Erasing Racial Stereotypes in Sports

As a person that writes an NFL blog and is the NFL Senior Writer for the Fantasy Football Maniaxs, I know a thing or two about what is going to draw interest from readers.

There is no bigger topic than race. That is why the tone of the presidential election does not surprise me this year. Even in an election year, when the economy and the war are such important issues to most Americans, the debate keeps returning to the issue of race.

I don’t want to get into the dynamics of which candidate you support or what you think about the various issues in the presidential campaign. While those are all fine topics, it isn’t a road I wish to travel down in this article.

My point is simply that our society is still very concerned about race, whether it is in something as important as our presidential election, or something as simple as how the media treats our favorite player.

For example, on Jan. 16, 2008, I wrote an article for my Fox Sports blog called "Livin’ the Dream at the Body Tap Strip Club". It was an article about the poor judgment that Pacman Jones had shown by having allegations of violence at the strip club brought against him yet again, even though he was suspended at the time of the allegation by the NFL for repeated encounters with legal authorities, most of which also took place at strip clubs.

One of the readers said this about my article: “His viewpoint maybe exactly that, but his overtone is obvious...quick to attack an easy story to grab attention to his blog.”

What the commenter didn’t realize is that I had gotten three times as many comments talking about actual football topics on my blog. I have been featured in the Rumors Etc. section on both the NFL page and the Fox Sports Home Page. 

One article that was featured was the extremely controversial topic of the historical context of the 9-0 Patriots traveling to the 8-0 Colts, and where that game ranked in the history of great NFL regular-season games. I don’t need to do articles about race to get people to read my material about the NFL.

However, his point was well taken. People that don’t have a following can use a topic like race to draw attention to their work; attention that would not ordinarily be available to them if they had to focus on meat-and-potatoes sports issues. 

The issue of race in sports sparks large emotions on both sides of the debate, and it generates both positive and negative discussions of that issue. You don’t even need to be talented or thoughtful to draw attention to yourself when you engage in a racial debate.

It amazes me how poorly an article about race can be made, how it brings up absolutely zero legitimate points, yet it still draws comments from readers.

I have done articles about Michael Vick’s dog fighting, Donovan McNabb's assertion that he is treated differently as a black quarterback, and that Pacman Jones should not be allowed to be Pacman Jones and play football. I have seen a lot of different comments and perspective, ranging from the very thoughtful to the extremely thoughtless.
 
This is an issue that I like to talk about. When it is discussed seriously, it can be a very interesting topic.

I encourage everyone to watch the town-hall meeting Bob Costas did last spring. It will make you think about how sports is reported and discussed in talk radio and on blogs, and where we as a sports culture stand on various racial issues.

Here are my thoughts on where we as a society are at when in it comes to racial differences in sports: 
 

1) There is still racism in the media that covers sports

That isn’t really a newsflash. I don’t think that really shocked anyone. It is pretty obvious, but I will still give you a few examples. How many times have you heard Kevin Garnett referred to as the $126 million man, Barry Bonds as the $43 million man, when that salary meant something, or Shaq referred to by his hefty $122 million contract?

Did you ever hear that about Cal Ripken, Jr.? Who made more money in 2007, Tom Brady, Brett Favre, or Peyton Manning? The media traditionally has not reported prominent white athletes’ salaries with the same vigor and intensity as minority athletes.

The media has made significant strides in that regard since the '90s, but it still exists in many of the stories the media reports. It is important that if we are going to report contracts, accomplishments, and arrests, that we do so in a fair manner. There is no reason to report stories differently based on race.
 
Speaking of arrests, I love the mentality that some fans have when it comes to following a player’s legal troubles.

Here is a prime example.

In June of 2008, Brandon Jones, a wide receiver for the Tennessee Titans, who is black, was charged with a misdemeanor for bringing a loaded firearm to the airport. He had a permit to carry, and the gun was discovered at a security checkpoint. He claims the weapon was left in his bag by accident, as the last time he used the bag was when he took the gun to the shooting range in said bag.

He apologized for the oversight. Keep in mind that the Titans are still trying to get over Pacman Jones. The last thing they want is to have any player be arrested for any reason. They don’t want people thinking that Cincinnati has moved to Tennessee.

There are a number of takes you could focus on: stupid decision, poor judgment, and careless storage of a firearm. Is it wise to leave a loaded firearm in a bag and forget where it is? Could that be a potential hazard for children that may enter the home? All those questions and comments are legitimate.

Then there are the comments that were left on the comments section of the Fox Sports article about the arrest. Here are three of those:
 

Comment One:  “How much longer will fans put up with these idiots. They make millions off our money for tickets, watching the games, shirts etc. and we have to put up with this ####. I myself quit watching most pro sports two years ago. Can't bring myself to support thugs and morons even though I love the games.”
 
Comment Two: “This is typical Titan problems. They will never have quality players with class or brains until they break out the checkbook and purchase some marquee players. Look for them to be high in the draft after next year because they are not going anywhere. They should never have fired Chow as he was the class of organization.”
 
Comment Three: “Would have thought everyone knew that guns in airports get you arrested. What a loser. He deserves whatever he gets just for having no brain."

I understand that comments like these are typical on websites. It is a combination of ignorance and trying to rile up other readers by being controversial.

However, I have so many problems with those comments.

First, the guy that says he hasn’t followed pro sports for two years. Why are you reading about the NFL and commenting on it? Is the only thing the blogger follows is the criminal arrests by professionals? That just doesn’t add up to me.

I think you have a lot of people that say they won’t follow sports because of the arrests, but a much smaller number actually follow through. As long as it isn’t their team, they can live with it.

Furthermore, if their team is winning titles, they can overlook it (see '90s Dallas Cowboys). I think the Portland "Jailblazers" of about seven-10 years ago lost a lot of their fans for repeated legal problems, combined with their inability to beat the Lakers. I don’t think Los Angeles Lakers fans stopped watching the NBA because Portland's players were being arrested.

Second, you know most of these people are not the moral compass of our society. I would suspect that many of the same people leaving these comments cheat, steal, and act dishonorably, and then complain when someone else commits the smallest error.

Third, and most importantly, just because a person makes a mistake, that does not mean that the mistake defines them. Just because a kid grows up in a household that resides at the bottom of the income bracket, that does not mean the guy is a thug and has no morals.  

Let’s start with Brandon Jones.

I have no idea what his situation was growing up, or what he is like as a person today. Regardless, does a misdemeanor charge for unlawful possession of a handgun make someone a thug and a loser? I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because I haven’t been reading about unlawful behavior from him before.

If he gets charged with this two or three more times, he is an idiot and he has no excuse. One lapse in judgment should not destroy a person’s reputation.

Why is this a story? Why when every athlete commits the smallest of crimes is it newsworthy? The answer is obvious: It sells papers, and people are interested in celebrities’ legal problems.

In my opinion, there are some stories that require attention. O.J. “allegedly” killing his wife and her friend, Ron Goldman. That is newsworthy whether it is O.J. Simpson or Orenthal James Simpson. His celebrity turned that into a media circus, but murders are something that our society reports.

However, if Brandon Jones was a factory worker or a taxi driver, or even an accountant or doctor, I doubt the paper prints that story, and I also doubt that, if they did, anyone would read it or care.

A good rule of thumb is that if the celebrity has a solid reputation, and the only thing driving the story is the celebrity, it probably isn’t a very big deal.

Pacman Jones was not a story because he got into a fight at a strip club. He was a story because a bouncer was paralyzed during one of these incidents. He was a story because of the frequency of the incidents. The NFL needed to act in that situation.

However, does the NFL need to get rid of players that commit misdemeanors? If our employers held us to that standard, there wouldn’t be a lot of us working. While it would be nice to have an arrest-free league, that isn’t realistic or practical.

Finally, we need to look at the person as a whole. Would knowing that Brandon Jones was involved with Rebuilding Together, the nation's largest nonprofit organization at this year’s Super Bowl change your opinion?

This is what the organization does, in the words of Gary Officer, the President and the CEO of Rebuilding Together: "The partnership between API and Rebuilding Together has and will have a long-term effect on the homeowners we assist. By installing energy efficient products in their home, we not only enable them to live in more comfort, but to benefit from the repair monetarily by saving money."

Jones, Garrard (Jaguars), and Tapeh (Eagles) were three players involved with the project at Super Bowl XLII. They donated money, materials, and time to help on two renovation projects in the Phoenix area.

Nevertheless, people seem to forget that or don’t want to bother to do the research on a person. I didn’t know Brandon Jones volunteered at the Super Bowl for that charity. It also only took me one Google search to find out.

When a story like this comes out, so too do the stereotypes. It is assumed that Jones is a thug. It is assumed that he has nine kids with nine moms (sorry Travis Henry), and that he doesn’t pay for any of them. It is assumed that he is among the worst segment of our population. It is assumed that he is everything that is wrong with athletics. It couldn’t possibly be that he is a good person that made a poor decision.

If you want examples of athletes that get it, you don’t have to look very hard. Read the story about Leon Powe. His mother was a drug addict and the guy grew up homeless, only to make it the NBA and save his entire family from that difficult environment.

Another example of someone that didn’t grow up in a ghetto, but still had extreme hardship was Warrick Dunn. His mother (who was a police officer) was shot and killed while he was a senior in high school. Dunn became the head of his family, and he raised his siblings in L.A. while on scholarship at Florida State.

He founded the Warrick Dunn Foundation and Homes for the Holidays program. He should be made a saint for all the charitable work he has done and all the lives he has touched.

The next time you think that growing up poor or in a bad neighborhood or a bad situation makes that player want to commit crime, read about these guys.

Then go read about Jeffery Skilling, who was the white CEO of Enron in 2001. Except when he is convicted, it's called “embezzlement,” “white-collar crime,” and “schemes to manipulate financial results.” People become enraged, but I never hear that we need to get suburban white people out of the corporate environment before no one in this country can retire.

Instead, the crimes aren’t even called stealing or screwing hard working Americans out of their retirement and pensions. Instead, it is given a colorful name that diminishes the seriousness of the act.

Not every black athlete that gets in trouble grew up in Section Eight housing, the projects, or the ghetto. Not every black athlete that does well and gives back to the community grew up in a situation like Grant Hill, where his father worked in the front office of the Baltimore Orioles and his mother was a successful Washington D.C. attorney.

I think that too many people forget that having a lot of money does not equate to having a lot of morals. People’s attitudes and values are deeper than the size of their pocketbook or how much money their parents had when they grew up.
 

2) There is still racism in sports 

Again, not a newsflash. Anyone that wants to believe that there is no racism in sports is kidding themselves. The sporting world is a cross-section of our society. There is no way that our society can be facing the issues it has while sports is on a higher plateau.

I think racism is most prevalent in the grade schools, high schools, and smaller colleges. There isn’t a lot of financial gain to be had at those institutions. I think a racist high-school coach could easily favor white athletes over black athletes and get away with it.

I think white teammates could treat minority teammates differently without suffering financial consequences. Many of these coaches are volunteers, or they make very little in terms of salary for their time.

The players are often playing without scholarships, and they have little or no chance of making it at the pro level. Many of the coaches have no desire to move up the ranks of the coaching fraternity. With no financial penalty for committing racist acts, and little or no attention paid to these programs, it would be very easy to discriminate against minority athletes.

However, that doesn’t mean that every time a white coach wants to move a black quarterback to defensive back that he is a racist. Brett Favre was recruited by Southern Mississippi with the hope that he could be moved to safety. Steve Young went to BYU because a lot of colleges wanted him to switch positions. He waited behind Jim McMahon, hoping to play QB. Michael Jordan was cut from his high-school basketball team.

A lot of these coaches aren’t racist; they just aren’t very good.

There is a reason that coaching is not their primary source of income. There is a reason they aren’t a high-profile coach at a BCS school or in the pro ranks. They are volunteers or they are paid a meager salary. They do the best they can, and they don’t always get things right.

I think that while it is good to scrutinize things, we also have to be realistic.  Sometimes we try to search for deep, meaningful answers to why people decide certain things. A lot of times it is nothing more than they are bad decision makers. 
 

3) Money has reduced racism in professional sports as much as anything else

Racism still exists at the top levels of college and professional sports. There are always legitimate gripes about whether or not there are enough black head coaches.

At the NCAA Division-I level, I think those concerns are very legitimate. The pro level still has some concerns, but I believe they are light years ahead of the NCAA in terms of hiring processes and results.

The Rooney Rule is not perfect, but it definitely has involved people in the hiring process that might not have been afforded that opportunity 10 years ago.

I think that what cured this problem is that the money is too great.

If you are paying $500 million for a professional football team, you cannot not hire a black coach or play a black quarterback if you thought the two could help you win a championship. You aren’t going to pay that much for a franchise and run it into the ground.

That is why Donovan McNabb’s comments rang hollow to me in his HBO interview last fall. I understand where he is coming from, and I believe he was being sincere. I just didn’t agree with his assessment.

Winning cures almost everything.

In 2005, after years of incredible service to the Packers, the Milwaukee Journal did a poll, where out of 5,000 Packers fans, 80 percent thought Favre should be traded if the Packers could get value. That was Favre’s only losing season in his 16-year Packer career. Kurt Warner lost his job a year after winning his second NFL MVP and leading the Rams to their second Super Bowl in three years.
 
Michael Vick and JaMarcus Russell were not drafted No. 1 overall because Arthur Blank and Al Davis wanted to correct years of injustice. It was because those men believed those quarterbacks gave them the best chance to win a title. If they thought Jesse Palmer or Brady Quinn would have given them a better chance to win, they would have picked those guys instead.  
 
As popular as Brady and Manning are, if either goes out and has a 10 TD/20 INT season with the Colts or Pats, and go 5-11 in the process, there will be a QB controversy. If both become injury prone and don’t complete three full-seasons and miss the playoffs two out of three years, as McNabb has done, the fans will scream for a replacement.

If Manning or Brady’s backup does lead the Colts or Pats to the playoffs, like Garcia did for the Eagles when McNabb was hurt in 2006, people will want the Colts and Pats to go in a different direction. If McNabb wants to be loved, he doesn’t need to change skin color. He needs to play like he did in 2004 and lead the Eagles to a Super Bowl title.

Professional sports are a high-stakes enterprise worth millions of dollars. The 24-hour media coverage has infused millions and millions of dollars in revenue and endorsements into play. It makes winning a rewarding practice.

Some people (Bob Kraft, owner of the Patriots) run their organizations with extreme efficiency. Some people (Mike Brown, owner of the Bengals) run their teams into the ground. But where the line between winning and losing is so thin, and the dollars that are at stake are so high, I have a tough time believing that most owners would consciously make decisions based on race at the expense of profit and success.

I think the problems that plague professional sports, with regards to opportunity, are more institutional in nature, and they stem from prejudices that exist in the college and high school ranks.

Quality people aren’t getting a chance to compete for professional jobs because they aren’t getting the experience they need at the lower levels to be considered for those jobs. Improving those areas will do a great deal to improve things at the professional level.
 

4) Minorities need to stop championing the wrong victims

There are certain things we should all be able to agree on. The sun rises in the east. It sets in the west. We should also be able to agree that Pacman Jones is a bad person. We should be able to agree that Michael Vick should be behind bars. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.
 
Yet, when Roger Goodell wants to suspend Mr. Jones for a year, and require him to not sit in the back of a cop car whenever he is in a social setting, people cry foul. Pacman is misunderstood. He is the victim. He hasn’t been convicted of anything. He hasn’t done anything wrong.

What Pacman has done wrong is he has behaved in a manner that not only gives him a bad name, but gives the Titans, Cowboys, and the NFL bad names as well.  The NFL has a right to discourage such behavior. They should be allowed to protect their product and not have it hijacked by someone with zero judgment.

I had a blogger tell me that Michael Vick should be allowed to do whatever he wanted with his livestock. Another said that if hunting is legal, there is no reason dog fighting shouldn’t be legal as well.
 
Kenny Rogers gave great advice in his song "The Gambler".  “You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, and no when to run.”  You can defend those two if you want. When you do so, you drag your credibility down to their level.
 
I get that we have stupid people in this country. I could say something racist and foul, and I would get a segment of the population that would hop on board. I could say that 2+2=4, and I would have a segment of the population tell me I need to go back to school. I get that.

There is a certain segment of the population that will play devil’s advocate, no matter what the position may be. But there are too many intelligent people that stick up for some of these athletes, and it is inexcusable.

Athletes like Kobe Bryant, Marvin Harrison, or Ray Lewis are easier to defend.  These are guys that have been good citizens. Bryant and Lewis admitted that they used bad judgment. In Bryant’s case, it was having an affair. In Lewis’s case, it was being around a shooting and trying to obstruct justice.

They defended themselves successfully against the more serious charges of rape and murder. They paid the price with their reputations. They apologized and were sincere. They took the blame and did not look to pass it on to others. They worked hard to rebuild themselves and stayed out of future trouble.

If Bryant or Lewis were accused of something tomorrow, I would try to make every attempt to give them the benefit of the doubt.

That is one reason why I have not written anything criticizing Harrison. He has never been in trouble, and I want to give him the benefit of the doubt before writing an article to capitalize on his unfortunate situation.

Then you have Pacman Jones. He has been arrested and charged on numerous occasions, stemming from accusations of assaults and various controversies that always revolve around strip clubs. Pacman loves to make it rain at the strip club, and the result is that the safety of the people at the strip club is compromised. 

The night before he was supposed to meet with the commissioner about his strip club problems, he attended, you guessed it, a strip club. While his suspension was up for appeal, he had a woman accuse him of hitting her at...you guessed right again, a strip club. To be fair to Pacman, the alleged victim later retracted her statement. Still, could someone have worse judgment?

Lawyers always say that you never argue a good law with a bad set of facts. The problems with Pacman is that while he may have some interesting issues when it pertains to race relations, his credibility is so damaged that he makes a horrible person to stand beside.

His behavior is so repulsive and unpopular that no one wants to hear about his problems. They want him to rejoin the human race. The bar isn’t really being set that high.

That also pertains to Michael Vick. He was not the victim. He had money and he had fame. Hundreds of millions of dollars couldn’t buy him the legal representation necessary to save him. He pleaded guilty.

Even after that, there were still people that said he probably wasn’t guilty, but he was forced to plead guilty as a result of the threat of longer sentencing had he been found guilty at trial.

Never mind that Michael Vick failed a drug test between the time he pleaded guilty and while he was awaiting sentencing. Even today, with all we know about him, he is still the victim.

When advocates waste their time, energy, and resources defending people like Jones and Vick, it becomes the boy that cried wolf. Those accusations start to fall on deaf ears. Then when it comes up in a case where race has legitimacy and merit, and there is actually something important to talk about, people just tune it out.

It doesn’t help us, as a society, to solve the problems we need to solve and get to where we need to be when we are arguing about things that are so basic that everyone should be able to agree on them.

I think our country has come a long way, not only in our race relations, but also in how we view racial issues in sports. The fact that we are discussing it in such depth is a good thing.

However, I think there is still a long way to go.

As whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and human beings, we need to remember that when we throw our hats into the arena that is race relations, that we do so with some thought and integrity. It is too important of an issue to take lightly.

I don’t have all the answers. I am just one person with an opinion. There are plenty of people that know more about this topic than I do. There are always going to be good ideas and bad ideas when it comes to topics such as this. If we can just eliminate the baseless ideas, it will benefit everyone.

Derek Lofland is the NFL director for Fantasy Football Maniaxs.com