Sports: Your Kid's Future

It’s been a while.

I have missed telling folk the things they know are true which they do not want to hear.

Short of saying, “Gee, what an interesting last few months it has been!” I’ll get at it straightaway.

I stopped for a cut recently at Successful Images Barbershop in Crete, IL. I like Successful Images. I have watched Crete, my hometown, get significantly browner over the last decade and a half. This change has created a market for the shop’s owner, Sylvester Wilson, Jr. Syl’s shop boasts its fair share of working and middle class homeowners whose conversations I find more productive than in many of the other shops I frequented over the years. Successful Images is the kind of place where single moms can bring their sons and men can come in to discuss politics or the ball game, and no one feels offended by the conversations once they’ve tipped their barber and headed home. Its barbers cut three generations of James McCallums, and I can leave Jimby there for a bit while I run local errands while he gets that Lou Rawls look off of his head.

The staff is used to Jimby arriving in his karate, baseball and basketball uniforms, and on those rare school days when we stop by, his school togs. I joke with his barber about how keeping him busy keeps me broke.

I am not much of a sports fan. I can watch a pro game to be sociable, but I really gave very little about sports until my son started playing. I have had to explain time and again how I like watching my kid play, but I could care less about most sports overall. My mother’s emphasis was education. I could rebel my way out of Little League but life was too short to attempt to fight my way out of Rita’s library visits and writing camps. It was just easier to go and participate. As a result, though, I never grow up enamored with athletes. I never wanted to be Michael Jordan as a kid. I wanted to be Ed Bradley from 60 Minutes.

So while I acquiesced to my son being involved in the sporting activities of his choice, and I celebrate the fact he is a much better athlete than I ever was, I have never followed this emphasis that so many parents, especially Black ones, put on their kids playing sports.

What amazes me is these aren’t impoverished parents. In too many instances, these are educated people, often in two parent, double income households, in neighborhoods where crime is not the norm and there is plenty for kids to do.

Before someone writes in asking, “What the devil does that matter?” let me answer: Plenty.

I hear folk from the hood get on TV all of the time bemoaning how ghetto kids have lousy schools and crime infested neighborhoods and how the only kids who can get out and escape the gangs are the athletes. How kids living under those circumstances don’t have role models around to show them that education and hard work can mean a more comfortable life and whatnot, and how sports or entertainment are surefire ways out of a life of poverty and pain, because kids can only be that which they understand.

OK. Knowing the number of Black doctors, lawyers and self employed professionals produced during Reconstruction invalidates that, but hey, another day, another argument.

I wonder about educated Black parents, people whose education and work ethics have put them in houses nicer than their parents imagined, with luxuries like two nice cars, cable, designer clothes for the kids and the like, that I hear in my barbershop discussing how they push their sons to excel in sports. They go on and on about traveling leagues and what they spend on equipment and clinics, always summing up their expenses and time commitments with a shrug and one word: “College.”

Really? Has President Obama eliminated Financial Aid?

I listened to a father explain to me how he has worked his strategy for a number of years, his son being known by all local coaches and constantly in demand.

I asked, “Dude, is your kid getting paid?”

“This will get him into college for free, man,” he explained.

Dad is a CPA.

I once dated a woman whose academic achievements made her a story that will one day be featured in Ebony magazine. Teenage parent at 14. MBA by 32. Presently preparing to leave a lucrative corporate career to study Education and give inner city kids what she feels so many lack: a role model and a teacher who gives a damn. She struggled to keep her kids in private schools in part because she understands how education catapulted her where she never dreamt.

She and I had the craziest conversations about which sports I should steer Jimby towards, primarily, the ones that have few Black participants, because coaches are recruiting Black kids heavily for those events.

Huh?

I can’t understand this, especially when the odds of a kid getting a full ride to school for playing sports are so much higher than if the kid, oh, applied for a scholarship.

An old friend reminded me recently that she, too, got a full ride to school. She applied for every scholarship open to Black females. Many she won, she is sure, because there was such a small pool of applicants. Whatever, they paid for four years of undergraduate school while she studied chemistry and grad school as she earned her Pharm D.

In fact, when I argue with many of these parents there are more academic scholarships available than athletic ones, and all a student has to do to maintain an athletic scholarship is, well, STUDY, and MAINTAIN HIS GRADES (foreign concepts to a college student, I am sure) I get blank stares from college educated parents.

One said, ‘Well, our kids just aren’t GOOD at that type of stuff…”

Well, hell, maybe, if our kids aren’t god at being students, maybe they need not go to college, whatcha think?

I wonder if sometimes, our children’s lack of achievement in so many areas is due not to the excuses we make for them, but the low expectations we set and the things we teach them are important. Asian kids’ parents can expect them to ace the ACT, but we cannot. Let me go you one better. Black parents from Cameroon and Trinidad can expect their kids to study and ace tests and write scholarship essays proving they are good material for free college educations, but we Black Americans cannot. Of course, we can expect for our kids to make it into higher education if it involves excelling in something that boils down to entertaining Caucasians. Plus, we like the attention. That’s what it boils down to. Athletes are more popular than brainiacs, although it is the smart people who control the athletes’ money, legal affairs, and often, futures. Let’s also remember: that learning stuff, you know, that’s culturally biased. Sports, however, are naturally inherent. Comes from all those years picking cotton.

As a sidebar, I remember reading some of John Ogbu’s research the five years I taught school. I found it interesting that regardless of how much money was spent in affluent Black American schools, the academic disengagement prevented them from achieving at a level that some poorer schools did. Let me make this plain: tis wasn’t aptitude or money, this was interest. Black American kids were found to just place less of an emphasis on academic achievement, regardless of the resources at their disposal. Perhaps this was due in part to there being an overwhelming focus, not in the school, but at home, on things that render children popular as opposed to accomplished. Just a thought.

I have nothing against athletes. I am questioning the mindset among American parents, especially educated ones of color, to push their children to achieve in areas that statistically speaking, do not reap the same benefits and results as other professions. I hear Black people bemoan how whites have the power, Jews control the money and Asians are naturally proficient at computers and Arabs are the merchants. Their solution to those problems is to send kids from the educated households they inhabit into the world to prepare to enter the world as entertainers for whites whose money will be invested by Jews whose kids will be beat into Harvard by Asians whose mommas will, once the athletic fortune fades, be back to doing their shopping with Arabs.

Ya’ll Know Better.