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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5520
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 17, 2007 - 10:39 pm: | 
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Dave Zirin: Being Ali, Or Being Owned:
An Open Letter to LeBron
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 05/17/2007 -
10:04am. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Dave Zirin
Dear LeBron:
At the tender age of 22, you have the galactic talent to make us wonder if a mad scientist had Magic and MJ genetically spliced. But talent ain't wisdom. In a recent interview, you said that your goal in sports was to become "the richest man on earth." You also told ESPN, "I'm trying to be a global icon ... on the level of Muhammad Ali."
These dreams are compatible only if you choose to emulate Ali the icon and not Ali the man. Ali the icon is used to sell books, computers, snack foods, and anything not nailed down. Ali the man sacrificed his health, future, and untold millions by standing up to racism and war. No one is demanding you do the same. No one is insisting you get in front of a microphone and say, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Iraqis."
But you should understand that the reason Ali remains a "global icon" is precisely because he didn't define himself by his corporate sponsors. When his handlers told him to stop throttling the golden goose of fame he said, "Damn the money! Damn the white man's money!"
Evidence is accumulating that this won't become the King James catchphrase of choice.
Your teammate Ira Newble tried to get every member of the Cavs to sign a letter calling on China to stop exacerbating the genocide in Darfur by dealing arms to the government. "There's innocent people dying, and it's just a tragedy to stand back and let them do what they're doing," Newble said.
One of Newble's inspirations to take a stand has been the person he "idolized as a child": Muhammad Ali. That would be Ali the man, not the brand.
Newble stuffed fact sheets and articles in the lockers of every member on the team. He organized almost the entire squad to sign a letter that reads in part, "We, as basketball players in the N.B.A. and as potential athletes in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, cannot look on with indifference to the massive human suffering and destruction that continue in the Darfur region of Sudan." Larry Hughes signed. "Big Z," Zydrunas Ilgauskas signed. Drew Gooden signed.
Only two people refused and one was you. Nike, with whom you have a $90 million shoe deal, does business with China so you treated that letter like Dick Cheney treats a salad.
[There's no guarantee the young Ali would have signed this letter either. He may very well have said he wouldn't sign any letter telling China to get out of Darfur until the US was out of Iraq. After all this was a man who said, "The real enemy of my people is here." But one thing is for certain: "Show me the money" would not have trumped "Damn the money." No way.]
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader also tried to give you the chance to walk the Ali path. He sent you a public invitation to a forum about conditions in Nike factories. In the letter, Nader wrote,
"Mr. James, you are in a unique position to stand up for the people who make the products you endorse and to make the world a better place in the process. You can improve their working conditions in the contracted factories and pressure the entire sports shoe and apparel industry to change."
You replied to the press: "No, I haven't responded to it. But I think Nike's a great company and they would respond if need be."
The shoe wars continued in March in New York, when you dissed and dismissed Stephon Marbury's $14.98 sneaker line. You, whose signature Nikes go for $150, were asked whether you would ever sell a shoe that didn't cost a week's pay at McDonalds. You said, "No, I don't think so. Me being with Nike, we hold our standards high."
Marbury answered your words with the underreported smackdown of the season, saying, "I'd rather own than be owned." Damn.
Jim Brown once explained the allure of Ali in the 1960s this way: "White folks could not stand free black folks. White America could not stand to think that a sports hero that it was allowing to make big dollars would have the courage to stand up like no one else and risk, not only his life, but everything else that he had."
The choice you face is frankly quite stark: How free do you want to be? Do you want to be "King James of Nike Manor" or the King of the World? Only by refusing to be owned, only by displaying independence from the very corporate interests that enrich you, will you ever make the journey from brand to three dimensional man.
Dave Zirin is the author of the "The Muhammad Ali Handbook" (MQ Publications) and the forthcoming "Welcome to the Terrordome:" (Haymarket). You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by going to http://zirin.com/edgeofsports/?p=subscribe&id=1. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1021 |
Doberman23
Veteran Poster
Username: Doberman23
Post Number: 1004
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 18, 2007 - 01:35 am: |
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boooooo!!!!! on behalf of lebron ...stfu! |
Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 259
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 - 03:02 pm: |
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Tonya, Thanks for posting this Zirin column. You know, in William C. Rhoden's "$40 Million Slaves," a sports book which in some ways parallels LeRoi Jones's 1963 cultural nationalist historiography of jazz, LeBron James's photo illustrates the chapter titled "The Conveyor Belt: The Dilemma of Alienation." The caption to the photo of LeBron in a McDonald's All-American uniform reads:
Great young talents like LeBron James epitomize the Conveyor Belt, a process by which athletic gold is mined and distributed largely to the benefit of white institutions and individuals in the billion-dollar sports industry. The "Belt" creates young African American millionaires but reinforces a "white is right" mentality that prevents athletes from galvanizing their power.
It's not coincidental that Mr. Rhoden began his journalistic career as a jazz columnist for a Baltimore newspaper. According to Rhoden, jazz musicians had "consciousness" but no money, while professional athletes have a lot of money but little consciousness. He's not talking about Jalen Rose who has a scholarship fund or Alonzo Mourning, who, like athetes in many sports, has a charitable foundation. I think Rhoden is talking about collective economic power.
What does he mean by the Conveyor Belt? Well here's a brief excerpt from the book (PS Bear with it. It gets interesting toward the end with: "For African American ahtletes..."):
The sports industry is not just a signature aspect of the American way of life, but has also become a major component of the American economy. What distinguishes sports from other industries is the nature of its raw material: For the past fifty years, the prime raw resource in the sports industry has been black muscle. The work of the industry is to extract those bodies from where they primarily reside -- in the black neighborhoods of rural and urban America -- and put them to work. Now a sophisticated recruiting apparatus has been created for just that purpose. The apparatus is called the Conveyor Belt.
With integration and the television-fueled growth of the sports industry, the value placed on black muscle dramatically escalated and the stakes in the recruiting game began to rise. Predominantly white colleges and universities, which once either banned or ignored black athletes, were now twisting themselves like pretzels to recruit them. Schools that had long disdained African American athletes were now going out of their way to bring them on campus by any means necessary. The arms race was on. Bitter recruiting wars would be fought over young athletes, with all kinds of perks thrown in, from financial inducements to favors for family members and friends.
The challenge for the black community over the past decade has been to figure out how to control this mad scramble for black athletic resources and harness its potential to achieve the community's social, economic, and political goals. But to do so would entail combating the delivery system I first witnessed at the All-America game in 1983 and would see in repeated variations during the next twenty years. It would require understanding and redirecting the Conveyor Belt.
The recruiting process creates a fascinating reversal of fortune: The poor become rich, and those with the least access to higher education receive scholarships to some of the best institutions in America. Since 1936, when the Southeastern Conference became the first of the major collegiate conferences to award athletic grants-in-aid, the athletic scholarship has become the centerpiece of the college sports industry. But from the large pool of potential athletes, only a handful make it to the finish line of an athletic scholarship or a big professional sports contract; the National Collegiate Athletic Association estimates that only 3 percent of high school seniors who played basketball in 2005 will continue to play in college, and that only half of those 3 percent will receive some sort of athletic scholarship.
But before the system winnows out the winners from the losers, there are literally hundreds of thousands of young athletes who will ride the Conveyor Belt at some point in their lives, even if most of us are not good enough to ride it to the end. . . .
. . . For the most talented players, however, these programs [like Little League Baseball, Pop Warner Football, etc.] function as tributaries that carry them to progressively more refined pools of talent. The Conveyor Belt runs through a sprawling network of feeder systems: youth leagues, camps, clubs, clinics, and scholastic leagues. . . The Conveyor Belt transports young athletes from innocent fun and games to clubs and specialized leagues -- where they find increasingly rigorous competition and better training and coaching -- and finally to colleges and pro leagues. The well-trained athletes paying fans watch every weekend represent the finished product.
Most of the prestigious summer football and basketball camps are operated by white men who invite top high school players to work with and display their talent to invited coaches. At its best, the contemporary Conveyor Belt is a streamlined mechanism for developing players and offering training and showcases where talented players can display their talents for college scouts.
At its worst, the Conveyor Belt introduces young people to the worst ills of the contemporary sports-industrial complex while they're still young and impressionable. It's at the camps where many first learn about the gifted athlete's limitless entitlement. The better athletes learn that no wrong is too great to overlook, if not erase -- that no jam is too severe to get out of. The Conveyor process makes a future star feel he is above the fray from an early age. Isolated on the Belt, young athletes become accustomed to hearing "yes" all the time and having adults fawn over them and give them second and third chances because of the promise of their talents. The end result is often as evident on the crime blotter as in the sports section. No matter how focused and disciplined they are on the court, young athletes are not given any restraints off the court.
Life on the Belt also often fosters dependency. Star athletes who are so inclined become accustomed to being shepherded through the system without ever having to look out for themselves, from simple perks like not having to stand in line to more serious crutches like being guided through school by tutors and structured study halls.
Warren Brown, the former executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations, objected to the showcase games for these very reasons. Not only were the games "heavy duty" promotional jobs for the sponsoring companies, using the unpaid talents of high school students, but "We also think the games contribute to making sports bigger than life and making kids think that they're bigger than life because they are involved."
For African American athletes, the threat of the Conveyor Belt process goes beyond the ways in which it undermines character. The Belt is also designed to dull any racial consciousness and eliminate communal instincts. Instead, the Belt cultivates a culture of racial know-nothingism. Indeed, the act of "processing" athletes along the Conveyor Belt involves a significant and often subtle element of "deprogramming" potential troublemakers -- black athletes who might be tempted to think of themselves, or their situations, in racial terms and who might want to use their prominence in the service of something other than enriching the institution. In a university, such troublemakers might include athletes who want to use their visibility to call attention to the need for more black head coaches or faculty on campus, or athletes interested in initiating or joining in causes that might embarrass the institution. On the Conveyor Belt, young athletes quickly learn that easy passage through a white-controlled system is contingent upon not "rocking the boat," not being a "troublemaker," and making those in positions of power feel comfortable with the athletes' blackness.
The trick for the masters of the Belt -- coaches, athletic departments, owners at the professional level, promoters and managers in sports like boxing -- is to get control of young athletes early, take them away from any competitive interests -- especially their own communities -- and reward them with flashy goodies in order to keep them quiescent. Rudy Washington, the former head of the Black Coaches Association, once described the process:
"How tough is it to buy an inner-city kid? Buy him some shoes, take him to dinner, get him some nice clothes, maybe a car. You become his best friend, and he gets hooked, like a junkie," Washington said. "Then you control the product early. It's just like slavery. Modern-day slavery is what it is. And you know the saddest part? The kids benefit from the system -- at least a few lucky ones -- with education and money, but what they often lose is any identification with the black community."
Over time, the school-aged athlete's dislocation from the black community is manifest in the adult athlete's sense of alienation from his or her origins. In fact, among many athletes who've reached the professional level, their greatest fear is having to return to the community, to the point that some become afraid of the neighborhoods they grew up in. As Dennis Rodman has said, "I go through the projects. That's not me anymore. No longer part of my life."
Young athletes on the Belt also get a twisted education in values, ethics, and character. As the competition for players intensifies, journalists have started to uncover the lengths to which big and small programs alike go to lure blue-chip black talent to their campuses. . . .
. . . The Conveyor Belt isn't always a story about race. Every sport has one, even those sports without significant black participation: tennis, hockey, gymnastics. In sports like hockey, where a teenager can enter the minor leagues as early as junior year in high school, athletes begin rigorous competition as early as the fourth grade. By the eighth grade, many are seasoned veterans of travel. But race -- and the poverty that often goes hand-in-hand with black skin in this country -- adds a complicating factor to the Belt. And of all the major team sports, basketball offers the most poignant insights into the mechanics of the feeder system. Because of the growth of basketball during the past fifteen years, it has been a vehicle for both hustlers and positive forces to exert their influence.
The major difference with black athletes is the cultural dislocation and isolation the Belt encourages, and the infantilizing effect this has on the athletes themselves and the wasted opportunity it represents for the communities they come from. In the black athlete's quest for power, the Conveyor Belt represents an especially serious impediment. . . .
. . . And the Belt breeds complacency, not militancy. With their eyes on the prize of individual success and pleasing the white hands that feed them, players feel they can't risk a strategy of confrontation. [Chris] Webber is aware of how this fear of the white power structure -- and the goodies it provides -- emasculates black athletes.
"People will be so worried about how they will be seen by history or how their commercials are going to be taken away. Now the thing is, 'Don't step out of line.' Now the cool thing is, 'I don't want to be looked at. Don't separate me; don't pick on me.' I've even felt that way a couple of times, too -- and that's not good. We have so much influence; I don't think we know how much we have."
"This is what the Belt teaches you," Webber added. "That one thing. As black men we can't say what's on our mind. You can never do that. I think you learn that on that Conveyor Belt, you learn you got to shut up, you learn you got to be politically correct. You learn you got to say these cliches. It's [the message] on that Conveyor Belt since the eighth grade: Keep the trouble away from me."
. . . this is a crucial problem with black athletes: the notion that they should be grateful for the things that they've rightfully earned, that they should come hat-in-hand in gratitude for the money and power that they themselves generate. It's this sense of gratitude and subservience -- even under the bravado of many athletes' boastfulness and preening -- that in the end undermines any effort to take control of the Conveyor Belt and the raw resources it transports. . . .
. . . The ultimate effect of the Conveyor Belt is not so much to deliver young black athletes to the pros, but to deliver them with the correct mentality: They learn not to rock the boat, to get along, they learn by inference about the benevolent superiority of the white man and enter into a tacit agreement to let the system operate without comment. by the time they reach the NBA, the NFL, or Major League Baseball, black athletes have put themselves on an intellectual self-check: You don't even have to guard them, they'll miss the shot.
. . . One positive sign is that a new generation of younger black athletes are not brain-locked into the black-labor/white-wealth arrangement that has been so prevalent for so long. Many have started to use an expanded network of black professionals to negotiate contracts and represent them in a variety of business ventures. Black agents are emerging, slowly but surely, many of them young and possessed of the aggression of the hip-hop generation. This is progress of a sort, but it is not the Promised Land. In some cases, it's merely black exploitation replacing white exploitation. To really honor the struggles of the past, however, the ultimate goal must be to create a new and better model, not to replace an old form of oppression with a new one. |
Yukio
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 2362
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 - 03:48 pm: |
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thats alot of typing...bless you and your fingers. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 8660
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 - 04:21 pm: |
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Athletes are treated like they are the elite of black professionals. The NBA, in particular, is composed of a bunch of jocks with a skills limited a particular sport who are paid enormous amounts of money to entertain stadiums full of screaming white fans. Pardon me if I don't get upset about the circumstances of them becoming millionaires. I'd rather save my praise and concern for young black men who excel but who are unheralded in the fields of education and medicine and law and science and literature. |
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