Esoteric Ramblings
Well, another February has come and gone and once again, outside of our failed schools, bloated government departments and large corporations, nobody was clamoring for Black History Month.
There is a reason for this and a method behind the madness for the entities who continue to insist on foisting this stale fruitcake on us every year. Large corporations, being amoral and unfeeling by nature, latch onto cheap emotional appeals such as this to give themselves a veneer of "concern." They always do it lame though because, being the large corporations that they are, they have no real concern and hence no genuine feel. So the product they spew forth on such occasions is tepid, flat and very, very safe. And usually goes over as well as a lead balloon. These kind of campaigns always come off like the two-hour human resources department seminar on time management at Soulless Inc. The more you think about it, the more it numbs you. Best not to think about it at all.
However, in keeping with the name of this blog, I would like to ruminate a bit on ESPN and its always-banal Black History Month observations, not so much as a cultural critique, but as to how this hollow mythologizing of the black athlete in the face of reality affects the quality of the sports we watch.
Anyone who follows big-time professional and college football and basketball at all knows that these two sports are currently suffering from serious crises in quality. Lack of fundamentals, erratic and dangerous behavior by players on and off the field and an absence of that undefinable "joy" that accompanies a well-played game featuring talented teams are in evidence everywhere. These two sports also just happen to be dominated by young black male athletes. And what ESPN will never tell you is that there is a direct link between the lack of discipline shown by the young black athlete in America today and the decline in quality of these sports.
What the ESPN talking heads also will not tell you is that they are to a large extent responsible for this sad decline in the quality of these two sports today, a decline that has been fostered in a very real way by the complete lack of concern for the black male athlete's content of character, the very holy icon that the charlatans at this large corporation pretend one month a year to champion.
Big-time sports has always valued sheer athleticism over content of character. It is the nature of the beast. The poor behavior of athletes was widely overlooked in the lily-white days of Babe Ruth and Red Grange if the athlete in question could play at a high level. This was always bad for big-time sports but because the white athletes who dominated this era had a solid social structure that they could fall back on - intact family unit, a community that reinforced prevailing moral norms, a valuing of educational opportunities and so forth - the sports themselves could overcome the failings of a certain number of their players and still thrive.
Enter the rise of the black athlete in the late 1960s-early 1970s. That they did not have the structures in place to overcome the corroding message big-time sports was selling is a sad sociological fact. They did not have intact families, strong communities reinforcing moral behavior or a valuing of educational opportunity. Thus, the message that "your athletic ability is all that matters" hit the young black male particularly hard.
The crucial period was the early 1970s. Black athletes were going mainstream for the first time in American society. And all the wrong messages were sent to the very people who were least equipped to deal with the consequences of those messages. If pro and college sports had sent the black athletes of the early 1970s a strong signal that undisciplined or flat-out criminal behavior would not be tolerated, generations of young black athletes to come may have realized that a certain standard would be expected of them if they wanted to succeed at a very lucrative and esteem-enhancing profession that just so happened to value a set of skills that they held in abundance.
Instead, big-time sports, which at this time was still in the process of becoming the corporate goliath that we are all suffering under today, sent a clear signal to a vulnerable black community that criminal behavior would not affect a player's athletic career as long as he could perform on the field. Thus we have Johnny Rodgers winning the 1972 Heisman Trophy after a highly-regarded career at Nebraska that was certainly not going to be derailed by the fact that he committed armed robbery.
We also had the 1972 Ohio State-Minnesota basketball game, a video of which you will surely never see during ESPN's celebration of Black History Month, in which the black players who made up the majority of the Gophers' roster staged an assault exclusively on the white Ohio State players, ignoring the black Buckeye hoopsters that happened to cross their paths:
From the contemporary Sports Illustrated account:
Instead of a fight erupting from blows struck in the heat of competition, this was a cold, brutal attack, governed by the law of the jungle. It could be considered the inevitable result of the malaise that afflicts the sport these days, a stunning example of responsibility abdicated by a coach, the players he recruited and taught and the fans who followed them.
Was the University of Minnesota outraged by the behavior of its student athletes? Quite the contrary. In a letter to SI responding to its account of this sporting race riot, the Minnesota athletic director was quick to throw out one of the earliest uses of the race card in an attempt to turn the violent perpetrators into the victims they would so often be represented as in the decades to come:
[Author William F.] Reed describes the whole incident as "a cold, brutal attack, governed by the law of the jungle." Representatives of the black community have taken an active interest in the affair and deeply resent this as a thoroughly distasteful slur on their race. I must agree.
Here's one of the thugs who joined in on this savage attack. From the original SI article:
Dave Winfield, who recently joined the Gopher varsity, joined the fray, too, dodging to mid-court where some Minnesota reserves and civilians were trying to wrestle Ohio State substitute Mark Wagar to the floor. Winfield leaped on top of Wagar when he was down and hit him five times with his right fist on the face and head.
How did Winfield's shockingly violent role in this affair affect his standing in the world of big-time sports? Well...
In his senior year in college, Dave Winfield was a wanted man.
In 1973, Winfield, a senior at the University of Minnesota, was selected in four drafts in three different professional sports. Just weeks after being selected as the fourth overall pick in the baseball draft by the San Diego Padres, Winfield was named Most Valuable Player of the College World Series..
No doubt he would have been drafted by both hockey leagues as well if only he knew how to skate. Winfield of course went on to a profitable and celebrated Major League Baseball career.
Rodgers and Winfield are just two examples of how the evil message to young black males was sent and solidified: If you are a superior athlete, you will not be held accountable for your actions. The message was received and is now evident in full bloom in the selfish, shallow athletes we see dominating big-time football and basketball today. And right there beside them is the total sports network to wave the banner high. Every night you can see the glorification of superior individual athletic ability at the expense of team play. To watch ESPN is to see that it is devoted to promoting a bizarre religious cult of the individual athlete.
It can't be hard to see how the glorification of individual athletic ability can degrade the quality of athletic performance. No need to even list examples, for they are available on a daily basis during this, one of the worst years in college basketball in memory. Offense is almost non-existent, yet the ESPN "critics" almost never mention the focus on individual play and the seeming inability of major college basketball players to work as a five-man unit to get the ball in the basket.
Football is every bit as bad. Half-hearted performances, terrible execution, dropped passes by players looking to make the "big play", the emphasis on "hitting" instead of solid tackling, undisciplined penalties galore and more have marred the college and pro games to the point where they have become frankly unwatchable.
This is the inevitable endpoint of the message that athletic ability is all that matters. We told our young black athletes that they could go to college and learn nothing, that they could commit serious crimes and keep playing, and we seem surprised when this and this happens.
An authentic examination of the lives and histories of black Americans by a sports network would at least consider the possibility that the ethics of modern, corporate professional and major college sports have helped warp the values of the young black males who strive in overwhelming numbers to make up the playing ranks. Don't hold your breath waiting for ESPN to tackle that next February.
