A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players

Last month, I phoned Ronnie Brown at the Atlanta office of UBS, a 150-year-old wealth management company where the former Auburn University gridiron legend has made a name for himself as a big-time financial adviser.

My notion had been to collect Brown’s perspective on baldly racist statements made by his former college football coach, Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

“How did you get my number?” an irked Brown asked when I shared the reason for my call. The Georgia native and Alabama Sports Hall of Famer claimed to know nothing about the widely-reported news stories.

“Would you like me to read the quotes to you?” I asked the retired running back, who played 10 seasons in the National Football League.

“No. I don’t talk about politics,” Brown said, and then he hung up. That a money man like Ronnie Brown, 41, refused to discuss the increasingly embroiled senator was no shock; Brown's virtual Rolodex undoubtedly teems with wealthy Auburn alumni.

I then reached out to the immortal Bo Jackson. No response.

Next, Auburn all-time quarterback great Cam Newton. Nothing.

Tuberville’s most recent observations on race would be condemned by fellow Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell in mid-July. Yet, as I called, emailed and direct messaged dozens of Black players across the last 30 years of Auburn football rosters, an on-the-record perspective could not be found.

A day after I left messages with the agencies representing Newton and Jackson, a voice from the back pages of Tigers football said not to hold my breath waiting to hear back.

"They're not going to do or say anything,” predicted Eric Ramsey, a defensive backfield starter in 1989 and 1990. “They fear the repercussions. They're worried about the consequences.”

Ramsey — now an actor and business owner in Los Angeles — is offended by the Alabama lawmaker’s perspectives on race and would like an apology, “as a person of color.” Perhaps every other Auburn gridiron standout would also like their old ball coach to apologize.

Bo knows what he wants. But he’s staying silent.

Tuberville and ‘white nationalists’

“We are losing in the military so fast. Our readiness in terms of recruitment,” Tuberville said, according to a transcript of the May 4 interview with WBHM.

His current project is to keep the U.S. Marine Corps without a confirmed leader for the first time in a century while he battles culture wars.

“And why? I’ll tell you why,” Tuberville continues “Because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda.”

The interviewer next asked if Tuberville believed white nationalists should be allowed in the military, Tuberville responded, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”

This racial whopper was preceded by another stunning quiet-part-aloud moment, last fall.

“They’re not soft on crime,” Tuberville said of Democrats in October. “They’re pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”

If a conservative like Mitch McConnell could criticize Tuberville’s racism — some of which Tuberville walked back after a disastrous CNN interview earlier this month where he defended white nationalists — why wouldn’t the university’s alumni football stars do the same? Shouldn’t some of Auburn’s most visible successes feel confident weighing in with observations that directly affect their communities?

Apparently not: My Southern brothas weren’t spilling the beans. So I settled for the Auburn linebacker-turned-novelist Ace Atkins, who is white, to explain why Black football players are so reluctant to decry Tuberville’s racist statements.

Days after Tuberville’s comments on white supremacy in the military, Atkins tweeted: “What an absolute disgrace. This kind of talk must not be normalized or accepted. #Shameless”

"I'm as far from that [football] world as possible. My contacts didn't do me any good in New York publishing. Maybe that's why I can speak freely,” said Atkins, a member of the Tigers undefeated 1993 squad. "There's more pressure on Black athletes to show they're part of the program. They have to be extra [supportive], and it's a heavy burden."

In The South, “The Civil War is never really over”, according to Atkins, 52. Not only does that mean that Tuberville “knows who his people are, who he’s speaking to” and was being racist in intent, it means that highly-visible Black alumni must be seen and not heard when a Southern football mentor brings rationalized support of white nationalism to the public discourse.

These unwritten rules extend beyond players below the Mason-Dixon Line.

I tried Ball State Athletic Director Haven Fields, who played for Tuberville at Auburn, but he backed out after first saying yes.

A Tuberville-era equipment manager, also Black, did the same, and I finally got the point.

‘Seen and not heard’

“They are free to do everything, but talk,” said Ramsey. “It all goes back to the mentality of being seen and not heard. It's just something that is ingrained in them.”

In 1991, Ramsey surreptitiously recorded Tigers football coaches arranging illegal payments to players. Soon after, head coach Pat Dye resigned. In the new light of the NCAA’s name-image-likeness payment era, with payments for players seen as an end to a model of corruption, Ramsey’s decision takes on a different sheen.

Back then, though? He was fortunate not to be tarred and feathered. At his 1992 graduation from Auburn, Ramsey and his wife were booed, called the N-word and had objects thrown at them.

“I wasn't worried,” said Ramsey, who identifies as a Christian. “I had a higher purpose.”

Wealth in the Southeastern Conference recruiting range is dynamic. If you’re Jimmy Rane — who is to Auburn as Phil Knight is to Oregon — you’re the only billionaire in Alabama and your purview is greater, your power more concentrated than some coastal moneybags. If you’re a powerful Republican like Rane, you control the fates of players who have come through the program on football, business and political levels.

A single uppity critique might have a prospect from an Auburn family playing at 'Bama, the most shameful outcome of all. Even the university might mete out punishment.

So much caged expression begs one question: Has the audience he’s serving made Senator Tuberville, with his open white nationalism talk, more transparent than Tommy the Coach?

"If Tuberville was still coaching and having to recruit,” asks Ramsey, “would he still say the same thing?”