For this week’s blog we are going to talk about our experiences in sport – particularly regarding race/ethnicity. Throughout this past week in lecture we discussed the variety of ways that the color of our skin has come to influence our everyday (sporting) experiences, as well as perpetuate mythological beliefs about supposed genetic differences between the so-called ‘races’. Often this happens at the covert level, as in the way Terrell Owens has been treated in the media for being a ‘horrible’ teammate, that hasn’t led his team to any playoff victories since 2002, and through his departure will, supposedly, make the Cowboys a stronger team (someone please explain this to me). Last I checked the 49ers still haven’t been close to a good team since he left, the Eagles are still coming up short in their quest for Super Bowl glory, and there were 52 other players on those talented Cowboys teams that were a big part of their losses as well. Sure T.O. had a miserable game against the Seahawks (2 catches, 24 yards), but it was pouring rain and windy throughout, and everyone forgets that it was Jason Witten who ran a shorter route than he should have in the games final seconds meaning that he came up short of a first down which would have allowed the Cowboys to milk the clock and score a touchdown or FG that put the Seahawks away. Instead, after a review correctly overturned Witten’s mistake in running the route, the Cowboys had to rush on the field and attempt a field goal with a greased football leading to the infamous Tony Romo drop. Two years ago was different, T.O. had a fine game (4 catches 49 yards and 1 TD, plus he should have had two more but Romo underthrew him on both occassions), but again Jason Witten (everyone’s favorite in the supposed feud between he and T.O.) got his forward progress stopped on the 25 yard line on the team’s final drive – which cost the Cowboys their final timeout and effectively their chances to beat the Giants. So why does T.O. get the blame for this? How Is it that Jason Witten, whose two mistakes proved costly to the Cowboys in their last two playoff runs, gets no blame? The reasons why the Cowboys lost are just as much Witten’s fault as anyone’s, but nothing…really? What we have here, as T.O. gets shipped to Buffalo, is a perpetuation of those implicit beliefs about the supposedly naturally different behaviors and abilities of white and black players being defined for us by the sport media. On the one hand, Witten, a white player (however contentious claiming a racial make-up can be), has supposedly overcome his genetic shortcomings (being white) through hard work and dedication to his craft thereby becoming a useful NFL tight-end. The sport media loves a guy like this, and his play against the Eagles after losing a helmet is immortalized on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcRLgkLQh_Y), and his mistakes get overlooked. Conversely, T.O., the ‘natural’ black athlete, is positioned as a petulant child, who ruins everything, and only hurts teams despite his superior athletic talent. Rarely do we hear about his ridiculous workout regiment, or his role in developing younger players –some who may not even end up on his team- because it is easier for the media to position him as the black athlete who had it all, but couldn’t control his feelings and behavior. I’m not saying T.O. was/is perfect, but imagine if it was he who was stopped like Witten in the playoffs, is there any way that those mistakes get swept under the rug? While these racialized undertones often get played out in the media and popular culture, there still exist forms of overt racist belief rooted in pseudo-science about the supposed natural differences of white and non-white athletes. A perfect example of this was two years ago ESPN.com’s The Sports Guy (as popular a sport columnist as there is on the internet) wrote two columns that the website mysteriously ‘lost’ following their web publication for quite some time. Noticing it as a teachable moment I’ve been waiting for the two columns to come back, and recently I have been able to find them in his archives (though no one is likely to remember them since they were put up on the web two years ago). Anyway now they are back, and I’d like us to take a look at them and suggest that overt racism still exists in the sport media (http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/blog/archive?name=simmons&month=3&year=2007). On March 27, 2007 Simmons wrote that the 2006 NCAA Basketball Tournament was not as entertaining as past tournaments had been and he cited several reasons for why this was ‘true’, as he pointed to the fact that George Mason made it to the Final 4, the NBA allowing kids to skip college and move to the pro ranks, and, most contentiously, that: Two white guys (Adam Morrison and J.J. Redick) were indisputably the two best college basketball players alive. – Bill Simmons Now as we have learned throughout this week genetic scientists working on the human genome have been unable to link an individual’s skin color to their ability to do anything – let alone play basketball. Yet this is exactly what Simmons is positing here to a reading public that largely accepts this statement as truth. Before anyone suggests that I’m jumping to conclusions take a look at what he wrote the following day: Yesterday's blog elicited a few e-mails along the lines of this one from Mark Jacobs in New York: "I was very offended by your comments about last year's season being such a disaster that 'two white guys' were indisputably the best players in college basketball. Basketball doesn't require a non-white gene to be played well. You ought to look up Larry Bird or Pete Maravich. Did you write that the last football season was a disaster because two African- American coaches were in the Super Bowl? Didn't think so. Keep your comments to sports and athletics and stay out of the social arena." Um, I was trying to be funny … I just forgot that we live in a world where you can't joke about anything. This nation is tighter than Meg Ryan's face right now. Loosen up. It's not a crime to joke about the fact that last year's college hoops season sucked so much that the best two players were white. See, basketball has been a predominantly black sport for about 40 years now, a blessing because the game evolved in a vertical direction and became infinitely more entertaining than the product from the late '50s. If you wrote down the best NBA players from the last three decades, you'd probably notice that all of them were black except for Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Steve Nash, Chris Mullin, Dirk Nowitzki and John Stockton. Now, if last year's best college players were on the level of Bird, Nash and Stockton, it would be one thing. But J.J. Redick and Adam Morrison both flamed out in the tournament and look like potential busts as pros. Hence, my joke in yesterday's blog. For anyone who was offended, I'm sorry … not for the joke, but for the bug up your ass. So while Simmons defended his comment as a form of humor that, if we didn’t get, somehow indicated a failure on our part, he did in fact suggest that black basketball players are somehow genetically advanced in terms of being able to play the sport. But as the reader he berated rightly indicated, where does that gene come from? In other words how dark does your skin have to be to get the ‘vertical’ jumping gene? What above the football gene? Ski Jumping? Again what’s interesting to me here is that, by hiding the column for a period of time, ESPN allowed Simmons to write his racist beliefs, spread it to his readers, and never have to answer to the truth. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be able to make jokes or have fun, and if he couched his first comment in the idea that poor black players, who need basketball to move up the social class ladder, are jumping to the pro’s to make money thereby draining talent resources from the NCAA (white/black/other) rather than some sort of rehashing of pseudo-scientific genetic abilities it would have been fine. The fact is he didn’t and ESPN.com is protecting a talented white writer from any possible, and well-deserved controversy, thereby allowing him to continue writing these types of things in his column. Anyway this week we discussed two ways race and racism are perpetuated in the media and our everyday lives. In your responses I’d like for you to discuss how this may have had an a/effect on your sporting choices and experiences as an individual. Were you encouraged to think like Mr. Simmons? Have you changed your mind? Have a good spring break!