Ten days before this month's Martin Luther King Day, I discovered that the granddaughter of the UA's first Black athlete, Fred Batiste, is the UA's director for regional development (fundraising) in Phoenix. How's that for a legacy?
Alexis Butler has been working in the UA athletic department for 2½ years after being a star volleyball player at Washington and part of the UC-Irvine athletic department for nine years.
Each time I think of Fred Batiste, I wonder when the UA athletic department will create or erect a special area on campus — easily viewed by the public — to honor its first Black athlete. It's long overdue.
Handout photo of Fred Batiste — the first Black football and track athlete at the University of Arizona — in 1950.
In 1949, after serving in World War II and graduating from Tucson High School (1944), Batiste was given a scholarship to play football at Arizona. He was 23 and probably the school's best football player and track athlete in his two years at the school. He still ranks No. 3 in UA history with an 87-yard punt return for a touchdown in 1949.
Batiste had been denied enrollment at the UA after World War II because of the color of his skin and went to Compton JC in California for two years. Arizona didn't induct him into its Sports Hall of Fame until 2022. That's unreal. By then, 355 ex-Wildcats had been inducted. Batiste died in 1978.
Fred Batiste was a football and track star at Tucson High who went on to play running back at the UA.
Batiste was the Arizona state high school football player of the year in 1943 and the track athlete of the year in 1944. At Arizona, he encountered significant racism. He was not allowed to play in two UA football games because of discrimination in Texas. There's one other tie to Arizona: Batiste's grandson, Michael McDonald, was the starting point guard for Stanford's 31-3 basketball team of 2000-01. His father, Glenn McDonald, played basketball at Long Beach State under Lute Olson in the early 1970s.
