It happens every spring. And every summer, fall and winter. Some black athlete accidentally gives an honest and accurate answer to The Question, and then it’s off to the races.
The Question in question, which gets asked on an almost daily basis, is some variation of “How is your experience different from that of a white quarterback/coach/hockey player/golfer? Ninety nine times out of 100, the athlete dodges, ignores or jokes away The Question. Every black athlete in America has gotten good at doing so — otherwise they’d have to spend nearly every waking hour responding to it, again and again, as sports reporters lined up to ask it over and over, each thinking he was somehow being edgy, clever or original for doing so.
But then there’s that 100th time, when some black athlete actually answers. Maybe he’s tired, or he had a bad day, or he’s just sick of hearing the same &%@# question over and over, but this time he responds, honestly and accurately, as though it were a legitimate inquiry about his experience and not just a stupid, unvarying Gotcha! game. And then it’s off to the races.
What follows is inevitable, predictable, hackneyed and dull, but the participants in this weird ritual of the sports pages all pretend this is something new and noteworthy, something that they didn’t just finish doing, three months ago, almost verbatim. The Question being answered, it becomes time to write The Column.
The Column appears in dozens of newspapers simultaneously, with different bylines and a few other, very slight, variations. The similarities are creepy enough to make you wonder whether sports columnists might actually be some kind of multiheaded macro-organism, something like that giant mushroom in Michigan.
The athlete’s answer, The Column says, is wrong. The athlete’s answer is always wrong. His answer shows that he is thin-skinned; that he has a chip on his shoulder; that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because Roger Maris got death threats too and that surely proves it’s not a racial thing. They booed Pee Wee Reese too, you know, and …
Frankly, The Column is boring. It was boring 20 years ago when Charles Barkley answered the question honestly and was roundly condemned for doing so, and it was boring 30 years ago when the same thing happened to Reggie Jackson. And it hasn’t gotten any more interesting or enlightening since.
The most recent go-round of this inane ritual centered on Donovan McNabb, whose answer to The Question was measured, understated and true. Here’s what he said:
“There’s not that many African-American quarterbacks, so we have to do a little bit extra. … Because the percentage of us playing this position, which people didn’t want us to play … is low, so we do a little extra.”
He also suggested that white quarterbacks “don’t get criticized as much as we do.” That hardly seems radical or extreme, but it’s more than enough to give white sports reporters the vapors. Pressing a dainty handkerchief to their foreheads, they staggered to their keyboards and — en masse — cranked out yet another dismally predictable adaptation of The Column.
This time around The Column was particularly entertaining because of the setting for this episode: Philadelphia. This is the city with a statue of Connie Mack.* This is the home of the last team in the National League to integrate (after Jackie Robinson retired). This is the city that transformed Major League Baseball — free agency was created expressly because Curt Flood refused to play in what he called “the most racist town in America.” Yet last week, in dozens of examples of The Column, Philadelphia was portrayed as a colorblind, purely meritocratic utopia and a magnet for black athletes happy to be judged only on the quality of their performance. After all, Ryan Howard has already been allowed to play here nearly half as long as Richie Allen was. (Here’s the paper’s contribution to the corpus, a fine imitation of Stephen Colbert — “Am I white? I can’t tell. I don’t see color” — except without the irony.)
The latest round of this sad ritual ended Sunday afternoon, when McNabb played his first game of the year without a knee-brace, throwing for 381 yards and four touchdowns en route to a 56-21 win over the Detroit Lions. After the game, of course, he was asked The Question again, but he sidestepped it this time just like he did the Lions’ pass rush.
The Question isn’t going away. Reporters will keep asking it, seemingly unable to grasp that the very act of asking it is, itself, all the answer they should need.
For a refreshing alternative to The Column, see CBS Sports’ Mike Freeman, who actually wrote a real column, rather than just recycling the same thing he wrote back in 2001 when The Answer answered The Question. He seems to come at this subject from a different perspective than that shared by so many of his hivelike colleagues.** While you’re at it, also be sure to check out the responses Freeman’s gotten. (I wonder how many of those e-mails came from here in Philly.)
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* Reason No. 2,347 that I believe God has a sense of humor: The former site of Connie Mack Stadium is now the location of a thriving multi-ethnic church preaching a message of “racial reconciliation.”
** Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that the monochromatic horde of sports writers who congratulated themselves last week for churning out another version of The Column are all racists. Nor am I suggesting that they are all cliched, talentless hacks incapable of original thought. This is clearly an instance of lazy, thoughtless, gratuitous hackery, but whether or not it indicates a chronic condition is something that would need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
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