Where Have You Gone, Tommie Smith?

By Ben Edwards

"What I want to know Mr. Football Man is whaddya do about Willie Mays? Martin Luther King?" - Bob Dylan, 1963

In the history of American sports, a few names symbolize not just the pinnacle of physical prowess, but something larger - a vast and noble possibility in the human spirit. Great, evocative names like Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson and Wilma Rudolph - these have become synonymous with progress in the face of entrenched narrow-mindedness. Transcending sport, these great African-American athletes remind us what it's like to remember an age when heroes and pioneers changed the face of sports in this nation forever.

Looking back from 2005, it's easy to think their struggles belong to history, that the game is over and the home team victorious. It's easy to forget that for all our talk of progress and tolerance, every prominent African-American athlete from Jackie Robinson to Tiger Woods has received racist death threats.

Yet while many challenges to racial equality in sports remain - largely white ownership of sports teams; discrimination at the highest echelons of sport; outright bigotry among fans (Rush Limbaugh, your phone is ringing) - something is missing among this generation of African-American athletes. What's gone missing is the character and sense of responsibility for enhancing the black community possessed by the Jackie Robinsons and Althea Wilsons of the past. Today, greed and lethargy has cheapened black identity to the point of irrelevance. In our children's lifetimes, we may never see another athlete worthy of being honored for bettering society rather than for the numbers of zeroes in his or her bank account.

Look at, for example, Oakland Raider WR Randy Moss. As a troubled youth in West Virginia , Moss was arrested and lost football scholarships to Florida State and Notre Dame based on those arrests. In recent memory, he received a citation for pushing a female traffic cop a half-block on the hood of his Lexus. When fined by the NFL for a lewd celebration act, he bragged on video about the impressive wad of cash he used to pay the fine. And among the arsenal of excuses he cites for being targeted for this harassment? From the media, from fans, from the league - you get the picture. That's the equivalent of blaming Hurricane Katrina on the liberal media. Apparently, if you commit crimes in broad daylight, with several witnesses, in an urban setting, it's a classic case of "The Man Keeping You Down." If I would have done that, do you know where I would have gone? Jail. No black, no white, just bars and three squares a day. You and I have no wad of cash, but we probably have more common sense than Randy Moss. Oh, and a quick message if he ever reads this: In these cases, nobody hates you because you're black. They hate you because you're an asshole. If you were white, everyone would hate you because you'd still be an asshole.

What I want to see Randy Moss, Barry Bonds or Milton Bradley do more than anything else is get on a soapbox and help rid American sports of racism. Real racism. Milton Bradley of the Los Angeles Dodgers recently claimed that "Being black is the most important thing to me," after a clubhouse argument where he accused white teammate Jeff Kent of being a racist because Kent called out Bradley for not trying to score from first on a Kent 's double. That's not racism, it's fucking baseball. If Bradley were really concerned with racism, there are a number of ways he could put the $2.5M he's earning this summer to work. For instance, he could help kids learn that the most permanent ways out of the hood is not with drugs, basketball or rhyme schemes, but instead with a good education, safe sex, and resistance to the pressures commonly associated with being young and black in America . Let's see if you can remember that last athlete you can respect in cultural and educational senses.

In that vein, there are racial issues that have changed drastically since the 1960s and there are 21 st century problems that need to be addressed. Sadly, the role models have changed as well. Gone are minority heroes like Roberto Clemente who died flying supplies to earthquake victims in Puerto Rico or even Tommie Smith and John Carlos who at the very least had the guts to stand up and admit that there was a real problem with race in this country on an international stage. Now, the black community is stuck with "leaders" like P. "Vote or Die" Diddy and Allen Iverson, who continue to epitomize the greed, lethargy and lack of community unity that is ruining black America and everything that their parent's generation fought so hard to change. And what's even worse, is that they are creating a desirable image for African-American youth and continuing a trend that will only end in more poverty and deaths of people who could have been the next Willie Mays? Martin Luther King?