“Football has never just been a game. It’s the only way you can force a racist to actually cheer for a Black man.” Dr. Tommy Jackson, former Auburn football player who was on the 13-0 team in 2004. In Slate, October, 2020.
Jackson didn’t just lower a veil. He tore down a façade. It’s the truth. During their careers many Black college football players look at the crowd of mostly white people cheering and wonder, “If I screw up, how many are going to call me a dumb n—er.” The students who are athletes and Black understand the relationship. There are racists in that crowd who think the Black player is good for nothing but romping around the 100-yard field of green.
I have heard it from my side as white. Jackson just told me his side of the relationship as Black.
I heard one of the biggest fans of the game, an executive in the college game, who is white, declare this in a meeting:
“The NFL is full of angry Black men.”
I was not in that meeting as a reporter, but as a consultant and I understood I should keep it confidential. But I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget it because it confirmed what I had known for 40 years. I just had to hear it from one of the caretakers of the game. He spoke for a lot of them. Not all, but too many.
We saw another example of who is on which side last week with Kentucky basketball. The Big Blue hoopsters are idols in that state…in public, at least. You should see the adoring crowds in Rupp Arena. Many fans are for racial justice. Many are not.
And then the Black players asked Coach John Calipari if they could kneel during the national anthem as a response to white supremacists invading the U.S. Capitol.
I wasn’t surprised at the reaction from white politicians. They wailed. It is unholy that these white pols don’t show the same level of emotion with police brutality dealt to Black men and women by police.
The big question to ask is why we haven’t asked more forcefully what these Black college athletes have to deal with. In the book “What The Dog Saw” writer and social scientist Malcolm Gladwell says, “Curiosity about the interior life of other people’s day-to-day life is one of the most fundamental of human impulses.”
I have tried to ask athletes, but I am a stranger to them and they don’t share easily. Maybe I should pry more.
When they do speak, some athletes enlighten.
Here is Auburn’s Jackson again in Slate on Tommy Tuberville, his Auburn coach, who gets to be a U.S. Senator because “Tubs” supported Donald Trump:
“It’s very disingenuous. He coached a team that had a majority of African American players. And President Trump has no interest in Black males. And so for Coach Tuberville to support someone like that—what does that say about somebody who has always thought this way to make millions of dollars off the same people the president is intending to overlook or mistreat? It’s shameful. It’s downright shameful.”
Here is a link to the whole Slate story. I covered that Auburn team for the New York Times. Jackson, who works at West Georgia University, would not call me back. The star running back for that 2004 team, Ronnie Brown, emailed me and said he won’t discuss politics. But at least Jackson, and others, talked to another reporter and got it out in the open.
It is correct—not convenient—to draw a straight line from what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 to the business of college athletics. The same white rainbow you saw in the Capitol, you see in College Sports, Inc.
So screw it. The athletes now have my full authority to “ruin” the college model. If they do deals to get some of a local or national brands’ finite sponsorship dollars and their university gets less, so be it. If the schools respond by cutting “minor” sports, we will know it was a fraud all along; the schools were in it for the money and football.
Once upon a time, I was against players cashing in by holding their own paid camps and making sponsorship deals. I kept falling back on “unintended consequences” and cheating. Then the news broke of the Power 5 conferences agreeing to a nearly $6 billion, 12-year deal for the College Football Playoff in 2012. I started to look around at the salaries of athletic directors reaching $1 million, and assistant coaches getting $1 million, and Nike raking in money, and administrators in athletic departments making $250,000 to “handle” the media. The NCAA was paying lobbyists six-figure fees on Capitol Hill to keep its grip on the purse.
I mean, NCAA President Mark Emmert had his own private suite, with his own private walkway to the floor, constructed in the Georgia Dome for the 2012 Final Four. Talk about privilege.
I look at the obscene buy out of fired University of Texas football coach Tom Herman and his staff ($24 million) at a time when UT employees are being laid off or furloughed and think how unfair it is.
The Southeastern Conference just signed a deal for $300 million a year with ESPN. Coaching salaries and bonuses will go still higher.
I’m hoping one of the pioneers for athletes making money is none other than the Georgia quarterback JT Daniels. He is a West Coast guy. He didn’t grow up under the thumb of Southern football coaches who berate and intimidate, so I don’t think he will be pressured to stay away from deals. I’m hoping Daniels in May decides he is going to hold a quarterback camp in Athens and charge $100, donate some $ to charity, or a local high school football program, and keep the rest for himself. I’m hoping he brings along one of my favorite Bulldogs, receiver Kearis Jackson, and they make a bunch of money. Maybe Jackson holds his own camp.
I’m hoping Daniels signs a deal with Adidas to wear its shoes, not Nike’s, which provides shoes to UGa.
Sure, there are things that can go wrong as students, who are athletes, are empowered by the coming federal legislation. Graduation rates could decline because data is out there that when a student transfers they are less likely to graduate. We could have mega-team building, similar to the NBA. Could a crew of receivers in one one program leave to play with a rising quarterback? What happens to the guys those receivers just parachuted down on who were in the program?
But, as Tommy Jackson, who worked at Kennesaw State U., and now lives in west Georgia, has showed us, college athletes have a reasonable voice and they are going to make decisions for themselves now. He was able to show his voice 16 years after a great season. It shouldn’t have to take that long.
Black students who are athletes are going to have access to the market in College Sports Inc. The caretakers of College Sports Inc., who are mostly white, asked for this upheaval because they wouldn’t share enough of the bonanza.