Race and Sports: Maybe If the Cards are Laid Out on the Table…?

By: D.K. Wilson

Racism, the 21st century version, is as insidious as it has been at any point in U.S. history. Gone are the days of knowing which side of the tracks to live to distinguish white and black. Gone are the days of knowing that for a black person, to cross those tracks is to cross at one’s own peril. Though those tracks do still exist, we are at a time when, at every turn, the tracks are purposely blurred and a black person is just as likely to be the defender of the white, male, Western power structure as is the white person for whom he works.

And, as it has been throughout the 20th century, racism is most clearly seen through the lens of sports.

Today, there are no segregation-mandated Negro Baseball League, no blacks-only American Tennis Association in reaction to all-white tennis. However, the presence of Tiger Woods was to bring a glut of black golfers to the pro ranks.

Presently, there is one black golfer near the PGA or LPGA tours.

Former Los Angeles Lakers great Magic Johnson parlayed his fame and money into ownership of TGI Friday’s, his own chain of movie theaters and Starbucks coffee shops. Johnson then branched out even more and became the driving force (pun intended) behind the NASCAR initiative, the Executive Steering Committee for Diversity.

Four years later there is but one black driver known to have the potential - and more importantly, the sponsorship - to participate in NASCAR at its highest level, the Sprint Cup.

In 2008 the number of black baseball players at the Major League Baseball level has steadily declined to around 7.5% of all players, down 5% from just one decade ago. Former players Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd and Delino DeShields began an initiative to travel the U.S. and teach black boys the game.

Today there are two black managers in Major League Baseball, one more that 35 years ago.

The United States Tennis Association can boast that, in addition to Serena and Venus Williams on the women’s side, it has a black male player in the top 10, James Blake. Each year at the U.S. Open the USTA celebrates diversity on Arthur Ashe Stadium Court.

Yet, the United States Tennis Association has never sponsored a black tennis player.

The faces that make up the National Football League and the National Basketball Association are largely black. Black coaches are abound in the NBA and the number is growing in the NFL. The same is true at the management level. In the NFL there are more black players at its most important position, quarterback, than ever.

However, most sports “criminals” are from these two leagues. And in 2007, all but three in both leagues - two in the NFL and one in the NBA - were black. And the only quarterback summarily released from his team with a winning record - Byron Leftwich - is black. Six weeks passed before another team picked up the “rights” to Leftwich and his contract. He was released at the end of the 2007-08 season and to date no team has shown an interest in his services.

On the surface, the major U.S. sports look very black. But NBA commissioner David Stern elicited the help of political consultant Matthew Dowd to help him solve his “image” problem. Dowd’s claim to fame is that, as a consultant, he worked hand-in-hand with Karl Rove to help George Bush get re-elected in 2004.

Soon after their joining, Stern enacted a dress code for the players. Tee shirts, baseball hats, baggy jeans, and overt shows of jewelry became extinct as fashion statements or de riguer. Stern went so far as to alert every team to certain bars, nightclubs, and neighborhoods in NBA cities that should be considered off limits to players. For failing to avoid these “no go” zones fines were to be levied to offending players by the teams.

On the court officials were instructed to assess technical fouls to players who they felt complained too much or too vociferously. And an age limit - 19 - was instituted for players entering the NBA. No more could we see a player the caliber of Kobe Bryant or his teammate, burgeoning star Andrew Bynum enter the league directly out of high school. Stern enacted this rule so that players would be encouraged to attend college for at least one year to become more socially mature.

All of these rules were enacted to appease white corporate sponsors and the largely white ticket payers who fill arenas each night during the NBA season. Neither the 70% black athletes who make up the league nor the core black audience that remain fiercely loyal to the players, the teams, and the league, were considered when these measures were enacted.

But this was to be expected from a man who was instrumental in George W. Bush’s appeal to white middle and white rural America.

Major League Baseball is facing what it considers to be a “steroid epidemic.” Despite the fact that some players have said that up to 75% of all Major League Baseball players use or have used steroids or human growth hormone to aid in recovering from everything from injuries to the rigors of a six-month season where teams play 162 games in a mere 182 days, only one player is the face of the so-called epidemic. He has blasted more home runs than any player in MLB history. He has won more Most Valuable Player awards than any other MLB player. He is Barry Bonds and he is black.

Despite the fact that the preponderance of evidence suggests the man who, arguably, is the greatest right-handed pitcher ever - Roger Clemens - used performance-enhancing drugs, members of the sports press of all colors give Clemens the benefit of the doubt. They refuse to judge him until there is incontrovertible evidence for his guilt. Meantime Bonds’ reputation has been impugned based on innuendo and a government hell-bent on prosecuting him.

Though legions of white players, some of whom are the stars of baseball, have admitted to PED use, their names are rarely mentioned by the press.

With PEDs there are many questions to be asked. Despite the government’s want to scare the public into believing that steroids are the next drug scourge to be enforced, the only peer-reviewed scientific evidence suggests that steroids are beneficial for healthy adult males over the age of 25. Despite MLB’s use of Bonds as a villain, as early as 1990 studies conducted by MLB medical directors as well as the medical director from the MLB Player’s Association concluded that steroids are beneficial. They announced their findings to the MLB team owners. But the findings were suppressed. And when they were finally made known, the sports press met the knowledge that these findings exist with derision.

The findings have not yet been made public. And the press acts only to enable the hiding of the findings, to bolster the government’s claims that steroids use and human growth hormone use is dangerous to every human.

And the vilification of Barry Bonds continues unabated.

———————————

Yes, the sports media is culpable, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in propagating the continuance of racist ideals. While the casual observer would think that this is the result of a largely white press corps, they would only be partly correct. In fact, much of the castigating of black athletes has been performed by black sportswriters and columnists.

Before the 2007-08 NFL season began, newly-minted NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell embarked on a mission to fine, suspend, or rid professional football of players termed as “malcontents.”

USA Today aided the commissioner’s cause by running photos, police blotter style, of every NFL player known to have run afoul of the law. Of the 41 thumbnail photos shown, 39 players were black. Some white players and assistant coaches who also had problems with the authorities were not shown.

When police searched a Surry County, Virginia home purchased by Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick for his cousin Davon Boddie, investigators later indicated they found evidence of dog fighting. Though Vick would later be convicted for his involvement with dog fighting, the media’s early coverage stank of race speech.

The initial anti-Vick sentiment was set by a prominent black columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The journalist raced ahead of his peers and castigated Vick for the company he kept and adamantly stated that, though at the time it was not known whether or not Vick even visited the home, the quarterback should be held responsible for the goings-on at the home. Throughout the next few days, the columnist’s words would be repeated in various forms by sportswriters across the country.

While he busied himself with sullying Vick, there was another incident that involved a recently-traded white Atlanta Falcons player. Also early in the spring of 2007, a rape was alleged to have occurred at the home of Falcons defensive end Patrick Kerney. Earlier that night Kerney was out with a large group of friends that included Falcons players. They met a group of women at a bar and took them back to Kerney’s residence. The woman who told police she was raped by a friend of Kerney’s and said Kerney did not rape her.

However, unlike Vick, no Atlanta sports journalist ever accused Kerney of hanging out with the wrong crowd. Unlike with Vick, no journalist felt that Kerney should have known what was happening in his own home - while he was there. Yet Vick was immediately negatively tagged for hanging out with thugs and was responsible for the happenings at a home hundreds of miles from his Atlanta area residence.

The police said they were “quietly” pursuing the Kerney case. But as the Vick case intensified, the Kerney case was mentioned less and less in the Atlanta news. After a few months, the rape case at the home of Patrick Kerney was nowhere to be found in Atlanta-area newspapers. And it can only be assumed that since Kerney now played in Seattle, the investigation also ceased.

As egregious as was the press’ non-reaction reaction to the Kerney case, the lack of attention to it paid by Roger Goodell was more conspicuous. To date, Goodell has never once publicly mentioned the Kerney case’s existence and it is safe to say that, for Goodell, it does not exist.

While the NFL commissioner busied himself with suspending black players Adam “Pacman” Jones (one year), Chris Henry (eight games) and Terry “Tank” Johnson (eight games), Kansas City defensive end Jared Allen was arrested for the third time for “driving under the influence” of alcohol. Allen received a four-game suspension which, at the time was seen by some sportswriters as lenient. Then, about two weeks after the suspension was levied, Goodell quietly reduced Allen’s suspension to two weeks. No members of the press openly complained. And no black sports journalists wrote one word criticizing Goodell’s action with Allen.

Most importantly, no sportswriter or columnist mentioned the disparity in the suspension of Allen and the non-action taken with Kerney compared with the punishments handed down by the commissioner to black NFL players.

Four months after the Allen suspension reduction, though, the NFL faced a real tragedy in the shooting of Washington Redskins All-Pro safety, Sean Taylor in his own Miami home.

But when Taylor was tragically shot in his Florida home in front of his fiance and their young daughter, instead of words of prayer for Taylor as he lied dying in a Miami hospital, black sportswriters and columnists immediately went on the offensive and attacked Taylor mercilessly. Less than 24 hours after being shot Taylor died of his gunshot wounds. Instead of words of condolence, even award-winning black columnists questioned the reasons for Taylor’s having a machete in his home for protection. It turned out that the machete was left days earlier by the people who would later kill him. Longtime noted black columnists, especially Michael Wilbon of the Washington Post and Shaun Powell of Newsday, attacked Taylor for living what they called “hip-hop lifestyle” of partying and hanging out with “thugs.” It turned out that Taylor was a loner who mainly surrounded himself with family and friends.

Black sportswriters even assailed Taylor’s allegiance to his teammates, questioning his leaving the Washington, D.C. area to return to Florida. They implied that he abandoned his team to “hang out” in Florida. It turned out that Taylor returned to his home state because of the news that his home had been broken into.

Taylor’s sole reason for flying home was to protect his family.

Though some black journalists recovered and began to question the negative depiction of Taylor, none went so far as to lay blame at the feet of fellow black writers who led the charge in trampling the 24-year-old Taylor’s being. The result was that offending journalists of all races were able to scurry away to hide in the shadows to await another day to rear their heads and damage race relations in America even more.

A scant three months after Sean Taylor’s death, Golf Channel anchor person Kelly Tilghman and co-anchor and former PGA golfer Nick Faldo were engaged in an on-air discussion of the on-course dominance of Tiger Woods. Faldo joked that young golfers should beat up Woods, to which Tilghman replied, “take him [Woods] in a back alley and lynch him.”

In a heartbeat Tilghman found herself at the center of conversations nationwide about race and the nature of racism in America. Many black sports journalists would not commit a word until Michael Wilbon spoke and wrote extensively on the topic of Tilghman. They waited because they knew and know he, to a degree, knows Tiger Woods, the immediate butt of Tilghman’s utterance. For his part, Woods said Tilghman was a friend and that she meant no harm by her statement and that, for him, the issue was dead.

But for black people across the nation, Tilghman used a word that reopened a wound that, after centuries, has never fully healed.

Wilbon came out and told us that Tilghman’s joke was in poor taste; yes he did. But he has spent an inordinate amount of time and energy spinning the story to let the world know what a fine person Tilghman is; how she is a friend of his and a friend of his friend, Charles Barkley. More of his words are spent telling us that Tilghman’s crime was a “split-second gaffe,” instead of the truth, which is that here words were from her heart of hearts.

This acclaimed sports writer continues to remind us that there is “context” to her statement that we, outsiders, do not and cannot understand, so the master explains:


But there’s context to everything, beginning with the fact that Tilghman has not at any other time we’re aware of uttered anything even remotely similar. Nothing in her television work hints at anything mean-spirited or bigoted, which is also the reason Tiger Woods has said it’s a non-issue to him.

And thanks to Wilbon, Kelly Tilghman, the South Carolina debutante, Duke University graduate was largely let off the hook by the press. She served a two week suspension from her duties at the Golf Channel and returned to work as if nothing ever happened.

Incidents like these make us painfully aware that not only are there levers of control already in place that obfuscate stark issues where racism is otherwise plainly seen but we also exist in an era where black writers act as gatekeepers - wittingly or otherwise - for the further propagation of this obfuscation.

And in order to advance in this sordid game, the athlete must play along or perish. Rather than use their platform as wealthy people with the ability to explore the country and world in which they live, black professional athletes all too often close themselves off from everything save that which allows them the most comfort.

And so like sheep black athletes seek what they are told. Like sheep athletes care for what they are told. Like sheep they forget who and what they are for if they stay true to themselves, the retribution is swift and relentless. So, athletes go for the money. They go toward the money. They shroud themselves in money. They adhere to the methods used to mold minds to march to the drummer of consumerism.

And as a result, the vast preponderance of professional athletes have lost their souls.

However, the one facet of our society that has not advanced, but has become honed to the point it is so malleable that it takes on whatever form necessary to maintain its original philosophical origins is that of ————– racism.

But.

Is it the shoes as Mars Blackmon asked Michael Jordan?

As much as Nike would like you to believe that it is their product that makes the man, as many young black men have been robbed, beaten, and killed for insanely overpriced casual shoes, it never has been the shoes - about the thing. It is always, was always, and, until we actively alter our thoughts concerning racism, always will be the wearers of the shoes that matter most.

In the early 1990s Nike Air Jordans became the focal point for black-on-black crime. A word was used to describe the attackers of those wearing Michael Jordan’s signature shoes - thugs. And thanks to the efforts of Matthew Dowd at the behest of David Stern, and thanks to the efforts of Roger Goodell with the blessing of the head of the NFL Player’s Association Gene Upshaw, “thug” is now applied to professional athletes who get “out of control,” or fall out of line - or favor - with the leagues for which they work.

So, while there is not one corner of marketing geared to Americans ages 35 and under that does not have the unmistakable time signature and rhythm of rap. Whether it is McDonald’s or Cadillac Escalades or State Farm insurance, rappers, rap music, or black actors are central to the commercial theme and the new hipness of the corporate image. While the nation seems to move to a perpetual boom-boom clack, boom-boom clack clack, backbeat of rap music, racism remains the virus that keeps us from advancing together as a nation.

It is little wonder that abuse of athletes by drunken fans at major collegiate and professional sports events are on the rise. At any game on any given night or on any given Sunday there is a toxic stew of angry, largely underpaid and under-appreciated fans - mostly white - who earn enough to be repeat spectators but not enough to monetarily identify with the athletes they pay to see perform for them - largely black in the NFL and NBA - who earn millions of dollars to play games that every little boy grew up playing - even the fans watching.

And when these events do occur, even black members of the press corps are too afraid, too comfortable, or too conditioned by “dominant” society to understand or express or act in any way on what it is they are witnessing.

We must quickly come to understand and internalize that racism is at the root of everything that ails us. That beyond classism, beyond sexism, beyond religious differences, there is race.

We will never progress unless we stop kidding ourselves, stop pretending racism does not exist and is not rampant throughout our society. Stop pretending not to understand that the prejudices many, many black people feel towards whites are born out of a reaction to the racism directed at us by whites.

It is baffling that white people can tell black people that what they feel is not real. And yet they wholly expect black people to ascribe to images of themselves contrived by white imaginings of what it is to be black. It is baffling that the fact of slavery and the precepts of institutional racism that are at the very foundation of this country are lost on white people because they refuse to see that the past is inextricably tied to the present; their own or the country’s.

It is baffling that no white players are ever called thugs. They can have wives in different states, they can smoke crack and shoot heroin, they can get into fights, they can illegally gamble on sports, they can beat up their wives and mistresses and girlfriends, they can have children by multiple women, and brandish guns in public —— but they are never, ever called thugs.

And if this happens in the clear lens of sports, what does this portend for the rest of our society? Though we might be on the verge of electing a black man as president, black people worry that this man will be assassinated before he will ever be sworn into office. Meantime his rival for the Democratic nomination and her minions have used race and racism to demean his character, question his ability as a leader, and even suggest that somehow he is un-American.

And this is called ————— politics.

In a well-known ESPN Outside the Lines feature about guns and athletes several white athletes were interviewed and all were steadfast about carrying guns for protection and said they would use them, if necessary.

None were or are called thugs.

Yet when Sean Taylor was shot in his own home many journalists questioned why he needed to have a machete under his bed for protection unless he was fearful for his life, fearful that “someone from his past” might find him and want to kill him for some past indiscretion. The thug label was strapped on his back like a backpack full of explosives.

It would be days before any of these same journalists ever mentioned that the machete had been left from an earlier break-in of his home by one of the people who would ultimately kill him. And very, very few of them ever apologized either in their columns or at their place of employment on television.

And this is called ————— sport.

  • Subscribe to the CSR RSS feed today. Click here.
  • Subscribe to the SSNN RSS feed today. Click here.
  • Discuss this story here.

    • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    D.K. Wilson is a freelance sports writer. He is better known on the internet as "DWil," and writes for Sports On My Mind.

    Share This Article

    No Comments

    No comments yet.

    Comment On This Article