I’m a pretty morbid guy, so this story is right up my alley…
Man Dies in Conn. Dance Faceoff
I caught a couple of minutes of “Rize” and was saddened, amused and ready to turn the channel after about five minutes…
I’m sorry, but krumping is just stupid. It used to be called a seizure and we would laugh, then start doing the wop or the Kid-N-Play.
Now those were dances…
Our staff photographer reminded me that I wrote about the lack of black athletes playing baseball last year, right around the same time Major League Baseball was ready to honor Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier.
He’s right and I feel wrong. Wrong that I’ve let this issue die from these pages for that long because it’s bigger than that.
“When you look at, not just high school, but look at the professional ranks. It’s not just blacks, it is whites also,” said Levi Lewis, head baseball coach at Lanier High in Jackson, MS. “Baseball is dying in America and we don’t care. We’re not doing anything to save it.”
You can only save something that wants to live, and former pros are trying to determine just that. In last week’s Boston Glove, Meridian native Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd was attributed to having plans of building an independent league ballpark in Mississippi, with hopes of drawing the community back into the game.
“My kids will play baseball. Ken Griffey’s kids, Barry Bonds’s kids, they’ll all play baseball because it’s handed down,” said Boyd, who played for the Boston Red Sox (1982-89), Montreal Expos (1990-91), and Texas Rangers (1991). “Because of the challenges of surviving in our society in the past 15 or 20 years, we’ve skipped a whole generation of people passing baseball down to their kids.
“We’ve got to make them realize again how important it is to our history.”
Jonathan Howard’s history has him learning baseball at the YMCA and playing in the North Jackson baseball league as a youth. He moved to Ridgeland as a two-sport athlete, excelling on the diamond and the gridiron.
“I really loved it,” the Ridgeland High senior said about football, “but I had to stop playing.”
Howard was forced to stop after his neck snapped while making a tackle as a junior.
“My neck snapped back and my whole body got numb. This happened a couple of times, but I never knew what was happening,” said Howard, who still has a visible scar after a plate was put in to replace a disc between the 3rd and 4th vertebrae. “It was real narrow and my spinal cord kept hitting it. The doctor said I was one more step away from being paralyzed for the rest of my life.
“He said I was born with it, but I don’t know.”
He does know that next year he’ll be playing baseball for Holmes Community College, one reason Howard likely would have chosen baseball regardless of the injury and subsequent surgery.
“Baseball is a great opportunity to go to the next level,” Howard said. “I think African-Americans should get into it because there’s a better chance for them going than relying on football and basketball all the time.”
The numbers back him up. The National Basketball Association has only two rounds for their annual draft, with those left on the outside looking in destined for low-level professional leagues at home or abroad. The National Football League’s draft may last two days, but it’s only seven rounds to help fill the 55 final roster spots available on any team. To fill the numerous levels of baseball’s minor leagues, which Branch Rickey created the framework, there are 50 rounds in MLB’s First-Year Player Draft.
Rickey didn’t have to use one of those picks to sign Robinson to a minor league contract in 1945. He didn’t even have to negotiate financial terms with the Kansas City Monarchs, the Negro League team that Robinson was playing with at the time.
“There’s a lot of money involved,” Howard said. “That’s why I think a lot of African-Americans don’t put the time into it because you have to buy bats, gloves and some people don’t have the money.
“But people in the Dominican Republic are using their bare hands and they’re still getting it done, so it’s not an excuse.”
The excuse I hear when I’m sitting at games is the same thing I hear about soccer, that the game is too boring, it doesn’t move fast enough and it’s hard to understand. But it may be as simple as monkey see, monkey do.
“You don’t have parental involvement like we used to,” Lewis said. “Now parents are involved with basketball, especially when you go to your black schools.
“Basketball is the number one sport and baseball is like the bowling team,” he added. “It’s not prioritized, so if the adults look at it like that, then the students will look at it like that.”
If those students don’t start looking at baseball as a priority, in the future the only Americans in baseball will be the ones in the stands, and that’s the truth.
The New York Mets flagship station is WFAN, 660 AM in New York City. You can call me a band wagon jumper, but in 1986 I jumped on a signpost to watch the ticker tape parade as they celebrated the World Series championship.
I own a copy of the Let’s Go Mets music video (Don’t ask why) and at the end, there’s a promo for Imus in the Morning.
From that point until I graduated high school, I listened to the FAN at night, either to catch late Mets games or fall asleep to sports talk radio (Rob, you were there). That would mean I would wake up to Imus, who’s show runs from 5:30 a.m. to 9 a.m.
I think anyone can see where this is going, but I’ll start with this comment - I’m not defending Imus or his calling the Rutgers’ women’s basketball team a bunch of “Nappy-headed ho’s”.
It’s a racist (For those of you who don’t know, nappy-headed is associated with the tight, uncombed locks of an black person’s hair) and sexist (Imus is not a rapper, so he can’t get away with degrading women as such) remark, made without any thought because that’s what he does.
You can read more about Imus at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Imus_in_the_Morning&oldid=121912122
Imus is a racist, sexist, homophobic morning radio show host who used to concentrate on impersonating voices like Richard Nixon and Wilfred Brimley, making fun of the news of the day with racist, sexist and homophobic comments.
Towards the end of my listening time, he had grown more political, pulling guests like, "John Kerry, Dick Cheney, J.D. Hayworth and Harold Ford, Jr., as well as reporters and columnists from Newsweek, NBC, MSNBC, and other media outlets," according to Wikipedia.
They put him on MSNBC and despite doing a voice of Bill Clinton, I believe the former president was another guest on the show and even invited him to the Congressional Correspondent's dinner, basically the sign that a comedian has made the ultimate crossover jump.
Imus is good and bad and all that I've said before. What bothers me the most about this is the fact that the show has said and done SO MUCH WORSE than call a bunch of well-educated college girls from Rutgers "Nappy-headed ho's".
I listened to C. Vivian Stringer, the coach of the team, and the best point she made was that due to Imus, her girls which includes five freshman and will return the entire team, have been forgotten. The fact they reached the championship game, losing to Tennessee has been completely overshadowed by this "controversy".
And honestly, what was so wrong about this? You're going to tell me that Rush, Bill O'Reilly, Dr. Laura, Opie and Anthony and Howard Stern don't say stupid racist or sexist or homophobic things on a daily basis?
At least Stern and O & A are currently on satillite radio, so their 'filth' isn't polluting the national air waves.
It's just dumb, is all. I could recall back to Chris Rock's last special on HBO, where he started about the Jackson family and Kobe Bryant and a bunch of other unimportant crap, then reminded everyone...
IT'S ALL TO MAKE YOU FORGET ABOUT THE WAR!!!
We're at war, people. Right now, there are American soliders with weapons off safety, killing brown people (Thanks, George Carlin) for whatever reason you'd like to believe, whether that's for oil (which is strange since the price of gas keeps going up), or for Bush to get rich (He's already a multi-millionaire, but I guess more money can't hurt), to avenge his father, because Chaney was bored or to combat terrorism (HA!).
So instead of marches on Washington and sit-ins on college campuses, organizations like the National Organization of Women, the NAACP and the National Association of Black Journalists are spending their time trying to get Don Imus fired for a very stupid comment.
Why is it the only time I hear about the NAACP, it's for things like this?
It's all silly and Reecie said it best, just like Carlin before her and just like thousands of millions of people before and after them all.
If you don't like what you hear, you can just change the channel, turn the dial or turn it off and concentrate on more important things, like the dead-end conflict or the immense homeless problem in the country or the fact that the gap between the have's and the have not's only increases every day or that black people make up 12 percent of the population, but over 30 percent of the prision population.
If the NAACP looked into that, maybe I would join.