Project Logic Ga

With Mr. Jackie Robinson on the big screen and Tiger Woods on the little screen, we have the perfect opportunity to have a discussion about the influence of sports stars.  I don’t need a film to tell me about Mr. Robinson because my father did.

 
Jack Roosevelt Robinson, a Cairo, Georgia native, is the reason I dreamed as a kid about attending UCLA rather than playing ball in the Southeastern Conference.  If it takes the National Guard to get folks like me into a college, it will be a while before that school and is cool with me. Robison was a letterman in four sports in Westwood before becoming one of the first Black officers in the military.  Have you seen the film about Robinson being court-martialed for not going to the back of the bus in Fort Hood, Texas?

 
Better yet, my man Ken Burn’s documentary “Baseball” spent an episode on Robinson and viewers learned that he was considered a “race man.” I like that term.    If you are a person who has a preoccupation with moving your race forward, you are a race man.  The opposite of race men would be Tiger Woods and Michael Jeffery Jordan.    Oh, I love the sports success of these two but their first concern is Nike…not Negro.

 
When the Black pride protest of Carlos and Smith with the Black gloves at the Mexico City Olympics took place, Jackie Robinson said they were wrong for bringing protest on the field of sports.   UCLA race man Arthur Ashe was a hero to me because he blended sports performance with appropriate social change.   Most Americans first learned that we should fight apartheid in South Africa because Ashe refused to play tennis there.   Ashe was the epitome of elegance and smoothness and the youth today would be benefit from getting to know him.

 
Muhammad Ali’s embrace of Black Nationalism was bolder than his courage in the ring.   What if …what if…what if. What if Malcolm X wasn’t killed and his post-Mecca approach became the blueprint for race men rather than the King model.  I still can’t get with the idea of non-violent protest.  To me, getting your rifle when someone is burning a church (while people are inside) is natural self-defense.

 
But, most importantly, America in general never listened to the fundamental principles of nationalism.  The core beliefs are simply a form of conservatism.   Yeah, Clarence Thomas should have been more important than Jesse Jackson because his grandfather raised a young man who was a serious race man.

 
Thomas is pissed that governmental involvement made some of Black Americans soft and weak. Before Jackie Robinson broke into Major League Baseball, we had a Negro League whose all-stars beat the New York Yankees.  Cobb, Ruth and DiMaggio did complete against us during the regular season.   Before the color line was broken, we also had strong business districts in every city and town—usually across the train tracks.  Today, Black people spend money all over town but those businesses aren’t invested in the community.

 
Robinson and Ashe would be disappointed with the negativity that African Americans are bring on ourselves today—you can’t blame that on others. Finally, the marriage of Jackie and Rachel Robinson is how it is done. She is lovely to this day.

 
The character building part of sports is more important that physical fitness. If our youth spent half the time they spend on basketball and football on homework, they would be successful in professional life.  Many major league baseball teams have only one or two African Americans players. The bros aren’t feeling baseball but baseball players can make money into their forties.   We are going to be fine when we get back to who we use to be.