COLUMN: All Things Being Equal

From Ian Blake's, "Church of the Poisoned Mind," Fall '95 From Ian Blake's, "Church of the Poisoned Mind," Fall '95I am not a racist or anything, I just think blacks lack the basic necessities to work in the front offices of baseball? They also lack buoyancy which is why white people will always make better swimmers."-- Former Los Angeles Dodger GM Al Campanis. I thought to myself for a minute, looked down at my Santa Claus shaped belly and said, "Naw, I'd rather be one of those 27 NBA franchise owners who has the power to admit or deny any college player a chance to play for money. Hell, right now, I wouldn't mind owning a dairy farm out in the middle of Wisconsin." He looked at me dumbfounded. "Rich, all the guys I've just mentioned have one thing in common, they are owners. They sit on their keister's while other's, particularly the athletes, risk their bodies to make money for them." "Aw, man I don't believe you, if you got a chance to make millions why wouldn't you go for it." He waived me off and disappeared into a backroom to get us a couple of Budweise?er, ahh, iced tea's. I was a little upset with Penn's loss and his disbelief in my above disavowal of professional sports. He returned with our "wholesome" non-alcoholic drinks and I blurted out, "Look Rich, remember that sports announcer that used to be on television? What's his name?Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder." You remember Jimmy, ex-oddsmaker, and part-time anthropologist for the CBS sports network. You will recall that Mr. Snyder looked into the lens of a visiting television camera in January of 1988 and in a slightly inebriated condition stated that black athletes were not only superior to whites, but were "bred" to be that way. He talked about how the black athlete's big thighs extended up into his back, and how this would naturally make blacks better athletes than whites. He seemed to be saying that these traits had been carefully programmed by shrewd plantation task masters from the slave era to produce what were then improved cotton pickers. But, through heredity and emancipation had now evolved into the Michael Jordan's and Muhammed Ali's of the world, Twentieth century sports gladiators. Gladiators wasn't the Greek's exact choice of words, but the old negative connotations about black's surfaced just the same. "Yeah, those 'darkies' sure can run fast and jump higher than any cheetah. But I doubt, if they can spell their own names, let alone tie their shoes unless us white folks show 'em how." To be fair, he also stated that social and economic structures of our society basically prevented Caucasians from stemming the inundating tide of black athletes into professional sports ranks. His hope was that the almost exclusively, white front offices of these professional franchises would keep a few non-blacks on professional rosters for token appearances. In a complete retraction several days later, first by the CBS network and then by Jimmy, he said he never meant to hurt anybody; which is probably true considering the half-dozen or so consumed Gin and Tonic glasses that were laid out on the table in front of him as he gave his discourse on racial disparities in professional sports. I also remember a surprisingly substantial portion of the black sports community fighting for Jimmy to keep his job at CBS. But alas, too late! Within a week he had lost a job that paid nearly $500,000 annually. Many black intellects understood that Jimmy didn't speak the complete truth about racial dogma in sports. But what he did say opened old sores that many people would rather have stayed covered with an old infected band-aid. The troubling issue Jimmy raised was that the proliferation of black success on the playing fields in professional sports obscures the fact that there are no African-American owners of professional franchises and barely a handful of "real" minority front office employees. In addition, if African-American's dominate the rosters of professional sports, why aren't they represented in comparable numbers in upper management? University of California sociologist Harry Edwards states, "when professional sports teams began to be appreciably integrated in the 1960's, nobody claimed that extraordinary veins of black talent were being tapped. The concern in those days among white coaches and administrators was that the first few blacks in school or on the team not embarrass anyone --that they be good enough to play, but also capable in the classroom and in the outlying society the pure student athlete." Translation: They had to be "exceptional negroes." Black athletes are dominating sports in America today -- at least those team sports that attract most of our attention and our entertainment dollars. And there is a form of racial breeding at work. Not with geraniums or hamsters, but a kind of socioeconomic propagation that turns young blacks into athletic mercenaries. Many have been convinced since puberty that it is not one more turn of a textbook page, but one more bounce of the basketball that will get them their ultimate reward. Truth be told, the odds are greatly stacked against anyone, let alone black males moving into the professional ranks, something like 10,000 to 1 that a black athlete coming out of high school will make the NBA or NFL. Of those from major college sports programs, two in 100 go on to the pros. And after the black athlete's few playing years are over, if he doesn't have what Edwards calls the safety net of a valid high school diploma or college degree, so go his chances of making it in the real world. Richard still looked cynical. "Richard, you have two things going for you right now. You've got a university job that allows you to drink 'iced tea' whenever you want, and you don't have to risk your body to permanent injury on artificial surfaces like astroturf. Jerome and Kerry risk their health everytime they step on the court and right now they're not collecting checks. If they don't make it to the pros, they're going to have to get everyday jobs just like everybody else, so essentially, Jimmy the Greek said the wrong thing for the right reason." Once there was a time when the superior black performer was an aberration. Jackie Robinson, Jessie Owens and Joe Louis were seen as "credits to their race," not as the future of sports on the field and in its administrative offices. Realistically speaking, the problem can only be rectified when blacks are represented in sports by fewer numbers which are in direct proportion to the 12 percent they represent in the American population. In this, as in the other areas of social and economic fulfillment, the goal should be one of balance.