would defy any casual sports fan, say, to name every black coach in the National Basketball Association or every black quarterback in the National Football League. Ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, there were so few that it would have been easy."

He said that even his 1995 book, In Black and White: Race and Sports in America, is somewhat outdated in that some of the issues there have been resolved.

"But just because there has been some progress, does that mean you slow down? Does it push you to do more?" he asked. "If people have set up a system to interview more minority candidates for front office jobs, don't you have to make sure the system works correctly?"

He pointed to a recent controversy in Detroit, where the general manager, Matt Millen, was fined because he hired Steve Mariucci, white head coach, without sufficiently interviewing minority candidates. Millen, Shropshire said, seems to be chastened by the fine. But the team's ownership – primarily the Ford family – may well not remember the next time the issue comes up, because they were not held accountable like Millen was.

"On the field, yes, there is more acknowledgement that you get the best player out there – Donovan McNabb or Michael Vick – and don't worry about race," he said. "But the front office – general managers and the like – still abounds in an old-boy network."

Negotiating at Home and Beyond

Organized sports these days, said Shropshire, begin awfully young and, as his own busy family life proves, negotiations seem to start not with a pro contract, but at home.

"My wife, certainly, had a much more intense sporting life than I did, but even she did not start organized sports at age eight," Shropshire said about Diane Morrison, who is now an anesthesiologist, but back when they both attended Stanford University in the late 1970s, was the NCAA doubles champion (with partner Susie Hagey). She later played professionally before going to medical school. "I did play Little League baseball and assorted sports in the YMCA," Shropshire said, but unlike his own kids (eight-year-old Samuel and ten-year-old Theresa), "it was one sport per season – not trying to figure out how to get from hockey, to soccer and then to tennis. It gives you a perspective of how things change."

Shropshire's father was a physician in Los Angeles, and while he enjoyed seeing his son play football and become all-City and all-State as a 6-foot-1, 210-pound center, he was more interested in his college choice.

"I was looking at Stanford because, at the time, they seemed to be a football power," said Shropshire. "Those last two years I was in high school, they won the Rose Bowl over Ohio State and Michigan. They beat the hometown powers, Southern Cal and U.C.L.A. both years. In my mind, it was Stanford, Oklahoma, Notre Dame – football schools. To my parents, it was Stanford, a future."

Sure enough, Shropshire went to Stanford on a foot-ball scholarship and proved his parents right. He played all four of his years there, but after two years of playing it was clear to him that he was not going to make it into the N.F.L., as his teammates Tony Hill and James Lofton seemed destined to do.

"All right, so now I was not going to be in the N.F.L., but I still wanted to do something in sports," he said. "A bunch of the guys on the football team were talking law school, so I started heading in that direction. Sports agents were just being talked about, so maybe that was something worth considering."

Shropshire came east to go to law school at Columbia University, but after graduation headed back to California to practice law and eventually landed a job helping negotiate sponsorship contracts for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games.

"But then that was all finished about a year before the games, and they had to figure out something for me to do. They moved me to be the committee member in charge of the boxing competition. I was a 27-year-old lawyer, and it was the already the best job in my life," he said.

Shropshire got to travel the world, talking to various countries' Olympic boxing committees about how the sport would operate in Los Angeles. He had to make sure the East Germans were coming and entreat the Chinese – who had not been to the Games since 1952 – to get interested in boxing as well. He met with Cuban sports officials to see how their country's boxing federation worked and traveled to Europe to make sure each country there got its fair hearing. He worked closely with Danny Villanueva, the former Dallas Cowboys and Los Angeles Rams placekicker who had made a fortune as a founder of the Spanish television network Univision, who was the business executive working most closely with Olympic boxing.