Ten years ago, making a great error in judgment, I sat in the office of Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, then the sports editor of the Washington Post, along with my colleague, Jason LaCanfora. Both were telling me about the HBO series, "The Wire," and how they considered it the greatest television program ever.
I refused to watch it. I had no interest, I told them, in watching black men kill each other over drugs as entertainment, the same way I no longer had interest in listening to that pathology in song. I had no interest in watching the police be glorified as heroes for entertainment, no interest in indirectly contributing to that image as the prevailing one, for I did not consider it entertaining.
Emilio persisted: "Give it a chance. It is much, much more than that."
He was right. "The Wire" was the best, most ambitious and most nuanced show TV has ever produced, but unwavering has been the prevailing, popular depiction of black men with one finger on the trigger and one foot in the grave. The sports narrative in 2015, when everything is supposed to be fair and better, follows the same narrow, insulting pattern. Recently, Washington Wizards superstar guard John Wall said in an ESPN profile that had basketball not worked out, he'd be "on the streets or in jail." The "dead or in jail" narrative is a refrain that has become clichéd and, worse, unchallenged.
The integration of sports was a story built through the bedrock of legitimacy, of Jackie Robinson's collegiate and military credentials and Arthur Ashe's too, through the American Tennis Association. Athletic talent was coupled with notions of respectability, of aspiring, of being a college man and a veteran. From an American civil rights perspective, such coupling was necessary, for the battle wasn't about proving blacks could hit fastballs just as well as whites but about African-Americans belonging as equal, respectable partners in the American story, talented enough to share the same locker rooms as well as the same neighborhoods.
Even though statistics suggesting there are more black men in prisons than college has been largely debunked, the sports narrative, if it is to be believed, suggests "dead or in jail" is the only option for black men if their jump shots aren't quite good enough or their batting averages are too low or their 40-yard dash times are subpar. If sports haven't become the one-in-a-million athletic lottery ticket for black males to escape their circumstances, it certainly feels as if they have.
The narrative is also patently untrue and one of the reasons Tony Clark, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, is so important. Clark hasn't been on the job 15 months, yet he is already a historic figure in many ways. He's the first African-American head of the MLBPA, having succeeded Michael Weiner, Don Fehr, Ken Moffett and Marvin Miller. He's also the first ex-player to head the union. Clark's ascendance comes at a time when the unions of three of the four professional team sports are headed by African-Americans (Michelle Roberts at the NBAPA, DeMaurice Smith at the NFLPA and Clark; the NHLPA is headed by Don Fehr), and none of the four major North American sports has ever elected a black commissioner. Clark expands the narrative of African-Americans beyond the bullet or the base hit.
It is also significant that Clark is the head of the MLBPA, which is and traditionally has been the most powerful player union in sports. The MLBPA approaches a collective bargaining year in 2016, and Clark's leadership connects him to Miller and Fehr in a way that will define him far more than anything he accomplished during his 15-year major-league career. Unlike Smith, who oversees a beleaguered union that never recovered from losing the 1987 strike, Clark heads a group of committed players, a union run by stars who follow his lead -- a remarkable achievement considering the four most important teams in baseball (the Red Sox, Dodgers, Yankees and Cardinals) have never hired a black manager.
Clark is proof there is more to the black male story than winding up "dead or in jail," and he illustrates a less comfortable truth: To conclude in 2015 that a black man's destiny is either prison or shooting jump shots is to conclude no progress has been made. The real issue, on the part of mainstream media and pop culture, is a lack of interest in African-American men who do not fit that background. But Clark does not fit, and as the leader of the most powerful union in sports, his position makes him impossible to ignore.