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Saturday, November 05, 2005

Football Saturday

It’s not like I have a vested interest in this or anything, but for the life of me I can’t see what in the world is wrong with these remarks about “the black athlete.” For that matter, I don’t see anything wrong with Air Force coach Fisher DeBerry remarking on the fact that a lot of fast football players are black.  He said it inelegantly, to be sure:

Afro-American kids can run very well. That doesn’t mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can’t run, but it’s very obvious to me that they run extremely well.

“Other descents” is, I believe, a freshly coined term, not heretofore employed by sociologists or anthropologists.  It makes DeBerry sound like he’s sayin’ his team needs to git some of them fleet-o-foot Afro-Americans, is what it does.  And DeBerry has courted controversy before, most notoriously when he put up a banner in the Air Force locker room that read, “I am a Christian first and last. . . .  I am a member of Team Jesus Christ.” (Just when the Air Force was facing charges that it was actively discriminating against non-Christians in the service, too!  What a maroon.  A Christian maroon, at that.) Still, the fact remains that black players tend to occupy the speed positions, and have done so for quite some time.  Oh, sure, there have been some dominant white running backs—John Riggins comes to mind, and before him, the great Bronco Nagurski.  Let’s not forget the Galloping Ghost, Red Grange!  And there have been some great white players in the defensive secondary, even after the development of the forward pass.  Last but not least, it’s clearly not the case that all black athletes are fast.  But to say that black athletes have “changed the whole tempo of the game” and “have just done a great job as athletes and as people in turning the game around,” as JoePa did, is not merely to say the obvious; it’s to say the obvious in the form of a compliment.  It’s a little like saying that professional basketball is a different sport now than when George Mikan dominated the court, and that it’s a good thing too.

Contrast this nonce controversy with that of two years ago, when Rush Limbaugh resigned from ESPN after saying

I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well.  There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.

The problem with that remark isn’t that Limbaugh pointed out that McNabb is black; McNabb is black.  Rather, the problem is that Limbaugh claimed McNabb was overrated because he was black.  Quite apart from what that says about Limbaugh’s bizarre beliefs about the NFL and the media—and I believe King Kaufman nailed this at the time—there’s the fact that the remark doesn’t even make sense in football terms.  Think about it this way: in 2003, when Limbaugh shot his mouth off about that “little social concern in the NFL,” there were ten black starting quarterbacks.  They ran the gamut of the talent spectrum from star players like McNabb, Daunte Culpepper, Michael Vick, and Steve McNair, who really do carry their teams and are basically a new kind of player, the mobile 240-pound QB who can run for 100 yards a game, to mediocre guys like Aaron Brooks and Jeff Blake, to marginal players like Quincy Carter and Shaun King.  The idea that the NFL would pick just one of these guys, and have “a little social concern” to hype him and promote him because of his color, was really rather strange in 2003—the kind of remark you’d expect from a rank amateur who has no business being a sports commentator on ESPN.  Now, if Rush had made his remark fifteen years earlier, that would have been another story: in Super Bowl XXII, the Washington Redskins, with unheralded Doug Williams at the helm, beat the heavily favored Broncos after a stupefying 35-point second quarter in which Williams made the Redskins’ Broncos’ secondary look like the local high school JV, throwing for a record-setting four touchdowns.  Was there, in 1988, some excitement about that performance specifically because Williams was black?  Damn right there was—Williams was the first black QB in the Super Bowl, still the last black QB to win a Super Bowl, and he wound up as the MVP of the game, no less.  I had black friends—and white friends (some of my best friends are white!)—who were indeed thrilled that “a brother” had done all that.  To make things even sweeter, Williams had toiled in obscurity with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for years, and some people were glad for him just because he’d done time with a team where you could expect to lose twelve games and get sacked hard fifty times every year.  So yes, back in 1988 there really was “a little social concern,” a desire that “a black quarterback do well.”

And let’s put that “social concern” in social context.  Before that Super Bowl, if you go back to the mid-1970s—as I do—you find only one black starting QB, James Harris of the Rams (who had become pro football’s first black quarterback in 1969 with the Buffalo Bills).  There was also Joe Gilliam, a Steelers backup who saw little action behind Terry Bradshaw; only much later, in 1984, did Warren Moon arrive on the scene, and even he, for all his talent, spent six years in the wilderness of Canadian football before being signed in the NFL.  Back then, you really could hear whispers that black players didn’t have the intelligence or the leadership skills to be quarterbacks, and sometimes the remarks were louder than whispers.  In fact, when Fran Tarkenton hosted Saturday Night Live in 1977, he did a skit with Garrett Morris in which Morris asked him why there was only one black QB in the league, and Tarkenton replied (I’m paraphrasing) that black players weren’t smart enough to play the position (to which Morris said, with astonishment, that he’d never realized that before) and that no sane player would play center and turn his back on a black guy on every play (to which Morris replied, hey, me neither, man—I’ve got a wife and kids).  That was almost thirty years ago, back when SNL had some cojones and was willing to address race-and-sports slurs head-on.  But I haven’t heard that kind of slur in years, not from anyone who knows anything about the game.  Nor have I heard any whispers—let alone comments on ESPN, with the exception of Limbaugh’s—that certain black quarterbacks are overrated because of their race.  That’s not because the league put out new guidelines one day for how to discuss race in the NFL; it’s simply because there are now a significant number of black quarterbacks, some of whom are among the league’s elite and some of whom aren’t, and they’ve made the case for their skills on the field.  And that’s why Rush’s remarks merited all the criticism they got.

I make this point—using some of these words—in my forthcoming book, Liberal Arts:  Classroom Politics and “Bias” in American Higher Education. (Yep, it has a brand new title!  This is the one we’re going with.) Why do I talk about Rush Limbaugh and football in Liberal Arts?  You’ll just have to find out.  But the important thing, for now, is this: matters of race in sports should not be utterly off limits for discussion.  More important, we should distinguish innocuous remarks about race, such as observations that black players dominate the speed positions, from weird and uninformed remarks about race, such as suggestions that one black quarterback out of ten is being deliberately overrated by his league and the sports media because he is black.  Otherwise, if we demonize people who note that black players dominate the speed positions and have changed the tempo of the game, we let real ignoramuses like Limbaugh off the hook, and they can go on pretending that they’re bravely challenging political correctness rather than merely talking out their nether orifices.

There!  I’m glad that’s all cleared up now.  If there are any other long-festering questions about sports you’d like me to clear up this weekend, just let me know.

Posted by Michael on 11/05 at 01:26 PM
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