2006-07 Broadcast Season
Broadcast Program Transcripts
Episode #2217
The Politics of Blacks in Sports

Brown: Natalie Bullock Brown, host
Rhoden: William C. Rhoden, New York Times sports columnist, author
Omar: Hanif Omar, host of Fast Break
Banks:  Eugene Banks, former NBA player
Ballen:  Dwayne Ballen, sports analyst

Brown: A sport’s writer in his New York Times bestseller poses an important question about the relationship between black athletes and their owners.  Are today’s black athletes highly paid slaves in an arena largely controlled by whites?  We’ll explore this question and the politics of blacks in sports, next on Black Issues Forum.

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Brown: Welcome to Black Issues Forum.  I am Natalie bullock Brown.  New York Times sports columnist, Bill Rhoden, has a lot of people talking about his New York Times bestseller Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athlete.  In his book he traces the history of black athletes in sports from the 17th century to modern times.  And comments on how the image, purpose, power and responsibility of black athletes have played out through the course of social change.  A little more than 50 years ago blacks in America couldn’t dream of sharing a playing field with whites.  Today many popular professional sports are dominated by highly paid African American players.  But Rhoden asks, while blacks are a part of the game how much control do they really have?  We have an excellent panel of guests today to help us explore this question.  But first Black Issues Forum had the opportunity to talk to Bill Rhoden on his recent visit to the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.  Here’s what he had to say about power, black athletes and the value of knowing our history.

Rhoden: The thing that was terrible about the plantation aside from just the treatment of people, the thing that was worse is that you didn’t really get to share in the profit of your labor, you know.  And they share the power and TV revenue and all that, but not in terms of the power and the upward mobility and being consistently in positions of control.  So those are some of the parallels.  I wouldn’t go so far as saying that these guys are slaves.  It’s not that, but there is definitely a vacuum when it comes to power.  Sometimes I think it’s, you know, people in my generation’s fault that we didn’t really do a great job of making sure that our children, our younger brothers, were steeped in this history.  Because I think a lot of times when we were coming up there was such a—the movement was so strong that even if you didn’t really want to know the history, you were part of it.  You were part of the struggle whether you wanted to be part of it or not.  It was very difficult to be neutral, you know.  But with, you know, integration and things like that, it becomes easier to hide.  You know, you can kind of float out to the suburbs.  You know, you could go to different places and not really have to be connected to the black community and the black experience.  And I don’t know if we really did as much as we could to keep those institutions in place, to make sure our kids knew about institutions, you know, a lot of young people don’t—you know, they don’t have time for that.  “That’s old.  That happened yesterday,” you know. 

But we just have to continue to hammer into our kids, “you got to know this stuff because stuff is constantly coming at you,”--and if you don’t know how previous generations dealt with this—and the thing about racism and race, it changes form.  It’s not what it was in the 17th century.  It isn’t what it was in the 18th century.  What it—it comes in different disguises.  And this generation’s disguise is “everything is cool, because we can’t see it.”  It’s more like a silent spike, you know, and you wake up one day—particularly our kids—you wake up one day, and you are 18 or 19 years old, and bam!  You know, you realize you are a black man or a black woman, and you are really not equipped to deal with you.  You’re like well, I thought I was—no.  It’s not.  You know, it’s about power.  How much power do you have? 

For example, if you look at the NBA now these guys are making lots of money, millionaires or multi-millionaires but yet they have got owners who are telling them and the commissioner and a coach telling them what to wear, what not to wear.  They are telling them that you can’t talk back now.  You know, people get tired of you guys talking back.  You can’t talk back now.  You know, so it doesn’t matter how much money got we still control a lot of stuff we control—the movements you are going to be in because you don’t want to lose what you got.  And that’s what we hold over you. 

Brown: And now we are pleased to welcome our panel of guests for today’s discussion about the politics of blacks in sports.  We have with us first, Eugene Banks, who is a former Duke basketball standout.  And played professionally with the Chicago Bulls.  We also have with us Hanif Omar, CEO of FastbreakRadio.com and host of the weekly sports program Fast Break heard every Friday at 7:30 p.m. on WNCU radio.  And last but not least we have Dwayne Balance, a sports analyst and reporter who has worked with various commercial and cable networks.  Welcome to all of you.

All:  Thank you. 

Brown: So let’s just flesh out what William Rhoden, Bill Rhoden is talking about in his book Forty Million Dollar Slaves.  I am going to start with Eugene.  Do you think that there is something to what he is saying?  That black athletes actually are well paid slaves?

Banks: Well, most definitely.  The more you listen to him and then the more you read into the book, it really tells you a lot of things because here is one thing that is interesting.  They talk about a lot of the player’s salaries and they will say, ___ Iverson [ph] is making this much and Kevin Garnett is making—you never hear how much David Stern is making.  You never hear how much—you know, they talk about Mark Cuban but you never hear how much the owners and all these people that are running all these things, how much they make.  And they keep that, there’s a reason why they do that.  And he is hitting on some points because I think a lot of these guys are not realizing the power that they do have, still looking at the NBA you don’t have maybe three or four black owners that own a team.  Why is that?  You know, there is something else that’s going on and we need to get to the root of that and that’s why I think his book really hits on some key points that really need to be addressed especially for the athletes themselves because they do have—make a lot of money.  But, then again, still, they don’t have the power. 

Brown:  Let me just follow up on something you said.  You mentioned that you think the athletes do actually have quite a bit of power but maybe they don’t realize the sort of power they have.  Maybe they don’t exercise it.  What do you mean?

Banks: Well, individually.  I mean, power comes in numbers.  I mean, when you do it solidified and unified and if all these players got together and really sat down in a business mind they could really make some major changes on some things.  But everybody has their own individual thing.  It’s a whole new era now especially with materialism.  You know, they want to get their house, they want to get the nice looking cars, and the error now is how their __ are looking.  How many houses they have here and there.  They are not getting to grass roots, major issues.  My step-father said something that was very important that was so powerful and these guys can do it now.  The neighborhoods they came out of, whether it’s projects or bad neighborhoods, he said to me, he said, “Gene, if you came back into this neighborhood and bought a house in this neighborhood then make it as big as you want, fix it up, do you know how much impact you would have just coming back here with your name?  You can get this whole community back.”  And I didn’t think about it because we all—we want to live somewhere really nice and you want to do this and you want to have the best for your kids and you don’t want people coming into your house, feeling and messing with your wife because there is still some ignorant folk.  I love my folk but we got some ignorant folk.  And it’s all folk but I never thought about that but when you really look at nowadays how important the inner cities and all areas how, how key that is, that’s power, when you can come back and that’s set for you for life.

Brown:  Let me get Dwayne in here.  What do you think about this notion of black athletes, that there is something about the power of numbers and what they could possibly do if they were unified and mobilized, both their financial resources and maybe just their intellectual resources. 

Ballen: Well, the power they have just kinetically is just staggering.  But I think one of the reasons that Bill probably used that provocative title is that it’s __ story about, you know, if you teach man to go to the back of the room and enter from the back you won’t have to tell him to do it because he will automatically do it because he is conditioned.  So I think from that, these athletes are conditioned a certain way still regardless of what the compensation is.  They still think a certain way.  They don’t belong in that owner’s booth as far as they are concerned.  They make a lot of money, they don’t belong running a network. 

So there’s a condition there, a mental condition that goes along with it.  And so the power as Gene just mentioned, it really doesn’t matter if they don’t recognize that they have that power and how to harness it and utilize it.  They have a lot more than they realize but they’re disjointed and there’s not a great education system in place.  And a lot of that has to go with stewardship.  We as an older generation, now I am speaking of Gene and myself now, not you two, just the two of us, but we, as an older generation, there is a stewardship that goes with helping them understand what the responsibility is to move everything forward and not just tell them, “You go out there, you earn a big paycheck.  You’re fine, get yourself a big house.”  And I think that is part of the problem, is not a recognition of the power.  It’s there but they don’t really know what to do with it.

Brown: Let me stay with you for one moment and ask you who is responsible for putting into a young black person’s mind that instead of aspiring to work for someone, they need to aspire to own something?  So if you go into the NBA instead of aspiring to play ball, why don’t you aspire to own teams.  I mean, who should be teaching?

Ballen:That’s why I get back to us.  We have stewardship as an older generation, as people who are supposed to be in charge with shaping them and bringing them up as opposed to telling them how high can you run?  Let’s get you to camp and see how fast you can go so you can get that scholarship, get college ball and get into the NBA and you take care of all of us.  As opposed to preparing them mentally to understand that they have these great resources now at their disposal, what can they do with it beyond themselves to improve the lot of everyone else around them?  And then universities that these kids matriculate at, they also have a responsibility and there is a whole other show in that as supposed to the negligent side of some of these universities.  Not all but some of them in adhering to that charge and that policy of structuring and raising them. 

But in the end I think it comes back to the black community and, you know, those are our kids.  You know, those are our kids.  We’re allowing people to back up the truck and take our natural resources out.  You know, without really getting just compensation and I am not talking monetarily now.  I am talking about educate these kids, prepare these kids so they can come back and make this community better and make this society better.  And we have just abdicated that to a degree.

Brown: Hanif, what do you think about the likelihood of kids coming up today and definitely athletes that are already playing professional sports now, actually coming to a realization that there is a certain amount of power that they do have and being inspired to want to actually exercise that power so that they are owning more, they are controlling more, they’re really controlling their destinies I guess if you want to say it that way more they do currently?

Omar: Well, I think Mr. Rhoden made an excellent point in saying in taking responsibility that his generation kind of took it for granted that there needed to be some level of stewardship in guiding people of my generation, generation x or the hip hop generation into understanding the construct that they are in.  And I think there was a disconnect there.  I think the ball was dropped in terms of we just took for granted during the late ‘60s and ’70s that there was a movement towards black progress, towards black power.  Those types of things kind of waned and it wasn’t popular to be radical or powerful or to try to do something different. 

And so I think that it’s going to take a Kurt Flood type figure or someone to kind of sacrifice, an athlete to sacrifice themselves monetarily or to take some negative press and make a structure stet towards moving black athletes and black individuals towards thinking about ownership.  And I think the disconnect was there.  We’ve just taken for granted that we wanted integration for so long, we wanted to be able to have access to all the things that a greater society had, but we integrated without a plan.  Once we received integration there was no plan on how do we protect ourselves and realize that someone else’s ice is not colder than ours.  And we really still can have some power once we integrate.  So I think we assimilated without a plan.

Brown: Since you brought him up tell us a little bit about Kurt Flood and the stand he took.

Ballen: Well, Kurt Flood was—I mean, I think—Alex Rodriguez, a guy who has a $250 million contract, all these guys who are free agents today who—they are—they stand on the back of Kurt Flood.  He was a great baseball player, one of the best centerfielders of his time.  And he was traded.  And he was not happy with being traded after he had spent a certain period of time with his ball club.  I think it was the St Louis Cardinals.  For 12 years he was with that team and he just got traded.  Wasn’t warned and major league baseball had a clause, a reserve clause wherein which the owners controlled the rights of the players for an infinite amount of time.  And so what he did, he took a stand.  He said, “I am not going to report.  I am not going there.”  And what he set off was what we see today as free agents in the marketplace for athletes.  It was really a big move.  And probably if he would have just been quiet and kept going on he would probably continue to be a great baseball player.  But he took a great sacrifice by making that stand in 1969.  The thing is that 1969 is the year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King so the environment was right for revolution for change.  It’s not that way now.  So the environment was more right for him to even make that type of stand.  I don’t think it’s that way today. 

Banks: And he suffered.  And he suffered from that.  His sacrifice allowed all these players now in every sport especially African Americans to gain what they have and he really suffered.  Just like a lot of guys besides him that suffered for a lot of ball players now.  I was very fortunate when I came up having that unity.  Now you got AAU basketball down.  That’s another fixture.  I am for and against it.  My thing with AAU and I am not going to stay on that too long is the fact that they take kids out projects and they put them on these teams and they go into these situations.  It costs money for these programs.  But once it’s over it’s done.  They don’t know that this kid’s mother has a light bill to pay or he needs some books for school.  These guys forget about all of that. 

But now a lot of guys are piggy backing and going into the __ with that and now they got the policies and all that.  So their minds are distorted, you know.  I have people like James Flint, Bruiser Flint’s father kick up my butt when I was young.  I had an English teacher and I think we all, from our generation we had people that stayed on us constantly and I was very, very fortunate, very blessed and I thank god for it.  But a lot of these kids now, now that they tell them right off the bat you are going to be NBA right off the bat, boom.  You’re not going to be a great—you’re not going to graduate.  They’re not talking about graduation.  They talking about you going into the NBA.  You know, and that’s what they are thinking and they are training for it.  And the difficult part about is that they have to learn to gather themselves mentally and intellectually to be able to handle everything that is going to come at them because their skills, mind you, their skills are phenomenal.  These guys can jump out of a building, they can shoot like you never can believe.  So the skills have really changed because of conditioning, it’s different than when we were and so forth.  So it’s just the mind which is so powerful.  The mind is powerful.

Brown: It just seems that what’s going on with black athletes is, it’s just a reflection of the pathos that exists in the black community in general.  I mean, the mindset, I mean, it all begins with the mind, right?

Ballen: Right, and I think something we have got to recognize is that when we look back whether it is Arthur Ashe, Mohammed Ali, Carlos and Smith, Joe Louis, whomever it was, there was a universal set of draconian, oppressive situations that black people lived under in this country at the time.  No one could function as a respectable citizen for the most part.  So they were forced—we were forced to be unified.  You know, first of all let’s get basic dignity.  Carlos and Smith fist in the air in ’68 in Mexico City.  You know, Joe Louis lobbying for integrated situations wherever he was when he was in the army.  You know, we—so we were forced because we were in this vice grip of subjugation and prejudice that we had to work.  And so what did we do as a community?  We made sure that every representative that we sent out, whether they were a sportsman or whether they were an attorney or a doctor, they were absolutely prepared and understood how to conduct themselves.  You were representing not just yourselves but so many other people are depending upon you doing well in whatever it is you do.  So everyone understood that.  Jackie Robinson knew that the minute he stepped onto Evans field he knew that in 1947. 

So what’s happened is this veneer of integration now and this conspicuous consumption on the parts of a few, we think we have arrived.  But as you noted and as Gene mentioned earlier there is one black owner in the NBA, none in the NFL, none in major league baseball.  There is not a black commissioner of any sport.  There is not a black commissioner of any major conference in college athletics.  There out of 119 college football coaches in division one level but where you have 70% or 60-70% black players, you have less than 10 head coaches.  So it’s a matter of—the target is now moving.  Hey, you are getting some money at some point but as Rhoden regards to in his book the slave mentality is that you still are being told where to go and where to be and you are not looking at the bigger picture. 

Brown: Right.  Let me ask you because you mentioned free agency earlier and I am wondering, first of all explain free agency a little bit.  Because I don’t completely understand the politics of it.  But I am wondering if it gets players a little closer to having some sort of control over their careers and over what they are able to demand in terms of their salaries and the other amenities that they expect. 

Omar: Well, definitely.  You know, free agency is basically that after a said period of time whatever your contract says you are able to then see what your market rate is, see what another team, you would let the market place set your price as opposed to the team that owns your right continues to just pay you whatever they want to pay you.  So when you clear that contract, and that’s why a lot of young guys from the basketball side, college basketball side, they wanted to get into the NBA as quick as possible to get over that first contract which is kind of structured, so they can get past that first contract and they will get quicker into being a free agent so they can really test the market and then the exponential amount of dollars they can make comes once they test the market.  So if your team doesn’t want to pay you x amount of dollars you can go to another team. 

And I think—even when you look at a guy like Roger Clemmons [ph] now who is negotiating all types of terms where he can—he doesn’t have to travel with the team.  He doesn’t have to go to away games.  All of that was on the back of Kurt Flood and I think—so that’s what free agent represents but I think Mr. __ made a great point when he said that for our generation now racism or white supremacy or whatever you want to call it is overt now—I mean, it’s not as covert as it was.  You know, so when we look at these young athletes like a Lebron James or even Michael Jordan what are they standing up for?  Where is the issue?  Where is the situation that they can really rally around?  I think when we saw the Katrina catastrophe a couple years ago you saw really that we have a tangible issue that people can motivate and mobilize around. 

And that’s when we see guys really show their compassion.  So it’s 50/50.  You can put part of it on the athletes but then also we have to look at ourselves and say, “These guys are not equipped to deal with the overt racism that continues today.”  It’s hard to really put your hands around what issues to fight about.  So that’s why we have this quandary right now.

Banks: But then you also have the situation, how come Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and Barclay and these guys can’t put together a group and try to get a team?  That’s when you got the situation where the slave mentality or the good old boys are not going—you know, they got to go through these structures.  We got to go through this and go through that, you know, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and these guys are so great and they are considered the greatest things and they got money, $200 million, $500 million, whatever, how can they not be, first and foremost look at their proposal and say, “We got to really look at this.”  They will be great for the league, they play for the league and they got money to back it.  Why can they not have a team?  And that’s when you get back to about this book as well as it brings out some more issues and I know you want to elaborate more on that to that point.

Omar: Yeah, I think that when you saw Michael Jordan retired and came back to the NBA, one of the situations I was really hurt about, when he was—and I am not picking on him but his situation is good to show this example is that when he became part owner of the Washington Wizards, when he went back to the court I think even though for him personally, he had every right to do that if he wanted to continue his playing career but I think that kind of set back a movement that the greatest player that our generation, my generation has seen had been transitioned all this power, all the—being the media darling and then he transitioned into ownership.  So players would see that.  That’s my rightful step from being a player into ownership.  But when he came back to the court, raised all the revenue for the Washington Wizards in that franchise, then after he couldn’t play any longer, decided not to play any longer, those same owners who he had increased the revenue and even the league—I think the league owes him some type of ownership for raising the revenue.  They would not let him become a member again of the ownership group in Washington, DC.  And I think that is an example to show that, hey, you made us billions and billions of dollars but you still have your place.  You are not yet welcome at this table.  And I think that was the unfortunate part and now he is part owner with the Bobcats now but he was first with the Wizards and I think that example shows how we—if Michael Jordan being the quintessential example of this generation and his example begin apolitical, not saying anything, and really just earning dollars and he lost a lot of power there when he gave up his ownership rights.

Brown: Dwayne, I am going to give you the last word.  Tell us quickly, what can parents who are raising kids that are interested in basketball that may be basketball stars in their own right where they are, what can they do to just get them in the mindset that they are going to need potentially play professional sports?

Ballen: First of all make them understand that it is a tool to an end to a more comprehensive life and being a productive citizen.  It is a wonderful thing to do but the fact is even if they are successful, they are going to find themselves a very young person in their 30s with the rest of their life ahead of them.  Now what are they going to do with it?  Whether they have $100 million in the bank or whether they have $100 in the bank.  What are they going to do with that life?  And I would say that a man that we mentioned earlier, Magic Johnson, is a really good example because he has done a great job in business and he has getting involved in the community and he is really inspiring other people to do things progressively in black communities across the country.

Brown: I got to end it there.  But I thank all of you.  And if you would like to get in touch with our guests or obtain a copy or a transcript of tonight’s show, visit us online at unctv.org/bif.  And when you visit be sure to give us your comments and program suggestions.  You can also call us on the BIFline at 919-549-7167.  For Black Issues Forum, I am Natalie Bullock Brown reminding you to be encouraged no matter what.  Have a good one. 

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