The joke that is called "sports journalism" 12/21/2006

I think my page has taken on a far too serious tone at times. See, I'm a lover of many things, sports being one of them considering football was my first passion only to fall flat on my face without a Plan B.

But who would've known us colored boys can posses multitudinous qualities other than toting a microphone or a leather ball? Someone should've told me sooner or maybe I wouldn't be as late as I am at this journalism thing.

So now I'm on playing on a different surface, taking on suckas and finding myself do the things I once did as a football player......beating up on those considered bigger than me or out of my league.

I live for it, getting off on breaking the will of these so-called "journalists" who believe they go by as "THE" last word on sports. Making them back down before they decide to come at me, or in this case, at my team with their pens (or keyboard) in hand. By now, you all should know the colors of my uniform.


But there's a stark difference between the current conditions of the playing field of sports journalism than it was for me playing football at the University of Oklahoma. I thought I beat some serious odds to departing the sweet confines of Brooklyn, NYC leaving for the biblebelt of the country. But a 2006 study conducted by Institute of Diversity & Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida came up with some staggering numbers of the new odds I now face.

- White men and women make up 88 percent of newspaper staffs covering sports throughout the US.
- African-Americans make up 6.2 percent of newspaper staffs covering sports around the country.
- Of the sports editors at major papers in the US, 94 percent were white with 90 percent being white males.
- African Americans make up a paucity 1.6 percent of sports editors in the country

Staggering is an understatement. When gauging my prospects of what lays ahead of me, I find myself out manned and outgunned. So of course I have to work twice....no...three times as hard just to be in the game.


Yet it's not that I want to remain on the opposing team. I'd actually prefer to play alongside them. A welcomed addition and the missing piece while bearing a flair and flamboyance that typically comes along with people cut from a charcoal colored cloth.

But there's rarely a day that goes by when my peripheral senses aren't subject to a rant by a smug print columnist or on air personality sheltered behind the safety of the aforementioned stacked deck firmly stating that someone of my kind is on the opposing team.

And that's why they're on the other side.

I have to break up the monotony of this boys club. They're far too comfortable fattening themselves at the expense of mischaracterizing players who more often than not share a similar hue to myself. Not that many of these players need to be rescued since some are self centered collateral damage .

But since the overhyped and oversensationalized slap and skatefest that took place at the Garden last Saturday (basketball players can't fight worth a damn) between the New York Knicks and Denver Nuggets, I've read that its endemic of an encroaching "culture of violence" ready to engulf the sanctity of sports.

Basically, my generation has been called out by sports columnists and reporters turned sociologists who claim to have a keen understanding of my generations make up and why we do what we do. The same things they've been doing for years. So I've been invited to the game whether I wanted to participate or not.

So in my future blogs, I'm going to have a long line of enemy combatants, walking blindfolded in a row wearing Guantanamo Bay Burnt Orange prison jump suits with their ankles chained together in loose fitting shackles, with one hand placed on the shoulder of the one ahead of them, not realizing they're standing before a one man firing squad, leaving their articles and media generated talking points pock marked and speckled like the aftermath of someone whose suffered from a severe outbreak of smallpox.

They need to hear about themselves.

Damn....did I come off too serious again? I need to work on that.