The odds that any high school athlete will play a sport on the professional level are about 10,000 to 1. Yet according to a recent survey conducted by Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, 66 percent of all African-American males between the ages of 13 and 18 believe they can earn a living playing professional sports. That is more than double the proportion of young white males who hold such beliefs. Black parents also are four times more likely than white parents to believe that their children are destined for careers in professional athletics.
As an industry, sports have also created a relatively small, elite class of black multimillionaires. But these black players and their outrageous salaries, together with the media and advertising endorsements, have created the impression among many lower-income blacks that there are unlimited opportunities on the playing field. The result, say experts, is an obsession with sports among many young African-American males often at the expense of the more traditional, if less glamorous, route to upward mobility: education.
There is an overemphasis on sports in the black community, and too many black students are putting all their eggs in one basket,” says Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint. (www. usnews. com/usnews/Febissue/sports. htm) In his controversial book, Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race, “The whole problem here,” writes author John Hoberman, “is that the black middle class is rendered essentially invisible by the parade of black athletes and criminals on television.
That in turn fuels the perception that African-Americans excel in physical pursuits and Caucasians in intellectual endeavors. As in most high schools, the real social champions at a nearly all-black public academy on Chicago’s South Side are not the boys and girls who can think and problem solve but, rather, the kids who can dunk a basketball or run a quick 40-meter dash. “A lot of kids will tell you they want to be like Mike,” says one student, referring to the most recognized black athlete, basketball star Michael Jordan. In this context, being like Mike does not mean becoming an entrepreneur, a corporate spokesman, or a college graduate.
It means being a highflying, windmill slammer of a ballplayer. (http://racerelations. about. com/gi/dynamic/offsite. htm) Faced with the historic indignities of racism and segregation, blacks came to view sports as a source of inspiration. During the early part of the century, for instance, the boxing victories of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis served as tangible proof that black men could compete against whites and win. The same held true for Jackie Robinson’s entry into Major League Baseball in 1947. Black baseball fans, no matter where they lived, became instant Brooklyn Dodger loyalists.
The sports arena became a battleground against white supremacy. Ironically, the victory also concerned the black middle class, which did not want sports to replace churches and schools as the major focuses of the black community. To some degree, this is what has happened since Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line. Some of the numbers are striking. More than 40 percent of pro-baseball players are now black or Latino, a figure that has come to look low compared with the National Football League, which is 65 percent black, and the National Basketball Association, which is 80 percent black.
This is such that Jason Williams, a rare white star, is nicknamed “White Chocolate. ” (http://racerelations. about. com/gi/dynamic/offsite. htm) Whites have in some respects become sports’ second-class citizens. In a surreal inversion of Robinson’s era, white athletes are frequently the ones now tagged by the stereotypes of skin color. White athletes, even when they play sports dominated by blacks, are still entering an industry not only controlled by whites in every phase of authority and operation but also largely sustained by white audiences.
Although blacks dominate the most popular team sports, they still make up only 9 percent of all people in the United States who make a living or try to make a living as athletes, less than their percentage in the general population. With five African Americans among their players, the Edmonton Oilers are leading infamously white-dominated professional hockey into a new era. The Oilers have the most African-American players on any professional hockey roster since the 1940s. “Any time you can have series of five players on one team it creates a focus for the audience,” said Ken Martin, spokesperson for the NHL.
First off, they’re great players. But it’s a bonus that they happen to be minorities and have the great personalities necessary to be role models. ” The African-Americans of the team, which accounts for five of the 15 black players in the league, is expected to arouse interest in the sport among African Americans. “It’s a transition period right now, similar to what baseball went through,” Martin said. Currently, there are only 27 minorities in the whole league. The costly nature of the sport has been the biggest barrier for African Americans to date.
Expensive equipment and a lack of access to ice rinks can discourage those in low-income neighborhoods from participating. (http://www. diversityinc. com/insidearticle. cfm) It is easy enough to explain black dominance in some sports like boxing. It is the Western sport that has the longest history of black participation, so there is tradition. Moreover, it is a sport that has always attracted poor and marginalized men. Black men have persistently made up a disproportionate share of the poor and the marginalized.
Also, instruction is within easy reach; most boxing gyms are located in poor neighborhoods, where a premium is placed on being able to fight well. Jose Torres, light heavyweight boxing champ in the sixties talked of how boxers are generally perceived to be the most feeble-minded athletes, and not just because of the nature of their contest but because many are black and Latino. “Boxing is a contest of intelligence and character,” he said. “It is never perceived that way. It’s not the person who punches the hardest that wins. It’s the guy who punches when he has to punch and where he has to punch. ” (www. bergen. com/moresports/races. m)
Despite the enormous success of Kenyan marathon runners in the past 15 years, running remains a relative problem for the national sport of soccer. Unfortunately, Kenyans are among the world’s worst soccer players. Despite the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars of the country’s sparse sports resources, Kenya, is regularly trounced by far smaller countries in West Africa. In fact, there is no such thing as an East African soccer powerhouse. The same thing is true of sprinting. Kenya has tried desperately over the past decade to replicate its wondrous success in distance running at the sprints, to no avail.
The best Kenyan time ever of 10. 28 seconds in the 100 meters, ranks somewhere near 5,000th on the all-time list. This leaves many spectators questioning the training capabilities of these athletes. Some say that they are not living up to their potential as excellent running machines. This stereotype holds true within others sports. (http://www. salon. com/news/sports/olympics/2000/race/index. html) Sadly, black athletes have had to contend with these stereotypes that would limit their opportunities to fill on-field leadership slots, the so-called thinking positions, such as quarterback or head coaches.
But the current crop of black quarterbacks leading their teams to the playoffs has helped to dispel these thoughts. In 1999, two of the top three players in the NFL draft were black quarterbacks. The story line for last year’s NFL playoff games revolves around five “minority” superstar quarterbacks: four blacks and a Jew. An outraged letter to the Los Angeles Times in response to its entry in the black quarterback phenomenon sweepstakes correctly addressed the problem.
I find it sad and disappointing that you find it necessary to label these athletes as ‘black quarterbacks. ‘ Why can’t they just be quarterbacks? ” On one playoff team, the Philadelphia Eagles, 20 of the 22 starters, including all 11 on defense, are black. (www. usnews. com/usnews/Febissue/sports. htm) Given that blacks are over represented in the most popular sports and that young black men are more likely than young white men to consider athletics as a career, there has been much commentary about whether sports are bad for blacks.
One could make the analogy that sports are a form of slavery or blatant political and economic oppression. Superficially, this argument is made by discussing a player is the “property” of his team or of his manager; he can be traded or “sold” to another team. On a more sophisticated level, the slavery analogy is used to describe sports structurally: the way audiences are lured to sports as a false spectacle, and the way players are controlled mentally and physically by white male authority, their lack of access to the free-market worth of their labor.
Contrary to the white perception that it was an absolute triumph for African-Americans when Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, former Negro Leaguer Bob Scott of Elizabeth told of the flip side: the destruction of the Negro Leagues after their stars defected to the white-owned major leagues. “It was the only empire, the only big business that Negroes had in those days,” he said. “It was a source of pride. People came dressed to the ballpark the way they came to church. Today, we make millions of dollars and still we don’t own anything. “
