by Glenn Stout
Tiger Woods took one step down that path, early in his career, in a Nike ad in which his words rolled on the screen—There are still courses in the United States I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin. I’ve heard I’m not ready for you. Are you ready for me?—and, in the wake of a backlash, stopped there. Labor activists who requested Michael Jordan’s support in their quest to improve sweatshop conditions and reduce child-labor abuse in the production of Air Jordans in Southeast Asia got none. “Moral jellyfish,” Dave Meggyesy, a linebacker and antiwar activist with the St. Louis Cardinals in the ’60s, labeled these athletes.
But scores of modern athletes, led by Woods and Jordan, create remarkable charity foundations, raise funds, and donate millions. Taken one step further—watered with an investment of time and heart nearly equal to the money—a miracle such as Andre Agassi’s academy for at-risk children in Las Vegas has bloomed in the desert. But when it comes to social action that might step on toes, that might send a shiver down the spine of their publicists or their corporate sponsors, what have American athletes done? “The scared generation,” former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton calls them.
“They’ve put the dollar bill in front of the human race,” grouses Carlos. “That’s why they stopped standing up.”
“They have to speak up,” insists Harry Edwards, a track and field and basketball star at San Jose State in the early ’60s who went on to become a sociology professor there and at Cal. “They’re the most visible expression of achievement and financial success in this country. Actors in Hollywood have always been very outspoken. Athletes have surpassed them as the number-one entertainers; they should be at least as outspoken. Those who set the table that today’s athletes are dining at, they exercised that responsibility. Now you have to get past an athlete’s corporate and personal advisers, and so he’s got to think what’s in the best interest of Buick and Nike and Starbucks and General Electric.”
Fascinating how many of the recent sportsmen who’ve taken stands didn’t spring from our system or our soil: Canada’s Steve Nash, flayed by players, coaches, and media for wearing a NO WAR, SHOOT FOR PEACE T-shirt on media day at the NBA’s All-Star weekend in 2003, as the United States was girding to invade Iraq; Adonal Foyle of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, who founded Democracy Matters during his 12-year NBA career to educate young people on how money was strangling U.S. politics and to pressure politicians to change campaign-finance laws. The modern athlete who sacrificed by far the most for his cause—first his fortune, then his life—died here on Joseph’s campus, and he, of course, was foreign-born too. Retired NBA center Manute Bol gave away virtually his entire $6 million in savings to build schools and hospitals in his native southern Sudan, then extended his stay there for a week in 2010 at the request of the president to oversee South Sudan’s first independent elections even as a potentially deadly disease he’d contracted there, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, began devouring his flesh. He finally headed back to his family’s home in Kansas, got off the transatlantic flight at Dulles Airport, and was rushed to UVA Medical Center, where he died in searing pain virtually next door to the building where Joseph took Early African History as a freshman. “That,” Joseph says, “blows my mind.”
The only emergency he’s facing now is the ever-shrinking time until Virginia’s next football game, ticking away like frantic heartbeats on a scoreboard clock beside the locker-room door: 193 days, 2 hours, 14 minutes, 37 . . . 36 . . . 35 seconds until the 2012 opener against Richmond. He heads back onto campus, relieved that his coaches haven’t cornered him.
He digs up some phone numbers and calls NBC News, ABC, The Today Show, BET, and NPR, leaving word of the UVA hunger strike in hopes of drumming up coverage. He fails to mention one thing: he’s a football player. No one calls him back.
The strikers, most on their fourth day without food, are reeling when he joins them for their noon rally: an epidemic of headaches, dizziness, racing hearts, fatigue, and irritability. One has strep throat. Some can chant only for a few minutes, then have to lie down. “I feel fine,” Joseph assures Greg Gelburd, the family physician who’s monitoring them.
Two hours later he raises his hand as his Political and Social Thought class discusses a renowned letter that Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail to his fellow clergymen. “Yes, Joseph?” says professor Michael Smith. Joseph opens his mouth to speak . . . but hasn’t the faintest clue what, and falls silent.
But he knows exactly what he wants to say at a student council meeting that evening, after the strikers ask the council to issue a resolution to the trustees in support of a living wage for the workers. One opponent of the resolution insists that it’s un-American to pay workers “more than they’re worth on the free market,” that it’s an assault on the “sanctity” of the market, one of the country’s founding institutions. “Slavery was one of the founding institutions of America!” Joseph cries. How many rules and regulations have human beings, over time, understood more deeply and altered? The resolution gets tabled and dies.
He discovers three messages on his cell phone and an email from the football staff, all saying the same thing: Report to the office. Now.
Two massive black gladiators in football regalia rise over the right flank of coach Mike London’s desk. One mannequin wears the Cavaliers’ blue home jersey, the other visiting orange. They possess everything that an athlete in 2012 could desire: pectorals sculpted by years in a weight room, arms that hang at their sides like chiseled clubs, red biceps bands, white gloves, Nike swooshes. Everything . . . except heads.
They’re the easy metaphor for the athlete that the U.S. system produces today. Too easy. The separated-out, year-round, one-sport jock we’re creating is often steeped in discipline, fighting spirit, leadership, and time management skills. If he’s, say, a UVA player such as Joseph, he’s up at 5:30 A.M.; getting taped at 6:00; practicing, pumping iron, and doing agility drills till 10:30; dragging his weary legs and sore shoulders to class; returning at 3:15 for another hour and a half of meetings and film study; then squeezing in his homework after dinner and collapsing into sleep. The 20-hour limit on weekly practice mandated by the NCAA? Every university skirts that by establishing all manner of “voluntary” activities and preparation for games that any nonvolunteer, of course, will never play. If he’s a baseball player, he’s reporting three hours before a game that lasts another three hours, taking a knee in the outfield grass afterward while his coach recounts his version of the whole affair, cleaning up the dugout and regrooming the field, wolfing down a meal and straggling back to his books or his pillow eight and a half hours after pulling on his jock . . . 56 times in the regular season and up to 13 more in the postseason! Off-season? No off-season exists for college athletes anymore. Minor sports? Virtually no minor sports exist either, even at Division II and III levels. Lacrosse, volleyball, and field hockey programs have morphed into one more opportunity for an institution to market itself and a coach to burnish his résumé and climb his career ladder as university presidents turn a blind eye to the absurd number of hours required of student-ATHLETES . . . because . . . well, aren’t sports the glue that binds the college, that lures alums and their checkbooks back onto campus, that creates TV revenues and free media advertising? In a society in which coaches are left to play the role of tribal elders, too many tribal elders have lost their way. Louisville coach Bobby Petrino thought fullback D. J. Kamer’s priorities were all wrong when he requested to miss a practice—a practice—in 2003 so he could serve as a pallbearer at a dear friend’s funeral, a mind-set that, along with his 41-9 record with Louisville, reaped Petrino big leaps to the NFL’s Falcons and Arkansas until a blonde and a Harley-Davidson undid him.
Yes, the system allows an athlete to pursue his dream . . . but what if his head or heart is large enough for two dreams? What of the athlete wise enough to know that this dream has, oh, perhaps a one-in-100 chance of panning out beyond the next few years, and even if it does, another half
century or more of life awaits him—rich decades for those who’ve begun pursuing other passions and curiosities, more likely fallow for those herded into this tunnel?
Could Tommie Smith and John Carlos have become bronze statues on San Jose State’s campus had they come of age today? Would Smith, in 2012, have attended the provocative sociology classes taught by Harry Edwards that helped inspire the sprinter to shut his eyes, bow his head, and raise his right fist during the national anthem in Mexico City in 1968 after breaking the world record in the 200 meters, provoking a national debate and one more advance in our long crawl to humanity? Not if those sociology classes couldn’t have been crammed into today’s ever-narrowing windows of time between practice and conditioning and meetings, and not if—as has become commonplace—Smith’s coaches had persuaded him to take a less challenging major so he could commit fully to his sport.
“It’s like a job,” says Joseph. “We’re only students to a certain extent. Sports have become such a big moneymaker that it’s all about the bottom line, like so much else in our society. It not only limits your potential to pursue academics but punishes you when your dedication to academics interferes with your sport. Most football and basketball players can’t take any of the difficult classes. You’re not able to take advantage of what these great schools have to offer. It’s not even amateur athletics anymore. It’s professional.”
“It’s a horrific schedule,” says Edwards, who over the last three decades has watched athletes stop taking classes that start after 1:00 P.M., classes with labs, classes that require their time on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays. Study abroad in the off-season, even if you’re a Division III relief pitcher? Don’t be silly.
“Joseph is the first football player who’s ever entered our program,” says professor Smith, the director of UVA’s Political and Social Thought Department. “He soaks up learning. He’s got intellectual curiosity. He’s refreshingly open. I have enormous respect for the kids in our sports programs—plenty are smart and have enormous discipline. It suggests to me the potential of these athletes if we challenge them intellectually the way we do athletically. But we’re selling these kids a bad deal. They’re doing a job here—full-time athletics. To pretend otherwise is to engage in denial. They’re on an island within the university. A subset of the staff is paid highly to get them through, but it’s not about engaging their minds with the outside world. They lead a regimented life, no time to loaf, to think, to read a book. It’s a precious four years of a human life when you acquire the habit of inquiry, when you acquire your intellectual capital. We have to ask ourselves, Why do we do this? To fill the endless demand for cable TV programming? Are athletes really in college or in some quasi-factory? We’ve shrunk them.”
Joseph refuses to be shrunk. That’s why he has gotten in trouble in the past for dozing during defensive meetings and twice sleeping through the 6:00 A.M. alarm he’d set for his seven o’clock weight workouts. That’s why he’s stood during meetings and devoured bananas, having heard that they’re a more effective energy booster than coffee. He’s written essays at 3:00 A.M. because he wouldn’t allow the six hours a day of football commitments to annihilate the rest of his student life and volunteer work. But now, on day three of his hunger strike, it’s time to face the consequences. Right or wrong, he has violated one of sports’ bedrock values, submission to authority—the one that’s not pounded into actors as they grow up, making it so much easier for them to turn and stand against the tide. Heart thumping, he trudges upstairs to the football offices.
But not to Coach London’s office. This hunger strike’s a moral swamp that London has no wish to wade into. He’s not a tunnel coach, he’s a big-lens guy, an African American who has felt the same hot breath on his neck as these campus workers; who had a child when he was in college, divorced soon after, and drove a Boys & Girls Club bus to get by; who as an undercover detective in Richmond had a gun pointed at his head by a thug and heard the trigger click, the weapon malfunctioning; who beat 10,000-to-one odds when his bone marrow matched that of a daughter afflicted by a blood disorder that often leads to leukemia and death; and who has his players plugged into a multitude of volunteering activities. What muddies it all even more is that London is Joseph’s frat brother, a product of community-activist, predominantly African American Phi Beta Sigma, whose motto is “culture for service and service for humanity,” a group fiercely proud of its members’ leadership in the famous civil rights March on Washington in 1963, the Selma protest march two years later, and the Million Man March in 1995. But now London’s receiving $2.1 million a year from the same employer that the hunger strikers are howling at over precisely such vast wage disparities, and he’s passed word to his media relations man that he has no comment for reporters who’ve begun to inquire about Joseph’s hunger strike.
So Joseph’s sent to Jim Reid, the associate head coach and defensive coordinator. What will he do, Joseph wonders, if Reid lays down an ultimatum: give up the hunger strike or give up your football jersey. Will he have the strength of one of his heroes, Muhammad Ali, who walked away from his world heavyweight crown and boxing career for three years rather than accept induction into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War? Joseph loves Reid, considers him genuine, fair, and interested in his players as more than athletes. Didn’t Reid invite Joseph to sleep in his office during team meetings in the fall of 2010 when the kid’s father was dying in Washington, D.C., and all the traveling back and forth to the hospital, piled on top of his other commitments, pushed Joseph past the brink of exhaustion? Didn’t Reid once tell Joseph that he could envision him becoming the president of the United States or a Supreme Court justice? But now . . .
“You can be in sympathy with a cause, but some people shouldn’t be doing this,” Reid tells him. “You have to be responsible to your rehabbing and to your health. I’m a little disappointed that the people you’re with, they’re not aware you’re at greater risk than they are.”
Joseph’s mind spins. Greater risk? He’s an athlete, for crying out loud—he’s the only hunger striker whose blood pressure isn’t plummeting! What should he do? Turn and lock his coach’s office door, the way Edwards did 51 years ago when his moment of truth came with San Jose State track coach Bud Winter? Glaring down at Winter—Edwards was a six-foot-eight, 225-pound nationally ranked discus thrower—he demanded humane treatment of black athletes who were being flown in from as far as Philadelphia for track tryouts and given no money for lodging or transportation home if they were cut, leaving some to sleep in the team’s equipment shed.
Coach Reid’s not finished. “There’s a way to precipitate change,” he continues. “It happens through political solutions, and you work within a certain set of rules. You prepare and convince people, you prepare hard, you work hard, you win—just like football!” And one more thing. Reid doesn’t want this hunger strike being linked on the news with the Virginia football program.
Joseph blinks. Should he come right back at his coach the way Bill Walton did 40 years ago on the car ride home from jail when John Wooden—furious that he had to bail out Walton after his center had been arrested for helping take over a campus building during an anti–Vietnam War protest—reprimanded the redhead for working “outside the rules” instead of expressing his beliefs in a letter? “But, Coach, my friends are coming home in body bags and wheelchairs!” Walton fired back, then called Wooden’s bluff by marching into his office and using stationery with Wooden’s photo on the top to write a letter to President Richard Nixon demanding that he resign and getting all his teammates to sign it.
But Walton had just been named NCAA Player of the Year and led UCLA to a 30-0 record and a national title, and Edwards was so dominant an athlete that the San Jose State basketball coach simply picked up his full athletic scholarship and made him his starting center when Winter threw him off the track team. Joseph has one career tackle . . . if you count the Orange-Blue spring game.
He swallows his anger, says little,
and nods farewell to his coach.
Joseph has learned the hard way—in cop cars, in handcuffs, in courtrooms, in a fluorescent jumpsuit, in a juvenile detention center—to follow his mother’s advice: Watch that hole beneath your nose! But he feels as if his loyalty to the football program and UVA are being questioned, and, wait a minute, are those loyalties supposed to be larger than his loyalty to the human race? No, he can’t wait a minute, can’t wait till he gets home to respond to his coach. He flips open his laptop on a stool in front of his locker, takes a deep breath, and summons every bit of his UVA education to compose his reply.
Dear Coach Reid and the UVA Coaching Staff:
. . . This morning I met with you to discuss my involvement in the hunger strike and you expressed your disappointment that I and my fellow strikers are not seeking to resolve this grave issue in a more “political” manner. You told me that you had thought higher of me before you learned of my involvement in this campaign and stated that you were dismayed by my perceived unwillingness to “follow the rules.”
. . . I would firstly like to point out that this campaign has existed at UVA for 14 years and has thoroughly exhausted all manner of negotiations “within the rules” without any tangible results . . . Secondly, no great injustice has ever been overturned by following the rules. Our great country was founded on the wholly evil institution of slavery, which was only overturned when the nation split in two and engaged in civil war. The Jim Crow reign of segregation and fierce race hatred in the south, though challenged repeatedly through purely political and judicial actions, was eventually overturned only as a result of the nonviolent protest tactics of the Civil Rights Movement.
. . . I believe it is my responsibility as a member of the University community, and even moreso as a member of the human race, to stand up for those whose voices have been silenced and whose livelihoods are being marginalized by the policies of the current University administration. In fact, I firmly believe that the workers that the Living Wage Campaign represents are just as important to this community, if not moreso, than any football coaches, players, or fans. Thus, it disheartens myself and my fellow campaigners that while these workers, the majority of whom are women and African Americans, are being systematically discriminated against and exploited, there are plans to spend millions of dollars on a domed practice field and other accommodations for the athletics department . . . I refuse to comply with rules, regulations, or restrictions that reinforce the discrimination, persecution, and exploitation of human beings.
