Les Payne

February 14, 2009

I come forth humbly now, as Alex Rodriguez did last week, to declare that where once I was blind--I now see the light.

In my case, it was about sports reporting. Years ago, as an aggressive newspaper editor, I diverted several young sportswriters into political reporting on the advice that they should put away childish things.

As with poetry, I considered sports reporting a sign of arrested development. The field was more clouded back then. Reporters rooted rather openly for the home teams they covered, objectively, of course. They routinely accepted gifts as not so subtle incentives to slant stories. They got free tickets; drank the team owners’ brandy, top-shelf stuff, and smoked his expensive cigars.

With vested interest in the outcome, sportswriters tended not to report the facts so much as to waylay them. Accordingly, when things didn’t go their way, which is to say, they lost the side bets, fist fights in the press box were not unknown as spats on the road had to be taken to a higher court.

The looms of the hometown papers spun yarns of splendiferous colors about local Spartans giving their all on the playing fields. But here, I risk spinning a yarn of my own.

The simple fact is that I most likely opposed young talent entering sports reporting because it was not the field I had chosen to make my stand. Over-zealousness, despite my love of sports, drove me to dismiss coverage of these diversions as unworthy of the journalist’s eye.

I was wrong.

Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson had taught earlier generations that war and the pursuit of domestic tranquility could spill over into sports. In my own time, stark social lessons were taught at the Olympics of ’68 in Mexico City, Munich in ’72, Montreal in ’76, Los Angeles in ’84 and for good measure, Atlanta in ‘96.

As with the “reserve clause case” of Curt Flood, that made its way to the Supreme Court, the real national pastime of greedy capitalists making money by the suppression of labor is constantly displayed in all collegiate and professional sports. Early on, however, this tragic flaw was over looked by sports journalists, so called.

My personal revelation came during the ’83 championship fight between Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney, the heavyweight challenger billed as “the Great White Hope.” More social science, politics and race propaganda were displayed out of Las Vegas that night than one might witness, say, during a street demonstration or oral arguments of a civil rights case.

As black reporters trickled into sports journalism, they paid sharper attention to the prevalence of white privilege, job reservation, and the suppression of black talent by management—even in the press box. The most effective was Derrick Jackson, now a political columnist for the Boston Globe, a reporter I’d helped steer into mainstream journalism.

My enlightenment grew as I noticed America, much as apartheid South Africa, displayed on the playing fields the self-same social defects blocking an open society. Though not as grave perhaps as societal matters of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the diversionary games elite athletes play by before raucous crowds continue to reinforce in no small measure a national system of racial disparity and unfairness.

Despite my conversion, colleagues of the sporting press occasionally hound me about my early heathen days. None is more relentless than Bill Rhoden, the savvy, indispensable sporting writer for the New York Times.

At a recent Harlem lunch with Omar Minaya, general manager of the New York Mets, Bill pressed his point early about my transgression against his fellow workers in the press box. It did not escape the table that although Latino players dominate baseball, sports reporters who speak Spanish, to say nothing of Latino journalists covering the game, are as rare a triple play.      

As for my sin against sports coverage, the Vatican’s recent reinstitution of Indulgences comes too late for personal atonement—that would cut my time in Purgatory. (It probably doesn’t help that I’m Baptist.) Nonetheless, I will again acknowledge, just as Alex Rodriguez did this week, that I erred, early on, in tampering with the careers of sports journalists under my influence.

Not unlike A-Rod, I must allow that the culture of journalism, no matter how wide-spread the canker, did not justify my resorting to influence peddling. It was a personal choice.   

I felt a lot of pressure back then to increase the ranks of what, deep down, was construed as “serious” journalism. Like A-Rod, I was young. I was stupid. I wanted to enhance socio-political coverage exclusively; and for this narrow-mindedness, I am deeply regretful.

Incidentally, as much as any sports writer, the work of Bill Rhoden continues to leaven my view of journalism. Athletics has long been a key pillar of society, as noted by no less an analyst than Plato, who reportedly participated in the Olympics, winning the “pankration.”

As for William C. Rhoden, the Times’ columnist is sustaining a current hot streak in unraveling the complexities of the steroids matter that plagues the major leagues. Along the way, he brings into sharp relief the broader societal issues of truth, fairness and the possibility of reconciliation. “Our dual national pastimes—Wall Street and Major League Baseball,” Bill argues, “have been slammed into the rocks by ambition and unchecked greed.”

This most valuable utility player also spreads the word as a TV documentary writer, panelist on the tube, radio and lecture circuit, as well as author of the best-selling “Forty Million Dollar Slaves,” and a most recent ESPN tome on black quarterbacks, “Third and a Mile.”

So I take it back Bill, sports reporting is deserving of the best and the brightest talent available to journalism.