Sports Heroes?
By Lisa Fabrizio
July 24, 2008
Every Sunday night I go out to my favorite club to engage in lively conversation and enjoy some adult companionship. In the summertime, this often includes taking in ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball. This Sunday however, the Red Sox-Angels game was scheduled two hours earlier than the usual 8:00 PM start so that the network could air its annual ESPY Awards show in prime time.
Held captive by the dictates of our friendly bartender, my friends and I were forced to endure the entire two-plus hour event. I say endure because, as any adult who watches ESPN without the protection of the mute button knows, the audio assault which issues forth from the Bristol, CT studios is often unbearable.
I have in times past wondered exactly when the world of sports became infested with the cacophonous din of rock, rap and other forms of what are popularly considered to be 'music', but have long since ceased to care. I have also given up wondering when sports-- which used to be a way to encourage young men away from more dissolute pursuits--has now embraced all that is debased in our modern culture; the objectification of women as sex toys, vulgar language, egotism and violence.
As was to be suspected, all of this was on full display in the ESPYs telecast. From the crude, juvenile humor and other lame attempts at entertainment by host Justin Timberlake and other current celebrities, to the bevy of babes busting out of their décolletage, viewers looking for any real sports content were once again left on the sidelines. All of this proved to be merely an annoying distraction until the Arthur Ashe Courage Award was presented to John Carlos and Tommie Smith. That's when I blew my top.
For those old enough to remember, Smith and Carlos were track stars who, when they won the gold and bronze medals in the 200 meters at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Games, lowered their heads and gave the Black Power, gloved-fist salute during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner. To hear the sycophants at ESPN tell it, theirs was a tale of tremendous courage and the epitome of self-sacrifice.
Except that it wasn't, exactly. Smith and Carlos were founding members of a group called the Olympic Project for Human Rights, whose initial aim was to have black athletes boycott the Games in protest that they were only tools of the American white establishment, that winning any medals for such a country was only "a carrot on a stick." The OPHR's quasi-socialist manifesto included the following: (web site)
We must no longer allow the sports world to pat itself on the back as a citadel of racial justice when the racial injustices of the sports world are infamously legendary... any black person who allows himself to be used in the above matter is a traitor because he allows racist whites the luxury of resting assured that those black people in the ghettos are there because that is where they want to be. So we ask why should we run in Mexico only to crawl home?
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