When the World Series
took place in 1918 it did so under multiple clouds. The first was that World
War I was going and that baseball had been forced – reluctantly – to have its
greatest stars shoulder guns and fight. The owners believed that the 1919
season might very well be wiped out – no one knew that the war would be over by
November – and had already shortened their season to end in September. The
World Series was going to take place over a short period of time and very
likely be the last baseball anyone saw for a while.
Attendance had dropped
immensely as a result which dismayed the two teams: the Red Sox and the Cubs.
In the era of the reserve clause the World Series share was a major source of
income. Upsetting them more was the fact that for the first time baseball was
going to diminish the money having made the decision to divide ticket sales for
teams that finished anywhere from second to fourth in both leagues. Before the
series began, both teams considered staging a strike, demanding more money or
they wouldn’t play. The president of the American League Ban Johnson met with
the strike leaders and put their strike in the shadow of patriotism with which
The National pastime was now connected with. How could they think of letting
down the public, especially in a time of war?
The players, led by
Harry Hooper of the Red Sox, knew that they couldn’t win this fight. Baseball
was always the master of public relations when it came to its image as the
national game and to think of money in comparison to that – well, it was
practically un-American. The players came out looking like ingrates even though
they were in the right.
I mention all of this
because during the seventh inning stretch at what was then known as Cubs Field
the on-field band chose to use the opportunity to strike up The Star-Spangled
Banner. The song, I should mention, wasn’t the national anthem yet: it wouldn’t
be adopted as such until 1931. But when it began to play, the spectators began
to sing, first only a few, then more and more until by the final note, the
entire crowd was singing. And when the final note was played the entire crowd
burst into thunderous cheers and applause, no doubt inspired by the national
mood. The song was played at every game of the World Series, which the Red Sox
won four games to 2 over Chicago. Famously the Red Sox didn’t win another World
Series until 2004 and the Cubs, though they would contend frequently over the
next quarter of a century, wouldn’t win a World Series until 2016.
Because baseball was
associated with the national game – and because the owners never liked to mess
with anything that made them sound like that they weren’t an institution rather
than a business – the Star Spangled Banner became associated with baseball
pretty much from that point forward. And because baseball was the American
sport every other league and sport, from football to I suspect high school
lacrosse, has been imitated it ever since. That is the deeper story of the
connection between the Star-Spangled Banner and professional sports.
I seriously doubt that
any of the so-called patriots who condemn any action involving the national
anthem as ‘unamerican’ in professional
sports know anything about and I seriously doubt that even if they did know, their
opinion would change one bit. I also have incredible suspicion that the song
was written in the one American war we got our asses kicked in, that it has
four verses besides the first one, that it’s set to an English drinking song,
or that they even know the words to the anthem. And I’ll be honest
during the post-season and World Series year after year I tend not to listen
the national anthem. It’s not just that it’s almost inevitably badly sung,
no matter which Billboard singer they get to mangle it; it’s that even as
patriotic songs go, it’s not a particularly good one. ‘The Star-Spangled
Banner’ is a wartime song and sounds like it. Compared to God Bless America or
My Country, This of Thee, which are more peaceful and more tuneful, it sounds
like – well, like it was written by an attorney rather than a poet or a
songwriter. And this is coming from someone for whom it would doesn’t
necessarily have the relationship with America that Chris Rock once described
in his ‘Never Scared’ special. “For black people America is like the uncle who
paid your way through college – but molested you.”
The kindest thing you
can say about the national anthem and professional sports – and this is the
rare occasion I am loathe to be objective – is that it came during a time when
separate but equal was the law of the land, where black people were getting lynched
and race riots were considered the faults of the uppity black people.
Integration in professional sports was something that was considered
unthinkable and probably un-American even by those who went off to fight
fascism abroad in World War II.
Jackie Robinson learned
that lesson the hard way while serving in the military. He got on a bus and
ignored the instructions to move to the back. Transportation had been
integrated by the military. The driver either didn’t know or didn’t care. When
Robinson refused to do so, he was court-martialed. The jury would acquit him
but Robinson never forgot the realization that he was fighting two wars: “one
abroad and one against racism at home.” In his autobiography which ended up
being published posthumously (he died days before it was published) in his last
lines, he made it clear. “When I hear the national anthem, I can not salute the
flag. I know that I am a black man in white America. In 1972, in 1947, at my
birth in 1919 I know I never had it made.”
This last statement is
true of every African-American athlete half a century later. And while things
have improved immensely for athletes in many ways, particularly in the last
twenty years all of them are very aware of the precarious position they are in
with white ownership. This case has been made repeatedly but one that I was
unfamiliar with both when it happened and until fairly recently was the story
of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. It’s unlikely I still would be were it not for the work
of the sports documentaries on Showtime.
Until fairly recently
Showtime was at least as good as HBO when it came to showing documentary series
and they were superior, in my opinion, when it came to those on professional
athletes. I saw many fascinating ones over the past few years on sports that
don’t normally interest me and people I would have paid no attention to
otherwise. I learned the tragic story of Sonny Liston, one of the greatest and
most controversial boxers of all time. I saw The Kings the stories of
the intertwined fates of Sugar Ray Leonard, Marv Hagler, Roberto Duran and
Thomas Hearns, interplayed with the history of 1970s and 1980s America. I saw Goliath
the story of Wilt Chamberlain, the athlete before he was everything else. And
last year came Stand the story of a man who overcame obstacles to become
one of the greatest athletes in 1990s basketball – and then was destroyed
because of racism and faux outrage twenty years before Colin Kaepernick lived
through a similar experience. The difference was, for him, the consequences
were far more severe personally and it is only until recently that we’ve begun
to realize just how poorly we’ve treated him.
Unlike many of the
documentaries involving sports that I’ve watched over the years the events in Stand
took place during my lifetime or at least my childhood. I have no memory of
them no doubt because I never followed professional basketball seriously then
or now and I certainly wouldn’t have known anything about the saga of a point guard for the Denver Nuggets.
The Nuggets themselves were a relatively new team in basketball: they’d been
part of the ABA (American Basketball Association) and had joined the NBA when
the two leagues merged in 1976. Relatively speaking they’ve enjoyed some
success in their history. During the 1980s they were one of the highest scoring
teams in basketball, perennially contending for the playoffs but only winning
two division titles in the 1980s and never making it to the conference finals.
(They didn’t win their first championship until 2023.) They had gone through a
period of decline during 1989 and 1991, but that allowed them to make high
draft choices. One of them came in 1990.
Chris Jackson was born
in Gulfport, Mississippi, one of three sons in a single parent household. He
lived in poverty and constantly had poor nutrition. He missed fourth grade, was
later placed in special education classes and it wasn’t until 17 that he was
diagnosed with a moderate form of Tourette’s. Somehow he became a basketball
prodigy at Gulfport High School. He was named Mississippi Mr. Basketball in
1987 and 1988. He was signed by LSU. He set the scoring record for a freshman,
then broke it the same year, setting records for most points by a freshman. The following year he produced
similar numbers and tied his career high for three-pointers. Before his junior
year he declared for the draft and was selected third. He was a teammate his
second year with Shaquille O’Neal and later he took it personally when O’Neal
broke the records he set as LSU, something O’Neal remarks on with ruefulness in
the documentary
He was named to the
all-rookie second team in 1991, then struggled the following year due to issues
with a medication he’d been wrongly prescribed to treat his Tourette’s. The
next year he got back into shape and was named Most Improved Player. Listening
to his contemporaries and his peers, he is described in awe as this relatively
small man who was suffering from Tourette’s absolutely destroying guys twice
his size as a point guard. One observer says he was “Steph Curry before he was
Steph Curry” and Curry himself says he could not have done what Jackson did.
During the 1993 season
Jackson had converted to Islam, something that puzzled more people than it
upset. No one in Denver cared who he worshiped as long as he performed on the
court – something that he was doing with incredible skill. In the 1993-1994 season
the Nuggets had their first winning season in five years, managed to come from
a two game to nothing deficit to upset the first place Supersonics and nearly
did the same thing against the Utah Jazz before the lost in the second round.
The next year they finished .500 but still qualified for the playoffs. (They
were swept by the Spurs.) The 1995-1996 season was a rebuilding year but the
highpoint came when they played the 1995-96 Bulls who were on their way to a
72-10 season. One of those ten losses came against the Nuggets when Abdul-Rauf
scored 32 points against the Bulls. Steve Kerr tried to guard him that night
and freely tells the camera had no chance against him that night.
Around that time,
however, Abdul-Rauf began to undergo the wrong kind of scrutiny for what was a private
decision that got turned into something that led to him being ‘cheated out of
his career’. Abdul-Rauf makes it clear that he’d begun to read the writings of
such leftist thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and learned about ‘American
exceptionalism.” My readers know I have issues with both these men as scholars
but Abdul-Rauf makes it very clear in Stand that his interpretation is
milder than most current day progressives and even most African-Americans. And
when you consider the American flag, as I mentioned, has a different
implication for African-Americans then white ones his actions are understandable.
During the 1995-96
season when everyone was saluting the flag, Abdul-Rauf was sitting on the
sidelines. That’s all he was doing, not doing a Black Power salute or taking a
knee. He did so for somewhere between four to six months to the indifference of
his teammates, the attendees both in Denver and on the road, and most importantly
the NBA. His teammates and coach said that he told them what was he doing and
that they were fine with it – ‘it was no big deal’. And it very likely would
have remained one were it not for the interference and bullying of a Denver talk
radio host.
A broadcaster for
Denver’s KBPI radio station is shown saying simply: “I don’t like him.” The broadcaster (whose name is mentioned but
who no one in the documentary mentions by name) says he went to a game and
noticed Abdul-Rauf not standing for the National Anthem. He evokes the usual patriotic
cliches “my father fought in World War II” and basically decided to broadcast
this fact to his audience. His continued discussion of it on talk radio led to
it being picked up by cable and national news (a big deal because partisan
networks like Fox News and MSNBC didn’t exist yet). Eventually they went to
interview him about why Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem.
In the interview we
see, which goes Abdul-Rauf says went on for twenty minutes, he speaks in a
completely calm tone, lucidly and intellectually. He gives a full and measured
response. But in what was clearly a hack job done by the entire national media,
the only clips that ended up playing were ones where he said the flag was a
symbol of oppression and that the United States had a long history of tyranny.
This is a position, for the record, that a black man in white America would
have a hard time disagreeing with and considering Jackson/Abdul-Rauf’s
upbringing, it’s an understandable one. But nuance has never been the strong
suit of network news and eventually Abdul-Rauf became a polarizing figure.
We see a series of
talking heads and it should come as no surprise that all of the people who
express the greatest vehemence are white fans (male) and that African-American
superstars, among them Charles Barkley and Mike Tyson, offer complete support.
Shaquille O’Neal is shown in the present wishing that he’d gone out of his way
to support his former teammate because he has two sisters who practice Islam.
Abdul-Rauf described
what happened next. He showed up on March 12, 1996 for a home game and was
called in by his coach who was clearly upset – at the league, not him. He told
him about what had happened, that he was indefinitely suspended until he agreed
to stand for the anthem and that the team wanted him to leave the stadium
immediately, without dressing for the game or even talking to his teammates.
Abdul-Rauf was stunned. When his agent was sent the reasons for the suspension,
he knew it was bullshit because the code of conduct he’d supposedly broken was so
archaic the union never even negotiated it.
Abdul-Rauf is very
clear about the racism involved in this decision, though he does so subtly. He
points out that the league never liked the fact that his agent, who was a close
friend of his, was also African-American. He points out the hypocrisy of the
fact that African-Americans, despite being a majority of the talent in the NBA,
have almost no representation in management or the front office. This was under
scrutiny at the time as well. Famously in 1987 Al Campanis had come on Ted
Koppel to mark the fortieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut and had said
that he thought “black people didn’t have the necessities” to have positions in
management. The NBA no doubt didn’t want those questions asked either.
And the racism, which
the broadcaster denies, was very clear at the time. Four employees of KBI went
to a Colorado mosque and were charged with misdemeanors for playing ‘The
Star-Spangled Banner’ on bugle and trumpet. (One wonders if they even checked
to see if this was even a mosque Abdul-Rauf frequented or whether they thought
they all looked alike.) It’s worth remembering that in the 1990s Colorado was
essentially as deeply conservative as its neighbors Wyoming and Utah. With the
exception of LBJ’s landslide in 1964 and Clinton’s victory in 1992, it had been
solidly Republican for almost the entire twentieth century, even going for
Republican for the last two of FDR’s electoral landslides. (Indeed it went for
Bob Dole in 1996 and didn’t become solidly Democratic until Obama’s win in 2008.)
Much of Colorado’s politics and fan base was heavily white, even in Denver and as
we see in footage later on, Abdul-Rauf is seen being heavily booed at home when
the suspension was lifted. Eventually he worked out a compromise with the
league where he would stand during the playing of the anthem but could close
his eyes, look downward and silently recited prayer. For the fans, it changed
nothing and from that moment on he was a marked man.
The following season
after having had one of the biggest seasons of his career so far, Abdul Rauf
was traded to Sacramento Kings for basically nothing. He played 75 games the
next year and averaged 28.4 points a game
but the next year he didn’t start a single game. and one of the greatest
players in the league was for all intents and purposes blacklisted. The NBA denies
to this day that is what they did but the players and his friends know that it
was happened. He ended up signing with a Turkish basketball league but left
before finishing the season. He didn’t play for the 1999-2000 season and then
signed with the Vancouver Grizzlies in August of 2000. He managed to get
through the season intact but then September 11th put the final nail
in his coffin.
In December of 2001, he
was interviewed on HBO’s Real Sports. I have no doubt the only reason he was
talked too was because they wanted to talk to both a Muslim athlete and a
controversial figure. In his interview, where he was unaccompanied he stated
that he thought the attacks on the Twin Towers were an inside job and that
Israel might have been responsible. It’s telling that there are now many people
– including professional athletes like Aaron Rodgers – who spout conspiracy
theories on cable news and are treated not only justly but with authority and
Abdul-Rauf’s career in the NBA was torpedoed after that broadcast.
And it is worth noting
he faced far worse consequences then just being professionally blackballed. He
bought a mansion with his earnings for his family in Necaise, Mississippi in 1992.
In 2001, it was burned to the ground. Investigators determined there was arson
and the FBI investigated. The KKK and white nationalists have always had a heavy
presence in Mississippi to this day and some were suspected but no one was
charged. A teammate of Abdul-Rauf points out the hypocrisy: “Mahmud never said
to burn down the house but the Klan did burn his house down.” Abdul-Rauf
moved to Florida.
Abdul-Rauf played with
many international teams for the rest of his career, including in Russia and
Japan. And he is still very gifted as an athlete in his fifties. He currently
plays for the BIG3 basketball league, a league founded by Ice Cube in 2017 and
he still plays today and pretty well: at age 49, he was among the leaders in
field goal percentage.
Abdul-Rauf has every
right to be enraged by what happened to him: the parallels between him and
Colin Kaepernick are unmistakable. But I consider what happened to him more
outrageous because his actions were not only private but unnoticed by the
league for much of the initial period it was happening. Abdul-Rauf was never
outspoken the way many of todays professional athletes are and he never spoke
with the militancy of other Black Muslims, not just Louis Farrakhan or Muhammed
Ali but other polarizing racial figures of the time such as Al Sharpton or
Jesse Jackson. Abdul-Rauf had opinions but they were his own and he makes it
clear, even now, that they are solely his own and he never tried to preach to
anyone at the time.
The racism is, if
anything, more blatant then it was in the days of Fox News and talk radio not
only because it’s very clear this was the white administration coming down on a
Black Islam athlete who they considered ‘uppity’ though compared to his contemporaries
like Barkley and Dennis Rodman, he wasn’t even close to their level of
outrageousness. It’s equally clear that economics were involved: Denver was
never as a big market team as New York or Chicago and it’s likely the league
felt freer to stomp on Abdul-Rauf with impunity because he wasn’t Jordan
or Ewing even though he was clearly as good as them at his profession. Had his
career been even ten years later, when
social media was in full swing, it’s likely he could have survived this; had it
happened today, he’d probably be a bigger celebrity for what he said off the
court then on. But the perfect storm of events torpedoed his career and did far
more damage to his life than any athlete today.
I’m impressed by
Abdul-Rauf the way that I am by the measure of other athletes such as Jackie
Robinson or Ali and infinitely more than some of the so-called ‘activists’ today.
Abdul-Rauf didn’t know he was doing anything controversial at the time but when
the going got tough he stood firm to his principles. And it’s clear even today
that he still has them. One of the last images of Abdul-Rauf is him in
attendance of an NBA game while the National Anthem is being played. While
everyone else is standing and singing, he's looking downward with his eyes closed
and chanting silently. He does so the same way he did when the whole
controversy started – with no one in the stadium seeming angry or even noticing.
He has made peace with what has happened to him and he has never compromised.
He continues to make his stand.
No comments:
Post a Comment