Dividing Line
Trash Talk on Sports: Clinton should warn kids not to bet on a pro career
By Jack E. White
(TIME April 27) -- I'm no fan of Bill Clinton's so-called initiative on race, which
assumes that we would all get along better if we just threw
ourselves into a White House-led conversation on the subject. If
there's anything this overheated issue does not need, it's more
touchy-feely rhetoric and posturing from Washington. There are
no subjects that we debate more incessantly--and
pointlessly--than race relations, unless it's sports and
politics. Toss the three together on cable TV in an attempt to
grab a big audience of sports-addicted males, and the result can
be vacuity on an Olympian scale.
That's why the presidential town hall on race and sports,
broadcast by ESPN last week, was so disappointing. The
discussion rarely rose above the level of sports-talk radio. A
few urgent topics--such as how the millions of dollars earned by
black and Latino pro athletes can be converted into durable
economic development for their communities--were briefly touched
upon. But most of the exchange was, well, inside baseball--so
narrowly focused on the inner workings of big-league college and
professional sports that any lessons for the larger society were
left unclear. How, for example, increasing the number of white
cornerbacks in the National Football League will improve race
relations quite frankly beats the hell out of me. What we
need--and did not get from this panel--is a real discussion
about the ways that playing sports, not just obsessing on them,
can be used to transmit values that advance racial justice and
equity. For that kind of talk you need educators and
philosophers, not just coaches, jocks, ex-jocks and wannabe
jocks who went into politics.
Overlooked in last week's discussion, for example, were the
astronomical odds against even a gifted athlete's making it to
the major leagues. Far more important than the shortage of black
and Latino professional coaches and general managers is the huge
surplus of inner-city youngsters who don't think they have to
hit the books so long as they can crash the boards, or the
opposing quarterback. That self-destructive attitude gets
reinforced every time a high school sports star gets special
treatment over an A-student classmate; every time a
multimillionaire pro like Golden State Warriors guard Latrell
Sprewell gets off the hook for violent behavior that would cost
him his job and get him arrested if he earned his living any
other way. It may have something to do with the wide and
troubling gap that persists between black and white scores on
standardized tests for college admission. Yet we continue to put
sports figures on pedestals, paying some of them enough to fund
a small-town school system, while we offer few rewards in
prestige and applause to youngsters who excel in academics.
Indeed, in some black neighborhoods, kids who do well in school
are ridiculed for "acting white." Black entertainers Will Smith
and Chris Rock have boldly (and hilariously) taken aim at that
attitude. Why not the President and his sports panel?
Don't get me wrong. Playing sports can teach important lessons
about teamwork and striving, but it offers a career to only a
relative handful of athletes. And until we put sports back into
perspective, we're playing a sucker's game.
|
News
Click here