Our sense of sports and what they mean is completely shaped by their presentation. At no time of the year is that ever as apparent as in the weeks just passed, when we had the NCAA basketball tournament sold to us as all that is pure and hopeful about athletics, and contrasted often with the NBA, which gets cast as a showman’s league corrupted by selfishness. The comparison is as misguided and lazy as it is unavoidable. Funny, isn’t it, to remember that Carmelo Anthony, in public eyes one of this year’s great NBA villains, was America’s prince just eight Marches ago for single-handedly leading Syracuse to its first NCAA title as a baby-faced freshman.
Though fatuous, these are the narratives that we’re sold, and sport is nothing without narrative. Gerald Early, who has written frequently on sports throughout his career, is one of the cultural critics best able to lay these narratives bare. His treatment helps us to remember that sport is popular culture, and as worthy of analysis as music, film, literature, or any other form thoroughly embedded with meaning and context. What Early does is make that context clear, in often surprising ways. In a new collection of essays, A Level Playing Field: African Americans and the Republic of Sports, he continues that work.
The book’s heart is Early’s take on three episodes in which sport and politics slammed up against one another in public view: Jackie Robinson’s 1949 testimony on Paul Robeson before the House Un-American Activities Committee; Curt Flood’s legal challenge to Major League Baseball’s reserve clause after being traded against his will in 1969; and Rush Limbaugh’s claim on ESPN in 2003 that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb had his shortcomings obscured by a general desire amongst sports media members to see an African American succeed in a position traditionally dominated by whites.
In some cases Early’s telling of these stories isn’t the first, but his take consistently stands out for being both fair and insightful. In the case of the Limbaugh-McNabb kerfuffle, for example, Early is careful to point out that some of the attacks on Limbaugh’s remarks by liberal pundits actually served to illustrate Limbaugh’s point. He also, though, takes stock of Limbaugh’s defenders, and offers a thought experiment to put the whole episode in perspective:
What if Limbaugh were to say about a noted black doctor or scientist or, heaven forbid, a black public intellectual or scholar, such as, say, Cornel West or Henry Louis Gates, that he has the reputation he has because whites have created that reputation for political reasons, because we as a society need public examples of brainy black people or black people who can reasonably pass as brainy? Placing the comment in a different context might illuminate it a bit differently. And this, of course, has been said about certain black intellectuals. Indeed, historically, it has been said about blacks in every place that blacks have appeared where they were not expected.
Elsewhere in the book, Early shares his thoughts on the declining presence of African Americans in Major League Baseball, a topic that has received varying levels of attention in recent years. Several prominent African American players have remarked on what they see as the league’s preference for Latino players, and many have contrasted the league’s investment in Central American “baseball academies” with its abandonment of America’s urban centers. Others point to socioeconomic factors, such as the expense of the equipment that the sport requires.
Early dismisses all of these explanations, though, and states flatly that African American athletes have left baseball because they don’t care for the game: “The real reason black Americans do not play baseball is that they do not want to. They are not attracted to the game. Baseball has little hold on the black imagination, even though it existed as an institution in black life for many years.” He elaborated in a recent interview:
So much of baseball is nostalgia. For black people, it’s hard to get nostalgic, because when you get nostalgic, you are looking back at Jim Crow. Baseball is weighted down with this history of segregation. When you look back, you are reminded that this was a lily-white game, and they didn’t want you to play it.
Early should be read by anyone who thinks about sports in their social context. And, for anyone who doesn’t, now is the time to bone up. Both the NFL and NBA are currently headed for what appear to be unavoidable labor stoppages as their current collective bargaining agreements expire. This is big, big business. All-white billionaire team owners on the one side, mostly-black millionaire players on the other. With each side vying for public support, and neither a particularly sympathetic group in the middle of an economic downturn, the loaded rhetoric is sure to fly fast and hard. There’s no better guide than Gerald Early.
