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Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete - Softcover

Rhoden, William C.

 
9780307353146: Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307353141 ISBN 13: 9780307353146
Verlag: Crown, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports.”—Ebony
 
From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built.

Provocative and controversial, Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of black athletes in the United States, from the plantation to their beginnings in nineteenth-century boxing rings to the history-making accomplishments of notable figures such as Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays. Rhoden reveals that black athletes’ “evolution” has merely been a journey from literal plantations—where sports were introduced as diversions to quell revolutionary stirrings—to today’s figurative ones, in the form of collegiate and professional sports programs. He details the “conveyor belt” that brings kids from inner cities and small towns to big-time programs, where they’re cut off from their roots and exploited by team owners, sports agents, and the media. He also sets his sights on athletes like Michael Jordan, who he says have abdicated their responsibility to the community with an apathy that borders on treason.

The power black athletes have today is as limited as when masters forced their slaves to race and fight. The primary difference is, today’s shackles are invisible.

Praise for Forty Million Dollar Slaves
 
“A provocative, passionate, important, and disturbing book.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Brilliant . . . a beautifully written, complex, and rich narrative.”—Washington Post Book World
 
“A powerful call for more black athletes to give back to their communities.”—Los Angeles Times

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

WILLIAM C. RHODEN has been a sportswriter for the New York Times since 1983, and has written the “Sports of the Times” column for more than a decade. He also serves as a consultant for ESPN’s SportsCentury series, and occasionally appears as a guest on their show The Sports Reporters. In 1996, Rhoden won a Peabody Award for Broadcasting as writer of the HBO documentary Journey of the African-American Athlete. A graduate of Morgan State University in Baltimore, he lives in New York City’s Harlem with his wife and daughter.

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Chapter 1

The Race Begins: The Dilemma of Illusion

Long before there was race and even before there was politics, there were Saturday mornings in the playground.

Every summer, on Saturday mornings my father and I would greet the dawn. We’d have our breakfast, put on shorts and sneakers, walk across the street to the Martha Ruggles Elementary School playground, and practice basketball. My father was my first coach. He was a mathematics teacher by training, and his penchant for teaching extended to sports. He taught me how to catch a football and run a sprint. I played Biddy Basketball at the Chatham branch of the YMCA; my dad was the coach. An astute judge of talent, he recognized that his oldest son needed tutoring. And that’s how those joyous Saturday morning sessions evolved. I was eight years old, my shots barely reached the rim, but my dad constantly reminded me that there was a lot more to the game than shooting. He said that by the time I was able to hit the rim consistently, I’d have an idea of how to play the game. So we worked on fundamentals: dribbling, passing, catching. Now and then we’d play a game of one-on-one. He always won. For a change of pace, we’d run a foot race. He won that, too. But what I loved most about Saturday morning was the bonding. Those practice sessions gave me an opportunity to be with my father, and be with him on a relatively equal playing field. At every turn, I measured my physical prowess against my father’s. At every picnic, on every long walk, I’d challenge him to a race, keeping mental notes all along, noting how long he had to run hard before easing up and letting me win. He was still father, I was son, but I knew that one day, if I became strong enough, quick enough, big enough, competent enough, the dynamics of our athletic relationship would change.

Those memories, carefully tucked away in my heart, are what make sports reverberate in my soul. Not covering the big games, interviewing celebrities and superstars, but childhood recollections of a boy trying to please his parents. The deepest, most ancient pull of sports for me has always been emotional. “Race” was something you did on the sidewalk or on a dusty road on the way home from school. In the beginning, speed and quickness didn’t have a color.

My father tried to shield his three children from the brutality of the racial struggles that swirled about us in the 1950s. Every now and then he’d talk about some slight or indignity he’d suffered at the hands of a white person. Mostly he insulated us from the unfolding drama of the Civil Rights movement. Jackie Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball three years before I was born, but my father wasn’t much of a baseball fan, so I wasn’t shellacked in Jackie’s legend of black Americans in the United States.

My mother was not an avid sports fan, but she was the lion in my soul. Her brother, my uncle Eddie, was a prizefighter in his younger days (my father called him the Canvas Kid). One day, when I complained about Billy Boy, our next-door neighbor, my mother didn’t advise me to turn the other cheek, or to ignore him, or to tell his mother. She essentially told me to go back and kick his ass. I remember the two of us standing in our kitchen, my mother giving me an impromptu boxing clinic. I can still hear her voice as she showed me how to throw a combination: “Bop, bop—just like that,” she said, showing me how to deck Billy Boy. I never did fight Billy Boy. I faced him in the yard soon after my mother’s tutorial but couldn’t bring myself to throw the first punch. This was my first lesson in combat: Power without heart and strategy is meaningless.

My mother laid out the racial facts of life for me. She burst my bubble in our kitchen one afternoon when she said casually that there were more white people than black people in the United States. I was stunned. In my segregated world on Chicago’s South Side, black and brown were the dominant colors. In my world, white people were there, but they weren’t there. Invisible. The stores, the Laundromat, the record shops, my schools. If whites were the majority, where were they? Why didn’t I ever see any?

Of course, the answers to these questions flowed into the larger ocean of segregation and racism. That, in turn, flowed back to the ritual my dad and I enacted when we watched sports.

I learned about race and racism in front of the TV set. My father and I watched football games upstairs, in our bungalow on 78th and Calumet. We sat and cheered on the red leather seat my dad had pulled out of our ’56 Mercury station wagon. Televised football didn’t make a lot of sense to me back then. The images were too crowded, too small, too gray. The fun of it was cheering; and cheering interests were simple in our house. We rooted for the team with the most black players. We cheered for the hometown clubs, the Bears and White Sox, but aside from that, the general rule of thumb was that we cheered for the team with the most colorful presence.

In those days, when black faces were few and far between, we cheered for the color of the skin. We had some variations to the general rule: If the team was from the South and had just one Brother, his team was our team; he was our man. Didn’t matter who the athlete was underneath his uniform or his skin—his true character was less significant than his presence. Out there on the field, he became the torchbearer for the race. Content of character mattered only to the extent that we prayed these pioneers wouldn’t embarrass The Race.

The ritual my dad and I engaged in was one that took place among black sports fans and non-fans throughout the United States. The ritual went further back than Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, or Jesse Owens. It probably went all the way back to the heavyweight prizefighter Jack Johnson in 1910, when the telegram runners passed through black neighborhoods calling out round-by-round progress of Johnson’s historic fight with Jim Jeffries, the first Great White Hope. When Johnson defeated Jeffries on July 4, 1910, black communities across the country exploded in celebration. Other parts of the nation exploded with violence. As news of Johnson’s victory spread, mobs of angry whites beat up and, in some instances, murdered blacks. Many whites feared that the black community might be emboldened by Johnson’s victory over a white man. And they were not mistaken. Those early symbolic victories were soul food.

Symbolic representation was the rule of the day, part of a timeless ritual throughout the United States’ melting pot of ethnicity: Jews cheered for Jews, Irish for Irish, Italians for Italians. But the predicament of black Americans was more complex, precarious, and sometimes seemed even hopeless. African Americans were so disconnected from the American dream that sports often seemed the only venue where the battle for self-respect could be vigorously waged.

My parents and their parents sat around their radios listening to Joe Louis fights, living and dying with every punch. Louis was fighting for himself and his country, but he was also fighting for a black nation within a nation. Every time Jackie Robinson went to bat, he did so for that elusive, ever-evolving state of mind called “Black America.”

In those days of suffocating, uncompromising segregation, we cheered black muscle with a vengeance. The fate of black civilization seemed to rest on every round, every at bat....

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307353141
ISBN 13 
9780307353146
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
305
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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