Bear-Arms
Mentor
It offers some good points but then goes into the typical fashion sports writers spiral down towards.
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Blacks and Sports -- Lifeline or Noose?
For years, a debate has raged over whether too many young African Americans count on becoming pro athletes. Now the argument has taken a new twist.
The first warnings that overinvolvement in sports was damaging the black community sounded from the Bay Area in the 1960s, a time and place that nurtured the unconventional and revolutionary.
The warning appeared in the unlikely 6-foot-8-inch form of Harry Edwards, himself an athlete who had grown up idolizing Jesse Owens and Joe Louis in impoverished East St. Louis, Illinois.
Edwards was so grounded in sports that his first store-bought toy was a pair of boxing gloves, which his father presented to him as if it were a trust fund. He told his son that, for a black man in America, sports was the only path to success and respectability.
``As a child, I believed in the dream as deeply as my father did,'' says Edwards, the UC Berkeley sports sociologist and 49ers consultant.
But by early adulthood, Edwards was calling for blacks to boycott the 1968 Olympics. He argued that the blind pursuit of sports was undermining black achievement. It was gobbling up thousands of talented young men who might otherwise have become lawyers and entrepreneurs.
Edwards offended blacks and whites alike by dismissing the rosy view that, because blacks and whites cooperated on the playing fields, sports was some sort of race-relations beacon that would show the way for the rest of society.
Others have since echoed the call for de-emphasizing sports in the black community, most recently John Hoberman in his thought-provoking 1997 book, ``Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race.'' And the documentary ``Hoop Dreams'' several years ago captured the fervor with which impoverished black families cling to the unrealistic hope of athletic success to the exclusion of almost all other pursuits.
The dream has persisted because it seems so attainable. In newspapers and on TV, black families see more success stories in sports than in any other field. Blacks make up 80 percent of the team rosters in the National Basketball Association and nearly 70 percent in the National Football League. Blacks have won 41 percent of baseball's Most Valuable Player titles over the last 25 years, although blacks account for just 17 percent of the players. At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, blacks won 13 of America's 14 gold medals in men's track and field. (Shotputter Randy Barnes was the only white gold medalist.)
Not surprisingly, a recent study by Northeastern's Center for the Study of Sport in Society found that 66 percent of African American males between the ages of 13 and 16 believed they could earn a living playing professional sports, more than double the percentage of white males. But the real odds of a high school athlete playing in any pro sport is 10,000 to 1. Playing in the NBA is a 50,000-to-1 shot.
Yet as the warnings Edwards sounded 20 years ago find new life through Hoberman and others, Edwards himself has done an about- face. The question raised at sociology conferences around the country -- Do blacks lose by winning in sports? -- is now so irrelevant as to be absurd, Edwards says
The national landscape has changed, he says, and so has his outlook. ``Those who are calling for the de-emphasis of sports are behind the times or seriously misreading the facts of black life and reality,'' he says.
Crime, drugs, gangs, AIDS and violence are sending increasing numbers of young black men to America's jails and graveyards. Edwards contends that sports remains the one hook that can pull at least some back from the abyss. The athletic dream, no matter how unrealistic, offers at least a ray of hope to an increasingly hopeless generation.
Thus, he argues, it no longer matters what price the black community pays for pursuing sports in such disproportionate numbers. The concern now is simply survival. If sports can help, as Edwards believes it can, then focusing on its drawbacks is like complaining about uncomfortable seating in a lifeboat.
``The issue is not: Are blacks paying a price? -- of course we are -- but: Are we paying a price we're conscious of?'' Edwards says. ``Are we dreaming with our eyes open? Other than those kinds of considerations, the question `Do blacks lose by winning in sports?' is absurd. What you're asking is, `Is life worth living?' Considering the option, hell, yes.''
Perhaps even more startling than Edwards' turnaround is his prediction that, just when he feels sports are needed most, black participation is now being restricted. Stiffer NCAA admission requirements -- without a concurrent improvement in high school academic preparation -- are keeping more and more black athletes out of college. Schools and governments are cutting youth sports programs to meet shrinking budgets. Inner-city playgrounds and recreation centers are falling into disrepair and increasingly becoming the province of gangs and drug dealers.
The Golden Age of the Black Athlete, which Edwards claims lasted from Jackie Robinson's arrival in baseball in 1947 until 1997, is over.
``We are, quite simply, disqualifying, jailing and burying an increasing number of our black potential football players, basketball players, baseball players and other prospective athletes,'' Edwards says, ``right along with our black potential lawyers, doctors and teachers.''
If the Golden Age of the Black Athlete is ending, the trend will be welcomed by those who contend that sports has done more harm than good to blacks in the United States. Hoberman, a white professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says that in the 1920s and '30s, the leaders of the NAACP and the Urban League encouraged participation in sports, believing that if blacks showed the white community they could excel, doors would open in other fields and racism would begin to crumble.
Instead, Hoberman and others say, the opposite has happened. Black athletic excellence has stymied race relations because it has allowed both whites and blacks to persuade themselves that society's racial problems are being solved. And it has reinforced myths, dating back to the days of slavery, that blacks are physically superior and intellectually inferior.
``Whites easily accommodated black athletic excellence, while dismissing the moral and intellectual capacities among the same group of people,'' Hoberman says. The observation hearkens back to W.E.B. DuBois's observation about ragtime music at the turn of the century: ``White folks are lynching the Negro while singing his songs.''
Edwards, however, says sports had nothing to do with reinforcing stereotypes in the white mind. ``Whites already perceived blacks to be limited intellectually, and athletics is simply the evidence,'' he says. ``If it were not athletics, it would be something else.''
Jamie Williams, the former 49ers tight end, earned his doctorate this spring in leadership at the University of San Francisco and recently took a job as an executive recruiter. Yet he still feels the apprehension from whites who perceive him, at least at first glance, as a large, possibly dangerous, black male.
``You see all these images of black men breaking four and five tackles, sacking the quarterback, slamming a tomahawk dunk over a 7-foot white guy. You see them every single day and you're left with the perception of the black athlete as a dominating being with a blood lust for violence,'' Williams says.
``I see it even today with me. It's all subtle. I'll be introduced to a guy, and he'll say, `Oh, you could crush me,' or `You're not going to kill me if I say this, are you?' ''
Even within the 49ers, as enlightened an organization as there is in the NFL, black players have felt that stereotypes of the dumb black jock sometimes prevailed. Williams recalled, as an example, a meeting with all the players on offense. An assistant coach was going through the game plan and accepting suggestions from the players.
``Two black players said something to the coach,'' Williams says, ``and he just dismissed the suggestions. One of our star black players made a suggestion and the coach even wrote him off. A few minutes later, a white player says almost the same exact thing and the coach goes, `Oh, that's a great idea.' Then another white player makes another suggestion and coach says, `Yeah, we'll try that.'
``I went up to him afterward and said, `You're about to have a revolt on your hands.' And to the coach's credit, he came back a few days later and said we were right. He said he had to do better.''
Joe Morgan, the Hall of Fame second baseman from Oakland who retired in 1984, ran into similar stereotypes when he applied for a bank loan to finance his own company, a beverage distributorship in the East Bay. He found that the equality he enjoyed on the field ended at the clubhouse door.
``I had to have about 50 percent of the money myself, and they still balked,'' Morgan said. ``First, I was an athlete. Second, I was a black athlete. I had to really call the banks on the carpet and threaten them. They told me they had had bad experiences with athletes before -- they wouldn't say black athletes. But I've got a friend in sports who's white, and he's gone bankrupt twice and still had no problem getting another loan.''
Morgan acknowledges that overemphasis on sports has hurt the black community but, like Edwards, he doesn't believe blacks have consciously chosen sports over other avenues. If you're trapped in a room and there's only one hatch open to the outside, you go through it, he says.
Sports was seen as the one place where a black man was allowed dominance over a white man, the one place that was a true meritocracy. Prejudice had no power over a stopwatch or a home run. It was not a natural ability that earned blacks a disproportionate number of athletic honors in the United States, Morgan and others say, but a lack of other choices and an institutional channeling toward that single pursuit.
``How many libraries are in the inner cities?'' Morgan asks. ``And how many basketball courts? I don't think there's any doubt that sports has hurt in a way, but in some cases, it's been the only recourse.''
Former A's pitcher Dave Stewart agrees. ``If athletics is what we're going to be good at,'' he told Sports Illustrated, ``and the one thing we can be the majority at, the one thing in which we can set up our businesses and families and pass (the wealth) on -- so be it. Right now, it's sports, but we're seeing a lot more black people in government, more black doctors, more black lawyers. You've got to begin somewhere.''
Clearly, mixed in with the damage that sports has done to the black community, there has been progress. White kids today make little or no distinction between black and white in choosing their favorite players. Posters of Michael Jordan and 49ers wide receiver Jerry Rice adorn walls of white and black children alike. But the question raised with such hope when Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis emerged as cross- cultural heroes remains today:
When and how will the white society that so admires Michael Jordan learn to be as color-blind beyond the playing field?
[url]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ar chive/1998/09/20/SC73016.DTL&type=special [/url]
------------------------
Blacks and Sports -- Lifeline or Noose?
For years, a debate has raged over whether too many young African Americans count on becoming pro athletes. Now the argument has taken a new twist.
The first warnings that overinvolvement in sports was damaging the black community sounded from the Bay Area in the 1960s, a time and place that nurtured the unconventional and revolutionary.
The warning appeared in the unlikely 6-foot-8-inch form of Harry Edwards, himself an athlete who had grown up idolizing Jesse Owens and Joe Louis in impoverished East St. Louis, Illinois.
Edwards was so grounded in sports that his first store-bought toy was a pair of boxing gloves, which his father presented to him as if it were a trust fund. He told his son that, for a black man in America, sports was the only path to success and respectability.
``As a child, I believed in the dream as deeply as my father did,'' says Edwards, the UC Berkeley sports sociologist and 49ers consultant.
But by early adulthood, Edwards was calling for blacks to boycott the 1968 Olympics. He argued that the blind pursuit of sports was undermining black achievement. It was gobbling up thousands of talented young men who might otherwise have become lawyers and entrepreneurs.
Edwards offended blacks and whites alike by dismissing the rosy view that, because blacks and whites cooperated on the playing fields, sports was some sort of race-relations beacon that would show the way for the rest of society.
Others have since echoed the call for de-emphasizing sports in the black community, most recently John Hoberman in his thought-provoking 1997 book, ``Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race.'' And the documentary ``Hoop Dreams'' several years ago captured the fervor with which impoverished black families cling to the unrealistic hope of athletic success to the exclusion of almost all other pursuits.
The dream has persisted because it seems so attainable. In newspapers and on TV, black families see more success stories in sports than in any other field. Blacks make up 80 percent of the team rosters in the National Basketball Association and nearly 70 percent in the National Football League. Blacks have won 41 percent of baseball's Most Valuable Player titles over the last 25 years, although blacks account for just 17 percent of the players. At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, blacks won 13 of America's 14 gold medals in men's track and field. (Shotputter Randy Barnes was the only white gold medalist.)
Not surprisingly, a recent study by Northeastern's Center for the Study of Sport in Society found that 66 percent of African American males between the ages of 13 and 16 believed they could earn a living playing professional sports, more than double the percentage of white males. But the real odds of a high school athlete playing in any pro sport is 10,000 to 1. Playing in the NBA is a 50,000-to-1 shot.
Yet as the warnings Edwards sounded 20 years ago find new life through Hoberman and others, Edwards himself has done an about- face. The question raised at sociology conferences around the country -- Do blacks lose by winning in sports? -- is now so irrelevant as to be absurd, Edwards says
The national landscape has changed, he says, and so has his outlook. ``Those who are calling for the de-emphasis of sports are behind the times or seriously misreading the facts of black life and reality,'' he says.
Crime, drugs, gangs, AIDS and violence are sending increasing numbers of young black men to America's jails and graveyards. Edwards contends that sports remains the one hook that can pull at least some back from the abyss. The athletic dream, no matter how unrealistic, offers at least a ray of hope to an increasingly hopeless generation.
Thus, he argues, it no longer matters what price the black community pays for pursuing sports in such disproportionate numbers. The concern now is simply survival. If sports can help, as Edwards believes it can, then focusing on its drawbacks is like complaining about uncomfortable seating in a lifeboat.
``The issue is not: Are blacks paying a price? -- of course we are -- but: Are we paying a price we're conscious of?'' Edwards says. ``Are we dreaming with our eyes open? Other than those kinds of considerations, the question `Do blacks lose by winning in sports?' is absurd. What you're asking is, `Is life worth living?' Considering the option, hell, yes.''
Perhaps even more startling than Edwards' turnaround is his prediction that, just when he feels sports are needed most, black participation is now being restricted. Stiffer NCAA admission requirements -- without a concurrent improvement in high school academic preparation -- are keeping more and more black athletes out of college. Schools and governments are cutting youth sports programs to meet shrinking budgets. Inner-city playgrounds and recreation centers are falling into disrepair and increasingly becoming the province of gangs and drug dealers.
The Golden Age of the Black Athlete, which Edwards claims lasted from Jackie Robinson's arrival in baseball in 1947 until 1997, is over.
``We are, quite simply, disqualifying, jailing and burying an increasing number of our black potential football players, basketball players, baseball players and other prospective athletes,'' Edwards says, ``right along with our black potential lawyers, doctors and teachers.''
If the Golden Age of the Black Athlete is ending, the trend will be welcomed by those who contend that sports has done more harm than good to blacks in the United States. Hoberman, a white professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says that in the 1920s and '30s, the leaders of the NAACP and the Urban League encouraged participation in sports, believing that if blacks showed the white community they could excel, doors would open in other fields and racism would begin to crumble.
Instead, Hoberman and others say, the opposite has happened. Black athletic excellence has stymied race relations because it has allowed both whites and blacks to persuade themselves that society's racial problems are being solved. And it has reinforced myths, dating back to the days of slavery, that blacks are physically superior and intellectually inferior.
``Whites easily accommodated black athletic excellence, while dismissing the moral and intellectual capacities among the same group of people,'' Hoberman says. The observation hearkens back to W.E.B. DuBois's observation about ragtime music at the turn of the century: ``White folks are lynching the Negro while singing his songs.''
Edwards, however, says sports had nothing to do with reinforcing stereotypes in the white mind. ``Whites already perceived blacks to be limited intellectually, and athletics is simply the evidence,'' he says. ``If it were not athletics, it would be something else.''
Jamie Williams, the former 49ers tight end, earned his doctorate this spring in leadership at the University of San Francisco and recently took a job as an executive recruiter. Yet he still feels the apprehension from whites who perceive him, at least at first glance, as a large, possibly dangerous, black male.
``You see all these images of black men breaking four and five tackles, sacking the quarterback, slamming a tomahawk dunk over a 7-foot white guy. You see them every single day and you're left with the perception of the black athlete as a dominating being with a blood lust for violence,'' Williams says.
``I see it even today with me. It's all subtle. I'll be introduced to a guy, and he'll say, `Oh, you could crush me,' or `You're not going to kill me if I say this, are you?' ''
Even within the 49ers, as enlightened an organization as there is in the NFL, black players have felt that stereotypes of the dumb black jock sometimes prevailed. Williams recalled, as an example, a meeting with all the players on offense. An assistant coach was going through the game plan and accepting suggestions from the players.
``Two black players said something to the coach,'' Williams says, ``and he just dismissed the suggestions. One of our star black players made a suggestion and the coach even wrote him off. A few minutes later, a white player says almost the same exact thing and the coach goes, `Oh, that's a great idea.' Then another white player makes another suggestion and coach says, `Yeah, we'll try that.'
``I went up to him afterward and said, `You're about to have a revolt on your hands.' And to the coach's credit, he came back a few days later and said we were right. He said he had to do better.''
Joe Morgan, the Hall of Fame second baseman from Oakland who retired in 1984, ran into similar stereotypes when he applied for a bank loan to finance his own company, a beverage distributorship in the East Bay. He found that the equality he enjoyed on the field ended at the clubhouse door.
``I had to have about 50 percent of the money myself, and they still balked,'' Morgan said. ``First, I was an athlete. Second, I was a black athlete. I had to really call the banks on the carpet and threaten them. They told me they had had bad experiences with athletes before -- they wouldn't say black athletes. But I've got a friend in sports who's white, and he's gone bankrupt twice and still had no problem getting another loan.''
Morgan acknowledges that overemphasis on sports has hurt the black community but, like Edwards, he doesn't believe blacks have consciously chosen sports over other avenues. If you're trapped in a room and there's only one hatch open to the outside, you go through it, he says.
Sports was seen as the one place where a black man was allowed dominance over a white man, the one place that was a true meritocracy. Prejudice had no power over a stopwatch or a home run. It was not a natural ability that earned blacks a disproportionate number of athletic honors in the United States, Morgan and others say, but a lack of other choices and an institutional channeling toward that single pursuit.
``How many libraries are in the inner cities?'' Morgan asks. ``And how many basketball courts? I don't think there's any doubt that sports has hurt in a way, but in some cases, it's been the only recourse.''
Former A's pitcher Dave Stewart agrees. ``If athletics is what we're going to be good at,'' he told Sports Illustrated, ``and the one thing we can be the majority at, the one thing in which we can set up our businesses and families and pass (the wealth) on -- so be it. Right now, it's sports, but we're seeing a lot more black people in government, more black doctors, more black lawyers. You've got to begin somewhere.''
Clearly, mixed in with the damage that sports has done to the black community, there has been progress. White kids today make little or no distinction between black and white in choosing their favorite players. Posters of Michael Jordan and 49ers wide receiver Jerry Rice adorn walls of white and black children alike. But the question raised with such hope when Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis emerged as cross- cultural heroes remains today:
When and how will the white society that so admires Michael Jordan learn to be as color-blind beyond the playing field?
[url]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ar chive/1998/09/20/SC73016.DTL&type=special [/url]
