SPORTS AND VIOLENCE

San Pablo Avenue is a bombed-out corridor that runs along the edge of West Oakland, a mostly-Black neighborhood in a mostly-Black city. The 10-block stretch between West Grand Avenue and 35th Street is one of Oakland's most violent, crime-infested areas. Beatings, muggings, and killings are common news in this neighborhood. Prostitutes camp out on every corner, flashing panties or bared breasts to the passing cars. Young men push drugs at all hours of the day or night...openly, brazenly, obviously, obliviously. In this neighborhood, African American men are always suspect, always presumed criminal, always subject to be stopped by the police without pretense. It is a dangerous place to be...for everybody. In this neighborhood, some weeks ago, an Oakland police officer was shot dead following what he thought was a routine traffic stop.

The San Pablo Avenue area of West Oakland is also one of the nation's premier sports neighborhoods. It is within a short walking distance of McClymonds High School--the accurately-nicknamed "School Of Champions"--where men like Bill Russell and Frank Robinson learned their trade, where Jim Hines learned how to run the 100 yard dash. It is a neighborhood of gritty, bent-rimmed, no-net basketball courts, where young men sweep the broken glass away to find a clear spot, and where they shoot hoops late into the night by the light of a dim street lamp. These courts are the land of the Black Man...white players rarely, if ever, venture here. This is one of the thousands of hardscrabble training grounds from which professional athletic teams draw their considerable talent. Forget Indiana, Georgetown, Duke. That's finishing school. The West Oaklands of America are where it all begins.

And so along the San Pablo Avenue neighborhood of West Oakland, a national basketball shoe company has chosen to place a billboard promoting its new product. It shows a huge pair of basketball sneakers in disarray, described in one word: Aggression2.

Aggression squared. Aggression at its peak. Aggression at that tremulous, frightening point just on the edge of violence. That's what sells American sports. And more than any other group, that is the province of the African American athlete.

Walking to our cars in a dimly-lit parking lot, few of us would welcome the sight of a group of young African American men bearing down on us. Yet dress those same African American men in brightly-colored uniforms and put them on a field or court, and we'll collectively lay out millions for the chance to watch.

With a few notable exceptions, it is African American athletes who are the big ticket-sellers of American sports. It is their flash, their daring, their aggression, that sets the tone, and that sports fans most love to come to see and root for or against. To broaden the intent of Reggie Jackson's famous quotation (he was applying it only to himself), African American athletes are "the straw that stirs the drink."

But when the lights go down and the announcers put up their microphones, even the most successful African American athlete finds his position little changed in American society. He is still a nigger. He is still suspect. In a darkened parking lot, until recognized, and sometimes even after he is recognized, he is still feared.

Consider the case of Joe Morgan, an Oakland native...Hall of Fame baseball player, World Series hero, network sports announcer, prominent businessman, spotless public and private reputation. Morgan was tackled, handcuffed, and arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport a couple of years ago because he got a bit testy when stopped by the police. They stopped him not for any infraction of the law, but because he fit one of the key profiles the airport police use to spot drug dealers. You know the type. Flashy. Expensive jewelry. Impeccably dressed. Lots of money in his pocket. And, of course, Black.

Or the case some years further back of Rico Carty, a dark-skinned, Spanish-speaking Dominican, an Atlanta Braves ballplayer, driving one night in a white Atlanta suburb. Protesting one of those "routine traffic stops" that seem to be routine only as they apply to African Americans, Carty was jumped on by several police officers, who cursed him for being a "nigger" while they beat him with billy clubs. Carty struggled to be understood in an unfamiliar language. "I no nigger!" he shouted. "I Rico!"

The African American athlete faces a dual dilemma. No matter how much he tries to conform to society's standards, he cannot escape the racial prejudice that sticks to his dark skin like flypaper. And that which made him successful in the first place--that aggression, that barely-controlled violence, that gliding on the edge of danger--confirms the worst stereotypes about African American men. But just as the African American athlete cannot change his skin color, he cannot simply turn off his aggression like the turning off of a faucet. His aggression is not contrived. It is the price of admission.

In "Skyline: One Season, One Team, One City," author and San Francisco Chronicle sports reporter Tim Keown provides an account of the explosive, tangled mix which is the proving ground for young, African American athletes. The book concerns the 1992-93 basketball season of Skyline High School, which sits in East Oakland's affluent hills section across the street from homes that sell in the million and a half range. Most of the school's athletes, however, come from the rough and tumble flatlands below. "Skyline" is a sensitive, well-written account, respectful of the history and nuances of the African American community that is at the core of Oakland's population. Keown is the consummate objective reporter, letting the subjects speak for themselves.

They speak of a tough world, a dangerous world, a violent world...a world where sports seems to be the only shining, crystal stair providing a way for them to get out. But more than that, athletics is a way for the African American male to identify himself, to separate himself from the pack, to become a blazing comet in a midnight sky before his life comes crashing to the ground. Keown describes the feelings of a Skyline player preparing for Jamboree, the round-robin, one night affair that opened Oakland's high school basketball season:

"Jason Wright wanted desperately to be included in the roll call of Oakland basketball. He wanted to be there with the players everybody in town knew, the players that eight- and ten-year-olds emulated on the playgrounds. The Jamboree was on his mind the entire week before, and in the unlikely event that he would forget about it, somebody was sure to remind him. ... 'J Wright, you gonna get a dunk for me?'"

Two minutes into the game, Wright did it, a spectacular, breakaway jam á la Michael Jordan or Shaquille O'Neal. "He hung on the rim just long enough to accentuate his point, and the crowd responded with a reflexive grunt, followed by a tremendous ovation that filled every silent space in the huge building. This was what they had come to see, and this was what Jason came to do. He ran downcourt yelling at the top of his lungs, his mouth wide open but no sound audible amid the roar."

Jason Wright was 16 years old at the time, a junior in high school. His mother came close to pulling him off the team before the season started because of bad grades. If he was not throwing down monster dunks on a basketball court, one wonders, would anyone roar for Jason Wright? It is a rhetorical question, of course.

Will Blackwell, a star basketball and football player who was recruited by several major universities and received a full athletic scholarship to San Diego State, described how he wended his way among Oakland's Byzantine, gang-controlled neighborhoods: "'I live on 104th,' he said, tracing a map on the floor with his finger. 'Somewhere on that street, somebody's sellin' drugs, and they're sellin' 'em in this block, and in this block. You need to have people there who know you. They don't want somebody there they don't know. I can pretty much go anywhere, but it matters what time it is.'"

Another Skyline player said that off campus, he had to carry a gun for protection. "'You have to watch the way you look at somebody,' he said. 'You can look like this--' he makes eye contact, then looks away. 'But you can't look like this--' he makes eye contact and holds it. 'You do that? They'll say, "What the hell you lookin' at? What do you want?" and pretty soon it's a fight.'" The player said he could find ten guys selling guns in the next fifteen minutes.

One Skyline football player, Eric Albert, did not look away. He got into an argument with another young man at a party...an argument over nothing of consequence. But the young man took it seriously and came back with a .22-caliber pump rifle. He shot Eric three times, the last time while Eric was laying defenseless on the ground. One of the bullets paralyzed Eric Albert from the waist down, for life. Skyline's football coach described him as maybe the best player he'd ever had on a team. Eric Albert had just received a football scholarship from UCLA.

Riding the crest of such explosive waves, crashing and spinning and tossed in the angry, boiling sea that is their world, how are these young men supposed to recognize the boundaries in these waters?

In "Heavy Justice: The State of Indiana v. Michael G. Tyson," J. Gregory Garrison and co-author Randy Roberts describe the classic case of the African American sports figure stepping outside society's marked boundaries. Roberts is a professor of history at Purdue University and the author of two books on boxing, but this book is written from the point of view of Garrison, the Indiana special prosecutor responsible for sending Tyson to jail for raping a Miss Black America contestant in 1991. It is a blow by blow account of the legal investigation that led to the charges against Tyson, and of the former heavyweight champion's widely-publicized trial.

"Heavy Justice" includes a brief section on Tyson's troubled background in the hardcore slums of Brooklyn, a background which the prosecuting team studied only for the purpose of preparing the case against him.

Short and bespectacled and cursed with a high, lispy voice, Tyson had to learn to defend himself against neighborhood toughs who called him "faggy boy" and "sissy." He learned how to hit, and hit hard. Without a consistent father figure in his life, "he grew up fast and mean."

"His mother lived off and on with a guy..." one former protégé reported. "One time he punched her in the mouth and knocked out her gold tooth... She went wild. Tried to throw a pot of boiling water on him. Tyson and his sister saw the whole fight--even got some water thrown on them."

By the age of nine, Mike Tyson was a criminal. "He quit going to school, smoked marijuana, drank..." Garrison and Roberts write. "He carried a gun. He would snatch groceries and purses from women, mug grown men, and pickpocket people for sport." American jails are notoriously violent, and the young Tyson was constantly in and out of them. Surviving, even excelling in this nether world, he bluntly described his success in jail by telling a friend, "I got my respect by fucking [other prisoners] up."

Tyson's smoldering, simmering violence were common in America's slum streets and jail cells, but not his boxing skills. On one of his stints out of jail, Tyson was introduced to Cus D'Amato, a man who had managed several successful professional fighters. "In Tyson," Garrison and Roberts write, "D'Amato saw raw material he could mold into another heavyweight champion of the world: an angry, distrustful, violent kid who had the reflexes and power of a great athlete."

Tyson listened to D'Amato's teachings, and worked, and punched men out, and became the youngest man to win the heavyweight championship of the world.

But though few men were his match in physical combat, Tyson could not counter the contradiction of the African American athlete. "The same thing make you laugh, make you cry," is an African American Southern saying. The aggression, the mastery of violence, that won Tyson worldwide adulation, fortune, and beautiful women at his fingertips...that same aggression and mastery of violence was his undoing. During a Black economic exposition in Indianapolis in 1991, Tyson had forced intercourse with a young beauty queen contestant, a woman who had come to his room at two in the morning but told him repeatedly, even by his account, that she did not want to have sex. The young woman pressed charges, and in the winter of 1992 Tyson was convicted of rape and sentenced to six years in jail.

"He might have won respect in the boxing ring by knocking people down," Garrison the prosecutor writes, "but that behavior was unacceptable in civilized society."

To which one might remark, really?

Rape is wrong under any circumstances. But also wrong (to a lesser degree, perhaps, but still wrong), is the beating of a man with your fists until the blood runs out his ears and nose and he collapses unconscious onto the floor. That's professional boxing, and that's how Tyson made his "legitimate" living. If Mike Tyson was confused by the signals "civilized society" was sending out to him, it was understandable. Inside the boxing ring he took what he wanted, violently, regardless of the opposition, and it won him unimaginable riches and the adulation and admiration of the world. Outside the boxing ring he took what he wanted, violently, regardless of the opposition, and he was sent to jail. Are we to believe...was Mike Tyson to believe...that the boundaries of civilization are a few pieces of rope tied around a boxing ring?

To understand the rise and fall of Mike Tyson is to see the multifaceted riddle of O.J. Simpson from another side. Simpson's public image was just the opposite of Tyson's: where Tyson was the crude and brooding beast, Simpson seemed urbane and ever-smiling, the prototypical warm and cuddly nice guy. But Simpson's background was very similar to Tyson's. Both men grew up street-tough...Simpson was a gang leader in San Francisco's rough Hunters Point-Potrero Hill section. Both excelled in a violent, brutal sport.

What passion...what courage...what level of primal aggression it must take to step onto the field of professional football, where the infliction of pain is legal and purposeful, and where men must slam their bodies into those of their adversaries with all possible speed and force in order to dislodge them of their senses. O.J. reveled in that world, excelled in that world, conquered that world.

Could such a man, still in his prime, turn off his aggression like a light switch once his playing days were over? It does not seem likely. Could such a man, in a fit of jealous passion, hack two people to death with a machete? We do not know if he did. But it does not seem unlikely that he could.

Sports has been a tremendously beneficial outlet for the African American athlete. For many individuals it has brought personal riches, and a way out of the ghetto. For all African Americans it has been a pathway to acceptance--a roundabout way of overcoming American society's still-lingering racism--a way to get into the living rooms of America's white mainstream and to show that we are not brutes or beasts but rather beautiful, graceful, competitive people. Without the outlet of professional, televised sports, such acceptance as African Americans have achieved might still be decades away. As Michael Jordan thoughtfully remarks in one of his many commercials, "Would you accept me as a role model if it weren't for basketball?"

But sports has been all-consuming beast as well--a bright-burning sun enticing Icarius to his ruin--emphasizing, drawing out, and rewarding those very characteristics which make the African American man so feared outside of the world of sports.

Like stereoscopic vision and big brains, aggression is part of our genetic heritage, a legacy of our human inheritance. Biologically speaking, we are hunter-gatherers still. It was our first and longest experience as human beings, the genetic molding wheel of all our existences. Though aggression in the male of the species seem to have no place in modern society, they insured our survival in those first days when we descended from the trees and walked onto the grasslands of the African savannah. Young men guarded the outer limits of our encampments to keep the beasts at bay, and hunted the game that put meat on our fires and kept us alive. Characteristics so deeply imprinted in our DNA cannot be tossed away like some 70's bellbottom jeans.

And at the same time, the African American cannot change his race.

We stand here on the edge of this whirlpool of deep and dangerous descent and try to discern how to avoid being swept up in the mælestrom. And we are left with our original dilemma: how do we reconcile the problem of the aggression of the African American male that makes him such a prize as an athlete and yet such a cipher as a member of our society at large?

The quick and obvious answer?

Build a society that does not use race as a way to divide and subjugate people. Build a society where the natural aggression of young men is used to the benefit of humanity, not to its detriment. Build a society where the Jason Wrights of the world can hear their roars.

And how to build such a society?

I wish to God I knew.