He came to Stanford as an athlete -- an all-city and all-state center recruited from Los Angeles on a football scholarship. At 210 pounds, however, the 6-foot-1 freshman was 50 pounds lighter than most Stanford linemen, and the Cardinal coaches relegated him to the bench. He never saw a minute of varsity playing time, but still went on to make his career in sports.
Ken Shropshire is what you might call a sports scholar. A professor of legal studies at Penn's Wharton School of Business, Shropshire is a leading social critic of the U.S. sports industry. He has written award-winning books exposing how the industry works, how it's reshaping American culture and how it deals with race. He's also a practicing attorney with a degree from Columbia who represents several athletes, has consulted for the National Football League and helped organize the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. "He's a black man who's had experience in the real world, has seen beneath the glamor of the world of sports, seen it as it is, which is sleazy," says Gerald Early, a professor of Afro-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis and a contributor to Shropshire's recent collection of essays, Basketball Jones: America Above the Rim (NYU Press, 2000).
The sports industry mirrors society's problems, including racism, Shropshire contends. In his 1996 book, In Black and White: Race and Sports in America, he observes that almost all owners and senior managers in American athletics are white, while most of the athletes who play for them are black. Shropshire calls on management, regulatory bodies, college presidents and athletes themselves to take bold steps toward righting the imbalance. "Anyone who can have an impact has a responsibility to act," he writes, "because the way sports addresses the issue says much about how other sectors will address inequality in the future."
His new book examines the phenomenal popularity of basketball, which "is encroaching on baseball's territory as the most widely entrenched sport in American culture," Shropshire says. "Whereas baseball struggled to make the transition to TV, basketball is perfect for this MTV-video age. Things like the slam dunk and the fast break seem designed for [ESPN's] SportsCenter."
Most recently, Shropshire served on the budget committee for the 2000 U.S. Olympic Team. He and his wife, anesthesiologist Diane Morrison, '79, live in Media, Pa., where they "very occasionally" play tennis but "never keep score," he says. Diane was a doubles champion and All-American at Stanford; the two met at a reunion in 1981. They have two children, Theresa and Sam, who also love sports -- "but," Shropshire chuckles, "they have piano lessons, too."
