Sunday I sat and watched the Los Angeles Clippers lose, and even as a Lakers fan it was painful to watch what happened on and especially off the court.
A week ago my play Blackballin’ completed a two week run at the University of California, Riverside. Blackballin’ uses historic moments in iconic American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing, to explore past and present race relations. When UCR’s Department of Theater decided to make Blackballin’ a part of our 2013-14 season, I immediately began wondering about the relevance of the issues addressed in a play I wrote almost 20 years ago.
It was 1995 when I wrote what I sometimes call my “angry Black man play”, during my first year of graduate school at UCLA; it also happened to be the last time the UCLA Bruins won the Men’s NCAA Championship. I remember celebrating at UCLA’s North Campus Student Center with a few dozen students and feeling the elation sports can evoke – that feeling of being a part of something greater than yourself. Yet I was writing a play that used iconic American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing to address issues of race relations still plaguing our country, and in so doing pointed out the ironic nature of sports. The play was selected the best written by graduate students that year and won the ASK/UCLA Playwriting Award which included a reading at London’s Royal Court Theatre.
Blackballin’ addresses issues ranging from the lack of Black quarterbacks in the NFL to the billions made by the NCAA on the backs of “student athletes” – many of whom were poor Black youth not allowed to profit from their labor; to the importance of one’s image – “Image is everything” which was a popular catch phrase from an advertising campaign for Cannon cameras during that time. I guess my concerns about the relevance of the issues addressed in Blackballin’ almost two decades ago were unfortunately unfounded.
I once read somewhere that sports are often times used as the means of embedding the mores of a society into its population. So that the things a society values is reinforced through ritual and repetition: Three strikes and you’re _____, never hit below the _____, that’s the way the ball ______, I’m sure you were able to fill in the blanks above without a second thought; and more importantly you probably believe that there is nothing wrong with adapting these rules as part of our daily lives, after all they must be true, just look at baseball, boxing and basketball.
So 1994 California decided to take “three strikes” off the baseball diamond and put it into law. (The essence of the Three Strikes law was to require a defendant convicted of any new felony, having suffered one prior conviction of a serious felony to be sentenced to state prison for twice the term otherwise provided for the crime. If the defendant was convicted of any felony with two or more prior strikes, the law mandated a state prison term of at least 25 years to life).
I wonder if this law would have passed if baseball players got 4 or even 5 strikes instead of 3.
Although I wasn’t surprise at the “alleged” racist words spoken by Donald Sterling, I still found it painful as a Black man to hear these embedded prejudices articulated. I often say to my wife that most of us as human beings spend all of our lives becoming who we are, and I believe this is no different with Sterling. He was probably a young racist in the 50’s, a middle aged racist in the 70’s, a Reagan racist in the 80’s (That’s when the rich got richer and then “trickled” on the poor and called it rain), and now he’s a rich old racist… with a bunch of “Negroes” laboring for him.
To paraphrase Denny Green – former “Black” coach of the Arizona Cardinals: “He is who we thought he was,” and we DID NOT let him off the hook!