Joel Anderson is better known in the blogosphere and Twitterverse as blackink12 of PostBourgie. He is currently a newspaper reporter in Florida and has worked at several news organizations, including The Associated Press, for nearly a decade.
Jason Collins’ coming out was a step in the right direction, but only an openly gay NFL player will make the kind of impact needed to truly challenge prejudice in American sports.
Jason Collins would never have been mistaken for an NBA player of much consequence.
He has played for six different teams, four in the last five years. He has averaged as many personal fouls per game as points—often more—in seven of his 12 seasons. This past season could have been his last in the league, as his 1.1 points and 1.6 rebounds per game aren’t likely to be in demand on the free-agent market.
In his first person essay in Sports Illustrated, Collins even ridiculed his own unremarkable career, writing, “I take charges and I foul—that’s been my forte. … I enter the court knowing I have six hard fouls to give.”
It was in the locker room and on the field where Wade Davis felt most at peace with himself, which doesn’t sound unusual until he tells you that he was then a closeted gay man. “Sports was, for me, the safest place,” says Davis, an NFL and NFL Europe player from 2000 to 2004. Davis used football as a sanctuary from the rigid social hierarchy of middle and high school. Away from the game, away from his teammates, he struggled to focus on anything other than his inner turmoil and whether it was evident to his fellow classmates. To conceal his sexuality, he wore baggy pants and talked “with a twang.” “Anything to make people feel as if I was like everyone else,” says Davis, who finally revealed he was gay in January 2012.
(AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) University of Miami quarterback Jacory Harris
In the annals of college football scandals, nothing about the details tying the University of Miami -- which started its season Monday with eight players missing after NCAA sanctions -- and dozens of its student-athletes to a rogue booster turned Ponzi-scheme convict seems all that fresh or uncommon.
If the claims of felon and former Miami superfan Nevin Shapiro and the reporting of sports journalism's itinerant watchdog Yahoo! Sports are to be believed, there were extravagant parties at South Beach nightclubs and on million-dollar yachts, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash handouts, and pimping.
Shirley Sherrod at her home on Friday, July 23, 2010, in Albany, Georgia. (AP Photo/Steve Cannon)
Let's review the past few weeks. The NAACP asked the Tea Party to condemn racist elements in its ranks, and the Tea Party responded with a fake letter from the NAACP to President Abraham Lincoln asking for slavery to be restored. Shirley Sherrod was fired from her job at the USDA over video of a controversial speech that turned out to be heavily edited.
