Based on recent statistics released during the Jackie Robinson celebration
on “Nightline,” 70 percent of the players in the National Football League
are African American, 80 percent in the National Basketball Association,
and 19 percent in Major League Baseball. That’s fewer than 1,400 Black
men on professional contract.
With the average career less than five
years,
why do so many Black males aspire to “the dream” of professional
sports? Five years of formally researching this issue, playing football
from Pop Warner to college, and interviewing thousands of people from
all walks of life have led me to some conclusions.
The channeling of Black males athletically is a complex situation.
The real reason so many brothers are trying to make it to “the show” is
validation. Sure, the money is good and so is the limelight to some, but
allow me to ask some questions. In what ways does American society
applaud Black male achievement? At our institutions, beginning in
kindergarten all the way to the university, how is the Black male
encouraged to make it in life? If you answered sports to both questions,
you are being honest with yourself. By not validating the cerebral or
thinking Black male, we as a society have set up the unhappy paradox
of the Black athletic hero.
This is what John Hoberman discusses in his recent book, Darwin’s
Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth
of Race. As Hoberman states: “The disappearance of the Black soldier
and aviator as public figures in American life after 1945 was significant,
because it denied an officially sanctioned modern status to Black men
who might otherwise have come to be identified with intellectual
mastery and technological competence in the eyes of the nation.”
In simpler terms, as Michael Eric Dyson discusses in Race Rules,
Black bodies are “in” now, especially in the context of sports and media
advertising. This is why many of our Black males involved in academics
and athletics today know more about Barry Bonds than stocks and
bonds. It also sets up a paradigm for many years of dreaming with their
eyes closed, while injecting themselves with sport novocaine.
A recent study released by the Center for the Study of Sport in
Society found that 66 percent of African American male high school
seniors believed their first jobs would be as a professional athlete. I see
the channeling process as fifty people trying to get in a Yugo at one
time–you can’t do it.
There is Always Hope: Education
I wish Paul Robeson (Rutgers), Arthur Ashe (UCLA), and Jerome
“Brud” Holland (Cornell) were alive today so they could mentor many
of our young men striving to be the best in only one thing. While the
media’s images of Black men often has us as brutes, buffoons, and
bucks, Robeson’s, Ashe’s, and Holland’s lives would tell our young
brothers to shake off these negative images and be the best at all they
do.
