Some lines you never expect to
cross. Some scenarios are too unlikely to imagine.
Yet, here I am, pulling for the
Celtics.
Native New Yorkers with no ties to
New England don’t root for Boston. That’s worse than rooting for Philadelphia.
We don’t care nothing about those I-95 outposts, also-rans not nice enough to
be named twice or have two football and two baseball teams. However, it’d be way
easier to pull for Philly, like supporting your little play-cousin.
Boston? That’s like rooting for the
racist uncle who married into the family.
Hating on Beantown is a given for
most self-respecting Black folks. It’s the default setting for consciousness, unless
you were born in that region and can’t activate the manual override. The mistreatment
of Black athletes there is legendary, a
flea market of racism. Even those who play for the home team are excused
when they confuse Boston with Birmingham. Where else have we seen a flag used like
a spear?
But for the first time and probably the last time, I’m rooting for a Boston team.
Caster Semenya was ready to go
there as an 18-year-old, willing to be humiliated in front of adults if that’s
what it took.
The South African track star was
prepared to remove her underwear to satisfy athletics officials’ questions
about her sex. “They thought I had a dick probably,” Semenya
said Tuesday on HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” Whatever. She told
them, “’It’s fine. I’m a female. I don’t care. If you want to see I’m a woman,
I will show you my vagina. Alright?’”
Making the proposal was degrading enough.
But Semenya, now 31, suffered worse emotional trauma in learning that such offers
are worthless. Officials have decided she’s a male based on hormone levels,
regardless of her body’s genitalia. The eye test means nothing if lab tests
determine the final result.
Semenya was a teenager from a
rural village in 2009 when she gained international prominence for her very
essence. She wasn’t cast into the
spotlight just because her appearance is more masculine than traditional femininity.
Semenya became a controversial figure because her leaked sex-verification tests
reportedly revealed that she had three times the amount of testosterone
typically found in an average woman.
She was identified as female at birth and has identified as such her whole life. Semenya continues to face unnecessary, unfortunate, and uncomfortable queries about her body. Plenty of Black females don’t have her condition, hyperandrogenism, but they can relate to the scrutiny and criticism of her God-given form.
Getting hot over mass shootings, trigger-happy
cops, environmental injustice, maternal mortality rates, voter suppression, unfair
hiring practices, redlining, and other systemic burdens, doesn’t leave much
energy for petty racism like name-calling.
If fair treatment in
life-and-death issues meant accepting verbal abuse, I’d listen. But we know
life doesn’t work that way. Letting white folks talk to you wild makes them think
other forms of abuse are OK, too. The cycle is older than dirt and faithful as
sunrise: Words lead to thoughts, which lead to actions, which leads to us
catching hell.
During Saturday’s game against the
Chicago White Sox, New York Yankees third baseman Josh Donaldson told us he’s racist
without saying the N-word. He thought he was slick, calling shortstop Tim
Anderson out his name by referencing the patron saint of Black ballplayers, stirring
emotions that sparked a near-brawl later in the game.
“He was trying to call me Jackie
Robinson, like ‘What’s up, Jackie?’ I don’t play like that,” Anderson
told reporters after the game. “I wasn’t really bothering nobody today, but
he made the comment and it was disrespectful.”
We didn’t hear Donaldson’s tone or inflection, but Anderson didn’t hear a compliment and neither did I. It was a condescending reminder that Anderson is “other,” a Black man in a white man’s game. He’s among the latest to feel it and Robinson was first, when he broke the major league color line in 1947.
Thanks to Michael Jordan and the flyest race car ever, NASCAR just hit for a lick.
The sport that wants more cool points and wider swaths of fans just achieved both goals, with props to Air Jordan and the internationally iconic logo. Though Jordan has struggled mightily as an NBA owner in Charlotte, his motorsports shine is blinding after last Sunday’s race in Kansas.
The Hornets have reached the
playoffs twice in his 11 seasons as owner. His NASCAR team – 23XI Racing (pronounced
twenty-three eleven) – has reached victory lane twice since he entered the
sport last year. The Jordan crossover broke ankles on the court; now it’s
drawing eyes at the track. Driver Kurt Busch’s win came in the first race to feature
a Jordan Brand-ride, with Jumpman and Black Cement
all over.
“A lot of the reason we started
this race team is Michael felt like NASCAR was a platform that didn’t maybe
always understand his brand,” 23XI
Racing co-owner Denny Hamlin told reporters. “He thought this was a good
way to branch out the Jordan Brand.”
Nick Saban knows the business,
which explains him pulling
$9.9 million in base salary as Alabama’s head football coach. He knows the
game, too, reaching six of the last seven title games and winning three
championships.
He’s probably the sport’s goat among
coaches not named Eddie Robinson. Saban is certainly the de facto Godfather, the
public face of the most powerful outfit. He’s sat atop the organization long enough
to know when something’s fishy, like sportsbooks taking a flurry of crazy big bets.
There’s a sense the table has flipped and the smart money is moving to players,
most of them Black. He’s worried about Alabama losing its edge as the house.
Saban isn’t with this new normal,
where entities happily pay college athletes through name, image and likeness
deals (NIL). Players are no longer broke, which signals a clear and present threat
to the old worldview Saban represents.
During an event Wednesday
night with local business leaders in Birmingham, he went all-in against “buying”
incoming recruits with NIL money. “Jackson State paid a guy $1 million last
year to come to their school,” Saban said, rekindling refuted reports about Travis
Hunter Jr., the nation’s No. 1 prospect. “It was in the paper and they bragged
about it,” Saban said. “No one did anything about it.”
Jackson State coach Deion Sanders promised
in a tweet to “address
that LIE Coach Saban told.” Hunter wishes it was real. “I got A mil?” he tweeted.
“But my mom still stay in a 3 bed room house with five kids.”
Saban also had words for Texas
A&M and Miami, claiming they opened the vault and broke the code for securing
talent while he stays true to the amateurism sham. He bragged that only 25 players
got NIL hook-ups at Alabama last year, for a measly $3 million total. He called
that “doing it the right way.”
It’s the right way if you’re salty that players get anything.
There’s never been a better time for
young stars in the multibillion-dollar college sports industry. But this being
America 2022, we see efforts to turn back the clock.
A few years ago, financial
compensation for college athletes was illicit and strictly under the table. Today,
top players are paid in open-air transactions with a trail of authorized direct
deposits.
USC quarterback Caleb Williams is
conducting a
master class on getting bags, while high schoolers don’t have to wait. Five-star
shooting guard Jared McCain, a Duke-signee, is among several
prep stars stacking paper in California, a forerunner among states allowing
name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals for college athletes and recruits.
I figured this free market wouldn’t last long before the NCAA and associates – officials, coaches, and conference directors – pushed back. But barely three years? Reconstruction lasted a dozen. This ride just began, and haters already pumping the breaks.
No, we don’t all agree. The young adults – not kids – should have the right to earn as much as possible, just like their peers who don’t play sports. More than 100 years late, these newfound gains must stay and grow. Progress won’t erase the stain, but moving forward is the preferable direction.
The black-and-gold paint scheme immediately
caught my eye, like grandfathers’ fraternal bond in the Divine Nine. Even though
the school wasn’t HU-You Know, at least another HBCU was center stage in February
for one of the nation’s biggest sports events, the Daytona 500.
I typically pay the same attention
to that race, “The
Super Bowl of NASCAR,” as any other – roughly none. But when the NY Racing Team
rolled up in that sweet ride, with homages to Grambling State University emblazoned on
the hood and doors, looking away was impossible. Learning that team owner
John Cohen is a Grambling alum who played for legendary coach Eddie Robinson only
increased the intrigue.
That was three months ago, back before
I had ever watched a NASCAR race from beginning to end. Since then, I’ve taken the
sport for a spin and found it super cool. It’s also way Blacker than imagined,
leading to a new favorite Facebook group, deeper interest, growing knowledge,
and lingering disbelief.
“Hi. I’m Deron, and I’m a Black NASCAR fan.”
Shoutout to Cohen, who’s been in
the game since 2007. His ongoing partnership with HBCU League Pass has paid off
in national TV shine for Norfolk
State University, Florida
A&M University, Stillman
College, and Morehouse
College. “It’s a way to move the
needle on my team and highlight HBCUs,” Cohen said in a phone interview. “We’ve
gotten really good feedback and all the schools are getting a lot of press
now.”
I know a lot of Black folks haven’t rocked
with NASCAR, understandably so considering its history with good ol’
boys and the confederate flag. But bear with me. There’s reason to
reconsider.
In 2017, NFL coach Pete Carroll raved
about Colin Kaepernick’s ability to play, but the quarterback has remained
unemployed. This week, NFL owner Mark Davis said he’s not opposed to Kaepernick
joining the Las Vegas Raiders, but no news yet.
For the trifecta, we just need a general
manager who loves him … and doesn’t face pushback from the coach and owner.
“(Kaepernick) deserves every
chance in the world to become a quarterback in the National Football League,” Davis
told NBC Sports Bay Area. “I still stand by it. If our coaches and general
manager want to bring him in or want him to be the quarterback on this team, I
would welcome him with open arms.”
The coach is Josh McDaniels and the general manager is Dave Ziegler, both hired in January. We won’t hold our breath waiting for their assessment, though Kaepernick on the Raiders would make perfect sense.
Unlike the NFL and its belated,
faux embrace of social justice, the Raiders haven’t used diversity and civil
rights as virtue signals. They’ve been
on the front for a while, including receipts for hiring the NFL’s first
Latino head coach (Tom Flores in 1979) and first Black head coach (Art Shell in
1989). The franchise also made Flores the NFL’s first Latino starting QB (1960),
and made Eldridge Dickey the first Black QB drafted in the first round (1968). And,
oh yeah, they made Amy Trask the NFL’s first women CEO in 1997.
We’ve come a long way from the
days when being “a real man” meant any signs of weakness were forbidden.
Lessons were learned early. Skinned
knees are painful for all children, yet little boys were told to suck it up
while little girls got kisses on the boo-boo. Boys who were teased for crying became
men incapable of expressing their feelings (besides anger). Being tough on the
outside and hollow on the inside created chronic cases of toxic masculinity, a threat
to women, children, and sensible men everywhere.
Thankfully, we’ve moved toward
embracing and affirming men’s need for self-care and emotional support without
calling them soft.
But we might be overcompensating
in Ben Simmons’ case.
The Brooklyn Nets guard is trying
our patience, tempting us to lose compassion for whatever’s going on in his
head. ESPN
reported that Simmons, a day ahead of his planned season debut, said his
back was sore and he can’t play in Monday’s must-win playoff game against the
Boston Celtics.
Who said his back only hurts because he lacks a spine?! That’s just wrong!
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day,
some folks only concentrate on MLK’s dreams while ignoring his denouncements.
King wasn’t just about fighting systemic racism. He also spoke forcefully
against poverty and the Vietnam War, topics that endangered his life more than
singing kumbaya with Klansmen.
But whitewashing King’s legacy
makes the status quo easier to maintain.
April 15 marks the 75th
anniversary of Robinson smashing Major League Baseball’s color line when he
debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field. His entry in 1947 started a
ripple of integration across sports and portions of society (e.g., the military
and public schools). After six All-Star seasons in an 11-year career, he
retired and eventually was enshrined in the
Hall of Fame.
And that’s where his story ends … unless you pay attention and reject any sanitized version of history.
Follow
