What Place Does Race Have in Sports?

By the time the Indianapolis Colts meet the Chicago Bears in the Super Bowl on Sunday -- that unofficial yet quintessential American holiday -- I'm sure that most of us surface-dwellers will have been apprised of the added significance of this one. Never before has any African American head coach taken a football team to the Super Bowl, yet this year, we will have two black coaches facing each other with the NFL championship on the line.

Some will cheer the prospect, some will sigh and say "its about time," some will deny that the event holds any relevance or significance, while others will be actively pissed off about the whole thing, wondering why the media has to make a big deal about 'minority' coaches when the league is almost 70 percent black. That latter group intrigues me.

As a black man and former collegiate football player, I've always been absolutely fascinated at the intersection of race and sport. Having heard the fanfare, and experienced on the one hand the almost childlike idealism we attach to these games and, on the other, observed the double standards and encroachment of our pervasive societal psychoses onto even this, our seemingly most sacred of public spaces, I can't help but take notice.

Sports, as fully evidenced by the 'event' the Super Bowl has become, are entertainment: a respite from the real world; an 'escape goat' (to appropriate a charming NBA misnomer), to be laden with our hopes, dreams, desires and sublimated aggression. What else explains the puritan zeal with which anti-doping officials guard the line between mere humanity and homo sapiens augmentis? Or that our anti-intellectual culture ascribes a higher esteem to its sports nerds, flush with batting averages, records and other statistical trivia, than the computer geeks who power its modern economy?

I'm a participant in all that, no doubt. But what brings me a particularly Duboisian joy about athletics are those moments in which the reality of sport belies the myth of the meritocracy that most Americans, in their naiveté, cling to so strongly.

I grew up watching sports on TV and couldn't help but note the differences in descriptions that announcers would use when discussing players. One guard in a basketball game makes a pass and it's 'instinctive.' Another guard, of a different hue, makes the same play, and it's 'heady.' One guy is a 'fiery competitor,' while another player exhibiting the same behavior is a 'team cancer'. 'Showboat'/ 'Individualist.'

The dichotomies amuse me to this day. It's almost as fun as looking up the various connotations of black and white in the dictionary. When legendary player (and coach) Bill Russell served as an NBA analyst and pointed out some of these contradictions in terms, he caught heat from those who thought that he was politicizing the announcer's booth. As if the status quo wasn't just a different and unchallenged form of politics. By and large, we don't want to think, at least not overtly, about any colors beyond those belonging to our team. Much as we'd like to believe in some innate purity of sport, any human undertaking is inherently flawed.

Doug Williams, the first black starting quarterback to participate in and win a Super Bowl accomplished that feat in 1988. And yet, almost 20 years later, on the official message board of an NFL team, I can read folks wondering whether a black person, in general, has what it takes, intellectually, to be an NFL quarterback, while, in the reader response section of a major daily newspaper's Web site, there are numerous comments calling African American players monkeys and thugs, interchangeably.

That's not surprising to me. I'm under no delusion that we'll ever be rid of those kinds of folks who probably proudly get their information from the Klan Kable Knetwork (or some Fox News affiliate). What is, however, frustrating is the number of people who, in the midst of all of that, question the significance of a black coach in the Super Bowl, or why the NFL, in response to years of criticism for its dearth of African American coaches, enacted the so-called Rooney rule, in which the team owners must bring in at least one 'minority' candidate for an interview when trying to fill a head coaching vacancy.