In the early 1980s, a handful of Dallas Cowboys players starred in what is, even in goofy athlete public service announcement-adjusted terms, one of the goofier athlete public service announcements I have ever seen. “Everybody wants to be a winner,” declares tight end Doug Cosbie, as he weaves his way between tight end Billy Joe DuPree and cornerback Rod Hill, both of whom are modeling alarming sloppy biceps curl form. Cosbie then comes to a stop in front of Hall of Fame defensive tackle Randy White, who is punching a heavy bag halfheartedly. “To be a winner takes cooperation and management, and solid teamwork,” he says.
The camera next cuts to DuPree, who made the Pro Bowl three times in the late 1970s. “Players have to work together for a football team to be successful,” he says, as teammates gather behind him in a ring like they are auditioning for bit parts in West Side Story. “It’s the same thing with jobs. Employers and employees must work towards the same goal.”
If you are wondering why professional athletes are reading what sound like proto-LinkedIn posts in a cadence most closely associated with HR training videos, the last guy to appear supplies the answer. “Equal employment opportunity is the law, and it will be enforced,” intones Clarence Thomas, then the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “But teamwork also pays off.” Thomas concludes by inviting viewers to call the EEOC for “further information.” He does not provide a phone number.
To understand what in heaven’s name is going on here, you have to go back to the early 1980s, when the Reagan White House was dealing with an increasingly embarrassing public relations problem: Black people did not want to work in it. As a result, more than a year after Reagan took office, the EEOC still did not have a Senate-confirmed chair. In their book Strange Justice, the journalists Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson write that the White House was “eager to the point of desperation” for Black candidates and had reached out to “ten or twelve” Black lawyers about taking the EEOC job, only to find that “none wanted to implement Reagan’s plan to dismantle well-established methods of fighting discrimination in the workplace.”
Eventually, the administration settled on 33-year-old Clarence Thomas, who had been confirmed by the Senate to a civil rights position in the Department of Education less than a year earlier. The promotion was huge, but the job was hard: As chair of the EEOC, Thomas was responsible for enforcing federal antidiscrimination law on behalf of a president who did not especially care about federal antidiscrimination law, unless the “discrimination” came in the form of Black people getting jobs to which white people believed they were entitled.
Hence, the substance of the 30-second spot above, in which Thomas tries to thread the needle by framing federal laws that prohibit employers from discriminating based on race as important, sure, but maybe not quite as important as an employee’s duty to be a team player, no matter how racist their workplace might be. Generally speaking, when the first word out of the EEOC chairman’s mouth after “equal employment opportunity is the law, and it will be enforced” is “but,” legal protections for civil rights are probably not in a great place.
Appearing alongside Cosbie and DuPree must have been a treat for Thomas, who during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings told Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden that he’d been rooting for the Cowboys for 25 years. In a city obsessed with the franchise now known as the Washington Commanders, this was borderline heresy, and Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson joked that Thomas’s admission of his Cowboys fandom would “create more concern” about his nomination than “anything thus far.” (Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas would not become public for several more weeks.)
In news that will surprise no one familiar with Thomas’s penchant for consorting with reactionary billionaires, he and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who bought the franchise in 1989, have become close friends over the years. Thomas has flown on Jones’s plane, sat in Jones’s owner’s box, and attended Cowboys training camp. In 2023, The New York Times reported that after the Cowboys won Super Bowl XXVIII, Jones asked Thomas to present the players with their Super Bowl rings, and thanked the justice by presenting him with a ring of his own.
Sources close to Thomas responded to the Times report by telling conservative media outlets that the ring was a replica. In theory, a peek at Thomas’s ethics disclosure forms from 1994 would resolve this mystery once and for all. Alas, according to a 2023 Dallas Morning News story, the Supreme Court no longer has a copy of it.
My attempts to reach Cosbie for this story were unsuccessful, but I was able to get in touch with DuPree. When we spoke on the phone, he couldn’t immediately recall this particular PSA, which seems reasonable to me given that (1) it is four decades old and (2) he appears in it for all of eight seconds. But he did remember meeting Thomas in the early 1980s through Armstrong Williams, a Thomas aide at the EEOC, during one of Thomas’s trips to Dallas. DuPree, who told me he identifies as an independent, campaigned for President George H.W. Bush, and considered running for Congress after retiring from football, said he thought Thomas was “okay” at the time, but that their conversations were more “social” than “political.”
When I asked what he thinks about Thomas now, DuPree said the two men haven’t kept in touch over the years. But from afar, DuPree said, Thomas “seems to be going along with the program”—which, when he was considering running for office, is the sort of thing he decided he wouldn’t be able to do. “If you’re in the arena, you either play by the rules or risk not being there,” DuPree told me. “I didn’t think that I would have the patience.”
Before we hung up, I did ask DuPree to account for his terrible biceps curl form. He laughed. “I’m not a weightlifter,” he said. At the time, players were supposed to be able to bench-press their body weight; DuPree says he never played above 230 pounds, and saw no reason to spend more time in the gym than he needed to. “How many times am I going to pick up a 500-, 400-, 300-pound guy and move him to the side?” he said. “I don’t think so.”
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.
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