Until the Next Sports, Media and Race Controversy...

The appropriate reaction to it all.

What we’ve witnessed in the last week is another chapter in the Book of Racism in Sports. For those who've heard about it all week, I'm sick of it, too. If you haven’t heard, however, a bunch of people have responded to this:

“I hated Duke, and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke don't recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.”

Jalen Rose’s comments – which he said reflected that of an 18-year old (and seemingly immature) kid – and his defense of them have elicited numerous columns, blog posts and other responses that range from misguided support (many assume this is how he feels NOW) to the usual disgusting hate speech on the races. Grant Hill’s response on the New York Times added more fuel to the fire along with more snarky critiques and side-taking.

All this week has shown this perpetual optimist is that no matter how much well-intentioned people seek it, media nerds clamor for it or ivory-tower academics demand it, there is one thing that we will never have in the United States.

There will never be a national conversation about race.

Twitter and Facebook don’t count, friends.

More than every other form of entertainment, sports inspire the strongest and most vitriolic commentary society can witness. Because the output of these games come from physical exploits (though there’s the use of the total being involved), fans and media can only infer and project their personal beliefs onto the action. We’ll make our assumptions based on body language and reactions to calls and plays, physical appearance and interactions with teammates and opponents.

When the participants – players, coaches and managers, executives, agents, etc. – do speak to the world, that’s when our senses sharpen a bit more. We’re more scrutinizing of their words because unlike musicians and actors, we don’t get a chance to hear from them outside of these dedicated times (press conferences, scheduled interviews, etc.). When one decides to create or take part a venture outside of those times, such as ESPN’s documentary – Rose, himself, was an executive producer – we have a chance to parse their words more. They give us insights that wouldn’t come up in the course of the game, season or even career as they are too caught up in the moment to reflect.

More often than not, people don’t like what they hear from athletes. How many times have you uttered, thought or heard the phrase “just shut up and play”? Ideally, these folks exist for our mere entertainment, not for having a voice, right? It doesn’t help when someone utters something regarding race.

Within a week, we’ve taken this “Uncle Tom” commentary and flipped it on its ear over and over again. Even the game played between both alma maters central to this controversy once again stood for so much more as Duke once again got the better of Michigan. We’ve thrown our opinions and experiences in hopes of having some grand-scale conversation, yet instead, we’re having intellectual show and tell. This controversy has compelled anyone with a platform (myself included, but in private) to show scars of racism, try to prove that we’re not racist or unfortunately defend personal bigotry.

We are an exclusive lot, though. The people who keep these controversies in the air more often are us media people (proficient bloggers count, too). We love having something to run with for days on end until some other sports figure has a case of foot-in-mouth disease. We come up with all of these concepts and analyses, but we never solve the problem the controversy presented. We come up short because we aren’t inclusive of all the people who hear or read these words.

We assume that because these conversation are had among the media and our most passionate consumers that ‘everyone’s talking about it’. Racism isn’t just discussed when someone utters unfortunate words; it’s talked about on street corners, on park benches, in break rooms and trendy restaurants. While we scream, stomp and demand you pay attention to us, millions of people are speaking in hushed tones and away from our purview.

For whatever reasons, they don’t trust us. Whether it’s a difference in credentials, personal experiences or history burned to memory, these people aren’t talking to us. They’re enduring and/or perpetuating the discrimination that made Rose’s comments so jarring and such ‘great’ sports radio talk. However, their absence – or exile, rather – from the media chatter keeps the ideal national conversation about race just that; ideal. Mythical, even.

Maybe a large part about these reactions is that mind-numbingly absurd belief that there's one universal perspective of the black community or any other community. Many assume that all ethnic groups live the same way and share the same experiences. That couldn’t be far from the case. Not all white people come from posh backgrounds and not every black person came up hard scrabble in the streets. Not every Latino hopped a fence or rode a shoddy raft to come to the States and not every Asian person grew up with a ‘Tiger Mom’.

What we’ve also done, what’s kept this at the tip of many tongues is not dig into the truth. Many refuse to dig into their own discrimination while others choose to ignore the existence of racism. In that, we’ve also killed any chance by having that mythical conversation. In a lot of ways, these moments are nothing but opportunities to get academic or grab headlines. In another regard, demands for ‘the national conversation about race’ is code for ‘let’s pile on the white man’.

But we’ve been spinning this wheel for how long now?

“Uncle Tom” and the subsequent responses were just the media racial craze of the moment. At this point, we really don’t care about the legacy of The Fab Five; at least in the short term. A year from now, people will believe what they always did before “Uncle Tom”. Either this collective was a trend-setting champion for urban black America, a system-bucking destroyer of white sports culture or in complete honesty, a team whose defense could have been a lot better.

What we do care about is where the next race-driven sports media dialogue takes place. We media folks should use “Uncle Tom” as a lesson for ourselves and future generations and just maybe, some of us will. Yet, as an almost under-the-radar comment proved, we’re looking to point out a lack of smarts or awareness from others instead of being honest with ourselves. Rose, Hill and other athletes will become someone else soon enough and we’ll spin this wheel again.

Deleted Scenes from "Hardwood Graduation"

As promised. It's always fun to edit works like this, knowing that Scribe is a perfect place to show everyone what was left on the cutting room floor.

Again, mucho thanks to Rodney Brown.

What you’re doing now and how long have you been involved?: I work in K-12 education as a high school administrator and have also worked as a high school athletic director in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’ve also served as a nonprofit executive with the Urban League, adjunct college professor of political science at a community college, a community organizer with a neighborhood association and a political candidate for local office.

Where did you play?: I played at Santa Clara University (1986 to 1990). Santa Clara produced professional players like Kurt Rambis and Steve Nash and sports super-agent Billy Duffy. In my senior year, I led our team in 3 point field goal shooting, was a team captain and led our conference in 3 point field goal percentage for most of the season. My proudest accomplishment was being voted Most Inspirational Player by my teammates in my senior year.

Did you start? Sub?: I started about half of the games my senior year, otherwise I was the first player off of the bench. I played point guard and shooting guard.

If you played with a highly-touted pro prospect (no matter how long they stuck in the pros), who was it?: Although Steve Nash entered Santa Clara 2 years after I left, I played pick-up basketball with him at Santa Clara. And, all the things that Steve does now, he was doing’ as a freshman at Santa Clara. There were three guys that I played with that went on to play basketball overseas (Dan Weiss-China, Jens Gordon-Germany and Jeffty Connelly-Spain).

Forward (III)

Now that quote from Roger Clemens’s interview with Mike Wallace on CBS’ 60 Minutes has made the rounds, baseball, as usual, will make the front pages and flood the switchboards of sports radio until the middle of next week… in New York. Because of that, college football will jump the line in front of the national pastime.

College football: Did we kill momentum? In yesterday’s post, you read about how the NHL grabbed a larger slice of the American viewing pie than normal, despite being broadcasted simultaneously with two bowl games on New Year’s Day. When plans of the game in Buffalo were revealed over the summer, hockey haters, puckheads and the loudmouths (or typers) debated the merits of having this event going up against the opening bell of the sports calendar in the traditional bowl games. Among some fans, there was reservation about trying to showcase the game against college football, a sport that has enjoyed a tremendous rise in popularity over the past decade. If you ask most of those fans for their thoughts days after the game, they would have probably changed their minds. For starters, it was a good game that featured the game’s youngest stars on the big stage. Adding on to that…

This bowl season hasn’t been very good.

This past season presented some of the wildest moments in history. Appalachian State’s upset of Michigan was the tip of the iceberg. Illinois over Ohio State, Stanford over USC, Kentucky over LSU in three overtimes, even Navy over Notre Dame… well, that last one may have been more embarrassment than upset. 59 teams of lower or no ranking defeated higher-ranked programs, including twelve unranked teams defeating Top 5 squads. Number 2 was a revolving door like no other time in recent memory as the second-fiddle lost SEVEN times! In addition to all of that chaos was the state of disbelief in Nebraska, Miami, Alabama and Florida State as those programs continued to fade from former glory. Meanwhile, South Florida (a school without a football team until eleven years ago) found itself No. 2 and two basketball schools were ever-so-close to national title game hopes (Missouri and Kansas). USC proved to have been able to handle an improved Pac-10 while the Big Ten may have been passed by. Hawaii flirted with perfection and Georgia finally gained the look of a champion.

So what’s with the sub-par bowl games?

Outside of the Capital One Bowl between Michigan and Florida, the games have been anti-climatic, one-sided and/or uneventful. There are plenty of reasons that can be thrown into the mix. Traditionalists will blame the influx of former whipping boys such as Cincinnati, Rutgers and Kentucky into the national conscious, but you know that’s nonsense. You can say that there are too many bowl games with little to no meaning, most being created by television networks just for the ratings war. You can look to the multitude of players held out of bowl season not for injuries, but for being academically ineligible or a team/school violation that called for suspension (though these didn’t just happen in December, did they?). Any way you slice it, there is another issue that has played a hand.

The month-plus break between the regular season and bowl season.

The matchups are decided well in advance after three months of politicking, conference championships and teams choosing to be inactive at the right times. There was such an exciting season and suddenly the fun comes to a halt so that these student-athletes can focus on classes.

Stop laughing.

The greatest ongoing joke in sports deals with the sudden one-month focus on final exams and papers. Not to completely demean these kids at all because they do have a strong work ethic. Typically, after the roll call of players deemed ineligible for bowl play, you discover that overall, the demands on the field continue to trump the demands in the classroom. You can debate the issue of the student-athlete all you want, but even professionals can find the balance between practice, walkthroughs, travelling and tutoring a bit difficult. There’s no doubt that the recent scandal at Florida State speaks to kids learning how to cut corners, yet it speaks to a somewhat absurd notion that they are students first. Big time college athletics serve as advertising for the school at-large, but fair or not, in the time they are selling the school, they may not have the complete focus and time to take advantage of their education. So why they are suddenly penalized for these miscellaneous violations between game selection and the actual game will never be fully understood.

What does this have to do with the games themselves?

That month off to ‘focus’ on academics may have more to do with television buildup than having a stellar graduation rate (but that’s Scribe’s mere speculation, of course). If anything, as the adage goes, you might as well finish what you start. Yet, how can that be accomplished when the NCAA is so steeped in tradition for tradition’s sake? Adding games would be a blessing to not only fans, but teams eager to prove something to the media that decides who plays where in January. Yet, realistically, conferences were reluctant to add the extra bowl games, let alone an extra regular season game in December. Adding a playoff has been long debated, leaving no need to do so here. It may take Duke and Air Force playing in the BCS title game for any progress there. Moving bowl season into mid-December? When pigs fly.

Moving forward, the powers-that-be are going to find more ways to maximize revenue without interrupting the break. Yet, all of the practices for 30-something bowl games aren’t enough to keep the excitement going from the regular season. If you think the pointless Media Week before the Super Bowl makes for a rusty start on Super Sunday, this is thousand times worse. If anything they can do to remedy this without compromising the break, they can ensure that NYU gets a shot against Wisconsin in October.

Wait, does NYU have a football team?