Dr. Lester K. Spence

_MG_5159.jpg, originally uploaded by Unbowed.

Here’s a little game to play during your next NBA outing: Look around for how many suites are dark. (You’ll notice them specifically in the corners or behind the baskets.) A dark suite means either that nobody bought it or that somebody did buy it for the season, then made the decision, “Screw it, let’s save the $1,200 [or whatever the number is] on food and drink and not give tonight’s suite tickets to anyone.” (Note: Only a handful of NBA teams control the concessions in their arenas.) That makes the less desirable suites somewhat of a sunk cost — those companies can’t get the money back for the season, but at the very least, they won’t lose more money on that purchase. What will happen next season? They just won’t buy the suite.

The sports guy nailed it. How long before the Madison Square Garden is empty?

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I didn’t think I’d make it to this point. Or said another way, I really didn’t think about what my life would be after 32. The year 2001 represented the future to me, so 32 was always my imagined end point. And here I stand and remain….

One more year until the blowout.

….

On another note, I knew that Michael Wilbon would write what some of us were thinking. Thank goodness for the Red Wings or I wouldn’t have been able to properly enjoy what SHOULD be the best series since Detroit v San Antonio.

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This story is interesting to me for a couple of different reasons.

I went to school in Dearborn. Beginning in the sixties Chaldeans moved into Dearborn from the Middle East to work at Ford. But Dearborn stayed more or less 90% white until the mid to late eighties. A lot of the (white) kids I went to school with in grade school attended Fordson for high school. I would have never imagined that the Middle Eastern population would explode to the point that the entire team (plus the coach) would either be Muslim or be from the Middle East.

The second thing is that this is the type of story that in another context would probably make a nice made-for-television movie or something like it. Ramadan is a supreme test of discipline, and to pull it off AND still be able to compete? Requires a great deal of perseverance.

For some reason I don’t think that movie will be coming anytime soon. Check out that first comment after the story to get a sense of what I mean. This isn’t just sour grapes speaking…Dearborn was well known throughout the country as one of the whitest cities in the North, and this change hasn’t gone over easy.

(I wish I could make this story replace the stories about Isiah Thomas coming in the wake of his sexual harassment of a black Madison Square Garden employee. I liked but really didn’t care about Marion Jones and the steroid deal. But the Thomas story has been more than disappointing.)

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The central meme that will define Vick’s circumstance is a simple one.

He didn’t leave the hood in the hood. People make the same argument about Pacman, and used to make the same argument about AI.

But here’s the thing. While there is a set of geographical markers that distinguish Detroit/Baltimore’s East Side (or Chicago’s South Side, or Saint Louis’ North Side) from its West/North side, even within this place there’s a whole lot of stuff going on. Even within one thin demographic slice you’ve got hustlers, workers, intellectuals, artisans, etc. And even within the straight up criminal class you’ve got people who understand the value of discretion, who know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. People who might not be able to tell you how to allot your 401K, but can tell you within a minute of meeting someone whether that person is trustworthy. Can give you both strategic and tactical advice about how to negotiate a given situation with a minimal use of rhetorical/physical violence.

The question then isn’t why Vick “didn’t let the hood go.” Because the “hood” contains as many different characters and character types as any other place that we might find on a map.

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I’ve been reading about Gary Sheffield’s (expanded) comments about the relative absence of African Americans in Major League Baseball. To tell you how much I know and how deep this situation is, until Sheffield made his comments I just assumed that Sheffield himself was Latino. I know that Bonds is an African American, and that Griffey is African American…but after that? My mind is a blank. (Oh. Cecil Fielder’s son Prince is African American.) The Tigers are now good enough for me to follow now, so hopefully that situation will change.But whatever the case I think that Sheffield’s comments are worth thinking about, and fleshing out. I’ve read at least one commenter who got some of it right. And another who also came close. But there’s more than a few idiots floating around. The following represents a piece I wrote over at my old haunts, with a few modifications. (more…)

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I got this from Both Teams Played Hard (the name of the website taken from an infamous Rasheed Wallace quote). They compiled the best 50 NBA Commercials available on YouTube. A couple of things stand out about this commercial. Three actually.

It holds up pretty well over time. I got the same chills watching it this time around as I did the first time I saw it. And I even remember thinking that homeboy in the red doesn’t really belong in the piece at all. What does he really do other than dance? I could do that!

The second is that this definitely needs to be higher on the list than what it was. I think it cracked the top ten but I’m thinking top 3, easy.

The third is that I can’t think of a better way to represent hip-hop without showing a single MC, DJ, or tagger.

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For those of you who’ve read me here and elsewhere, you know that when it comes to sports journalism, there is Ralph….and then there is everyone else. And given the background that many sports journalists of the generation before Ralph had? I’d trust them for good reporting on an arena that was increasingly dominated by athletes who couldn’t have shared a john with them in Mississippi about as far as I could throw them.

Halberstam was different though.

I don’t remember where I was when I first heard of him, or read him for that matter. But I knew that for a writer of his particular background he was incredibly honest about what he knew (and didn’t know). He was also very good at what he did. Not as good as Ralph as far as sports were concerned…but on a good day, he did more than ok. And truth be told, Halberstam’s more groundbreaking work on the children of the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War are in some ways much more important than Halberstam’s sports columns. He will be missed.

Oh. Boris Yeltsin passed away as well.

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I’m a fair weather baseball supporter. When the Tigers are doing well, I keep up. When they aren’t doing well? Not so much. I’m getting a chance to go to Camden Yards tomorrow. And because I’m not really going to see the game (a colleague of mine wants me to meet the person who own the skybox we’re going to be seeing the game from), I didn’t even know who they were playing (Detroit!) until I looked at the ticket.   While playing softball after a more than 20 year layoff was one of the highlights of living in Saint Louis–especially when I got my swing back–the game of summer for me has and will always be basketball.

So it was with only mild suprise that I read the following:

Even baseball teams at historically black colleges and universities (known as HBCUs) are now often comprised of mostly whites and Hispanics. Bethune-Cookman University, currently the No. 2 ranked HBCU baseball team in the country, plays its home games at Jackie Robinson Ballpark in Daytona Beach, Fla., site of Robinson’s first exhibition game in the Dodgers organization. Only seven of Bethune-Cookman’s 31 players are black.

More here.

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