Raise a Fist, Take a Knee - John Feinstein's Great Book on Racism and Men's Sports
RAISE A FIST , TAKE A KNEE: Race and the Illusion of Progress in Modern Sports – by: John Feinstein - is a Must Read – for anyone interested in men and sports. It is also an excellent read for others!
If anyone has any doubts – about this book – watch a video about it – one – interview by Judy Woodruff from the PBS News Hour (9:11) – one example -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT-Ldoag-YU .
Quote:
Jones ended up making two Olympic teams – the 2008 team and the 2012 team that went to London. He had become the first African American to hold a world record in 2007 (note: men’s swimming) … (p.302)
The night after George Floyd’s murder, Jones took his dog out for an evening walk. He was staying at his brother’s house in Charlotte, North Carolina, because he and his wife were building their own house nearby.
“I’d gone about a block when a police car went past me,” he said. “All of a sudden, the car screeched to a stop. The cop made a U-turn and came back to where I was walking. He said, ‘Where’d you get the dog?’ I told him it was my dog. He said, ‘Really? What kind of dog is it? I told him it was a French bulldog and it was seven years old. He lingered a little while longer and then finally said, ‘Well, just wanted to make sure everything’s okay,’ and drove away.
“I was really angry. Do you think if I’m white there’s any way he screeches to a halt and turns around to come back and question me that way? No way. He saw a six five Black dude walking in a nice neighborhood and he decided something was up. Did he think I was stealing someone’s dog?”
Jones had become a victim of a new phenomenon: WDWB – Walking Dog While Black. (p. 304-5)
In October of my junior year, I was looking forward to Duke’s game at West Point against Army… (p.8)
But when I got to the third paragraph in the lead, I froze. “The game turned around when Coach Mike McGee brought black freshman quarterback Mike Dunn into the game.”
A “black freshman quarterback”? I was stunned. …
I couldn’t believe it. Duke had a start freshman linebacker named Carl McGee. Nowhere was he identified as “Black freshman linebacker Carl McGee.” Tony Benjamin, the starting fullback and Troy Slade, the team’s best receiver, were never identified as Black.
Forty-five years later, I told the story to Doug Williams, the first African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl. He couldn’t stop laughing. “Boy were you naïve,” he said. “Back then, a Black quarterback was a big deal – anywhere, anytime. One of the reasons I went to Grambling was because I wanted to go somewhere where they had no choice but to play a Black guy at quarterback – because everyone on the team was Black.” (p.9)
George Raveling ... "I know you'll talk to a lot of Black people and you'll learn a lot. But you can never know what it's like to walk in the shoes of a Black man. You just can't" (p.20)
(Note: Brent Musburger in 1968 – regarding Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s Olympic medal ceremony protest) “Smith and Carlos looked like a couple of black-skinned storm troopers, holding aloft their black-gloved hands during the playing of the national anthem,”… “One gets a little tired of the United States getting run down by athletes who are enjoying themselves at the expense of their country.”
This was 1968, not 1858. Musburger could easily have been a plantation owner who couldn’t understand why his “darkies” were complaining about working twelve hours a day in the cotton fields when, after all, he fed and housed them. (p.29)
(Note: Tommie Smith talking with Feinstein when he was researching the current book) “He said,’I had to do it to protect my job, to take care of my family. I had to do it.’ I waited for him to say ‘I’m sorry.’ Instead he came over to me and started crying, put his arms around me and said. ‘I had to do it. I had to do it. He never actually apologized, but I still felt sorry for him at that moment. Not for what he did, but for the fact that he had to know how wrong he’d been. To me, the tears were his apology, but he never actually said ‘I’m sorry’
“He knew the column was racist; he had to know it. He just couldn’t bring himself to say it.” (p.31 – note: Musburger refused to be interviewed for the book)
Tapscott, a graduate of Tufts, had been a successful college coach at American University – succeeding future Hall of Farmer Gary Williams – before moving to the NBA, first as the top assistant for New York Knicks general manager Ernie Grunfeld and then as the Knicks general manager.
During his time with the Knicks, Tapscott had an apartment in tony Riverdale, in the Bronx, east of the George Washington Bridge, near the northern tip of Manhattan. …
“Once or twice a year – at least – I’d get pulled over somewhere between the Garden and my apartment,” he said. “I drove a nice car, not anything crazy, but a nice car. The closer I got to Riverdale, the more likely I was to get stopped.”
Tapscott’s crime? Speeding? No. Drinking and driving? Absolutely not. Broken taillight? Expired license plates? Highly unlikely.
No. Tapscott was pulled over for the catchall that most African American men – especially those who drive a high priced car – experience at some point: DWB. Driving while Black.
“Believe me when I tell you. I wasn’t just careful, I was extra careful,” Tapscott said. “But if a cop caught a glimpse of me, there was a decent chance I was going to get stopped.”
Almost without fail, Tapscott would have to wait while the cop ran a check on his plates and on his driver’s license. Because he had maintained his residence in Northern Virginia, he was asked, “What are you doing in this neighborhood at this hour?” When he explained that he worked for the Knicks and kept an apartment in Riverdale, he would usually be asked to show some kind of Knicks ID.
One night, when the cop finally told him he could go, Tapscott couldn’t resist asking, “Do you think this is fair?”
The copy shook his head and said, “No, it’s not fair.” (p.63-4)
Fifty-two years ago, when Ozzie Newsome was in eighth grade, he knew he had no chance to play quarterback for a Pop Warner team. Today, Lamar Jackson is quarterback of the team Newsome led for twenty-three years in the front office. It took Newsome – a Black general manager – and a draft in which four white quarterbacks were chosen well ahead of Jackson – to get him there.
In 2019, his second season and his first as the Ravens full-time starter, Jackson became the second player in history to be unanimously voted the league’s MVP. The first was Tom Brady.
Not bad for a running back. (p.140)
John Thompson
Thompson though was different. He was, as he often said, big, Black, and angry.”
He was frequently labeled a racist by the media. One writer called him “the Idi Amin of college basketball.” Most of the time, his team was all Black. In fact, Georgetown had become the school among Black teenagers. There were some who thought it was an HBCU. …
“Tell you what, John,” I said. “Let’s go outside. If what I’ve heard about you is true, I’ll kick your ass. If not, you’ll kick mine. Either way, I’ll be famous.
Thompson started at me in disbelief for a second, then burst out laughing. He put an arm around me and said, “You know something, motherfucker, I don’t like you. I don’t like you at all. But I respect your ass because you’re fucking crazy. I’ll talk to you when I’m finished.” (p.155)
(note: Thompson) “Do you think if we’d played exactly the same way we did in the eighties with a white coach and a lot of white player, we’d have been called the names we were called by the white media? We had three strikes against us every night: we had a loud Black coach, we had Black players, and – worst of all – we won. That combination made a lot of people crazy.” (p.206)
(note: Doc Rivers) "Ken Norman [a teammate] had it worse than I did. He stopped to get gas one day; cops pulled up, assumed he'd stolen the car, and threw him across the hood and handcuffed him. He wasn't even Driving While Black; he was Getting Gas While Black.
"Cops are supposed to be there to make sure we get home safely, not to make us worry that they might be the reason we don't get home safely." (p.242)
I remember watching Sanford and Son back in the seventies, and there's a scene where Lamont [the son] is trying to get Fred [the father] to change his diet. He says to him that eating bad food is the number one killer of Black men. Fred looks at him and says, 'Oh really? I always thought it was the police.' (p.245-6)
(Note: Steve Kerr talking about his [Black] assistant coach Aaron Miles )
He said to his dad, 'Does this mean that we can't run in our neighborhood because we're Black?' Imagine having to explain that to your eight-year-old." (p.253)
Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, a Republican for most of his life, is also someone for whom Black men - as friends, players, and coaches - have been extremely important. Before the pandemic and the Floyd killing, he was much like Kerr (Note: Steve Kerr), thinking he understood what it was like to be Black.
"I was wrong," he said, shortly before announcing that he would retire from coaching in the spring of 2022. "Really wrong. I wasn't just living in an ivory tower when it came to having a sense of what it was like to be Black; I was living above the ivory tower. If the building was twenty stories high, I lived my life on the twentieth floor." ...
After talking at length with his assistants, Krzyzewski decided to organize two Zoom sessions with his players - past and present. In all, about a hundred players took part.
"It was eye-opening, to say the least," he said. "I asked the guys to be very honest and I think they were. Some were very emotional talking about their experiences. Some cried. They all talked about systemic racism they'd faced. All of them. It was intense. I'm not going to say there was an aha moment. It was just an education for me. ...
(Note: regarding a 2:47 video Kryzyzeski posted 6/26/20, a month after the Floyd murder)
"This is a problem, a disease, a plague that has been with our country for four centuries." ... (Note: from cadet prayer K had learned 50+ years earlier at West Point) "Help me choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong."
He concluded: "It is time to choose the harder right .... It's time Black Lives Matter." (p.255-7)
(Note: Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDH56J2_ZmI )
It never occurred to Randolph that there would be no next job. ... Jeff Torborg, one of Randolph's predecessors with the Mets, managed fiver major league teams and had a winning record with only one of them... Among the thirty men managing MLB teams at the start of 2021, ten were on at least their second jobs. Only one of those, Houston Astros Dusty Baker was nonwhite. Unlike many of baseball's recycled managers, Randolph had a winning record (302-253), and, as a person, was liked by who ever worked with him. There is also the fact that the Mets had losing records every year from 2009 to 2014 after his departure.
Willie Randolph
And yet, Randolph has only been seriously considered for another managerial job once....(p.274-5)
A little more than a year ago, Varner and his wife, Amanda - who is white - pulled up to the front door of the Greenbrier, a West Virginia resort that annually hosts a PGA Tour even, and were greeted by a valet who said, "Caddies park outside." (p.297)
(Note: regarding Jeff Ward, Black National Hockey League hockey player)
"And then, just like that, I get the chance to win the game. It was an amazing feeling."
The feeling didn't last long. On the plane home that night teammate Jeff Halpern told Ward he was seeing some "really ugly stuff" on social media.
Most of it - though not all - was coming out of Boston. There were the usual "stick to basketball" gems, and the N-word was all over the place. "We don't need a N____r like you polluting our sport" was a familiar refrain. Ward shrugged most of it off - until the threats started. ...
"After the Bost goal, it went to a different level. People weren't just calling me names. They were saying, 'You should be dead.' I couldn't believe it. This was a hockey game. I tried to shrug it off, but there was a point when I couldn't do that, because it was too serious.
"I can tell you exactly when it got really serious: when the FBI called and said they felt I needed protection. That was serious." (p.311)
(Note: concerning protests of South Africa [under apartheid] participation in tennis competition)
In his PhD dissertaiion Lapchick compared apartheid in South Africa to the Nazi movement in Germany. (p.314 ) ...
Shortly before the matches were schedule to be held in Nashville, two men broke into Lapchick's office, pinned hi to the ground, and carved the N-word onto his stomach. Except they misspelled it, and it came out "niger". Although Lapchick says now the word was "more scratched than carved" into his stomach, he spent four days in the hospital with liver and kidney damage, a hernia, and a concussion. (p.316)
Lapchick likes to point out that most of the numbers he and his group have tracked have slowly improved but are still a long way from being close to where they need to be. Almost 50 percent of those who play football at FBS schools are Black; the number in power-five programs is closer to 60 percent. Thirteen of the 130 head coaches are Black. That's 10 percent." (p.322)
(Note: regarding Black (mostly) players kneeling before NFL games)
People said - among other things - that the protesters, who were almost always referred to in an angrily pejorative way, were ruining their enjoyment of football.
How were the protests doing that? None of the protests took place during a game or delayed a single kickoff. There were peaceful and nonviolent. After a while it became clear to me that what upset the white fans so much was that the sight of the protesters force them to think about something they didn't want to think about - or even admit existed. Their lives were unaffected by racism. They didn't have to fear for their lives during a routine traffic stop, and they didn't have to sit down and give their children The Talk so that they would understand that any interaction with police could quickly become dangerous.
Nor did they have to deal with the three letters - DWB - that almost every Black person, but especially men, knows in the same way that we all know DUI. Not one Black person, who I interviewed for this book had not been stopped for DWB at least once; most have dealt with it multiple times.
"And the first question is almost always the same," said Kenny Williams, the executive vice-president of the Chicago White Sox. "Where'd you get this car?"
If you combine being Black with driving a nice car in a nice neighborhood, you will almost certainly be pulled over for DWB early and often. (p.332-3)
The NFL once again sold the bogus notion to the media that the league had wanted to give Kaepernick a chance, but he wouldn't comply with their rules. Shame on him!
There was never any doubt that the workout wasn't going to result in Kaepernick's getting a job. He went along with the workout to try to quiet all the anonymous voices claiming he didn't want to play football or wasn't good enough to play again in the NFL. (p.336)
Not mentioned is Elston Howard, who in 1955 was the Yankees first Black player, someone who went on to win an MVP award and to be selected for nine All-Star Games. My guess is there was no malice in leaving Howard out, but somehow he was left out.
That sort of thing tends to go unnoticed. Most white people would shrug at that sort of oversight and see it as a mistake, nothing more. They would say that to put any racial implication to it is creating an issue where there's no issue.
Which gets to the crux of the problem. As George Raveling point out to me almost at the outset of my research, there was no way - regardless of how many people I interviewed or how sympathetic I might be to the Black experience - that I could truly understand that experience, because I have never lived it. ...
(Note: re: England in the most recent World Cup)
Italy won the penalty kick tiebreaker 3-2. The last three Englishmen to attempt penalties were Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka - all Black. All missed.
Within minutes of Saka's miss, the internet was filled with racist bleatings directed at the three players. A mural of Rashford in Manchester - where he plays for Manchester United - was defaced with racial slurs in what police described as a hate crime. The mural had been placed there to honor Rashford for the work he has done dealing with poverty and hunger among children.
The Football Association of England denounced the racist rants, as did Prime Minister Born Johnson, who called them "appalling."
The incident reinforced what we all already knew: racism is an issue well beyond the shores of the United States. (p.340)
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I hope that the quotes above - help give the reader a sense of the fantastic insights and detail John Feinstein has provided! I found this book simply incredible!
John Feinstein died a sportswriting legend. He started out a fiery Chronicle reporter
In the walkway off the basketball court in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, John Feinstein was making a scene.
He had just found out that the media at the 2013 NCAA men’s basketball Final Four had been moved out of courtside seats. The NCAA figured it could make a pretty dollar pushing journalists several rows up and selling those coveted courtside seats as tickets — a preposterous idea to Feinstein, which he made very clear to the unlucky tournament official he found in the hallway between the court and the media room.
Feinstein’s indignation, if expressed poorly, was not unwarranted. If there was a writer who harnessed national attention for college sports, it was Feinstein. He wanted a good view of the game, and he was not used to taking no for an answer.
Feinstein was stubborn and easy to anger. It is easy to find people who hated working with him, or with whom he never agreed. But it is difficult to find anyone who did not respect Feinstein. He cared about what he cared about as passionately as anyone in the world. He spent 51 of his 69 years devoted to sports writing, publishing more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. His book “A Season on the Brink” formed lines of eager buyers down city blocks upon its 1986 release.
John Feinstein died March 13. He and his career — which might have been the same thing — began at The Chronicle.
The Chronicle’s office on Duke’s campus sprawls across the top floor of a building tucked between the Duke Chapel, dining hall and auditorium. It has for about 70 years. Feinstein had to walk up three steep flights of stairs to get to his first newspaper office. Like most things in his work life, they could not discourage him.
That was where Feinstein started writing about the thing he had always loved.
“Sports have been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember,” he wrote in his senior Chronicle column. “When I was little if my parents wanted to punish me they wouldn’t let me watch the Mets or the Jets on the television.”
He committed to Duke to swim, but lasted roughly one practice with head coach Jack Persons before deciding to refocus his efforts toward writing. Maybe editors are easier to argue with than coaches.
Ann Pelham, Trinity ‘74 and editor-in-chief in 1973-74, welcomed him to the office when he first found it, and encouraged him to write about both news and sports. Feinstein did, “reluctantly and briefly,” according to Pelham, before abandoning news to direct all of his energy to sports.
Between 1973-74, Feinstein lived in Wannamaker House I right next to Paul Honigberg, who had also joined The Chronicle’s sports staff. Their junior year, the department voted Feinstein sports editor and Honigberg assistant sports editor. Anne Newman, then a senior, was their editor-in-chief. None of them were best friends. Honigberg and Newman, like most people, were not like Feinstein.
“It’s probably a good thing our offices were separated by a hallway and the newsroom,” Newman said in an email. “I was an outspoken feminist, and he was, well … John. One day I called him our own Howard Cosell, referring to the famously obnoxious sports broadcaster. I think he took it as a compliment.”
Honigberg spent his time outside the office with his fraternity brothers. Feinstein moved off campus at the start of his sophomore year and hung out with his cat, Venus. He called him “Veni.”
But the two young men were always together, toting typewriters across ACC territory to write game stories, sharing late meals at the Cambridge Inn — a snack bar on campus — and watching nights in the office become early mornings. Feinstein drove them to football and basketball games in a beat-up Pontiac Bonneville. Honigberg would wait for him in the press box after they filed their stories for The Chronicle, because local papers around North Carolina paid Feinstein to sling college sports for them. He would hook up the portable fax machine that “usually worked” to the telephone line and send his stories.
Feinstein was virtually as prolific in college as he was in his professional career. He often wrote more than one story a day for The Chronicle, along with his weekly column “Consider the Source,” while freelancing and stringing. As a sophomore, he started calling George Solomon, The Washington Post’s sports editor, to pitch ACC basketball stories. Solomon would concede, mostly because he got tired of the phone ringing.
Feinstein edited a small-but-mighty sports staff for two years. A Duke course load on top of editing is no small task, but Feinstein’s ability to work was unmatched.
He was a tough but fair editor. He didn’t write over his reporters, though it must have been tempting for a guy who took his own convictions as fact. Instead, he taught them how to be better. He would remind Honigberg that he was writing too much like a fan, when this was supposed to be serious stuff. His critiques were helpful, his compliments treasured.
“When you wrote a good one, and he said, ‘This is really good,’ or, ‘You asked a really good question’ … you felt like it meant something,” Honigberg told The Chronicle.
“You couldn’t help [but] love him while he was hell-bent on making his way in the world,” Newman said.
His senior year — still sports editor — he would argue with Howard Goldberg, the 1976-77 editor-in-chief, about the length of his pieces.
“He pounded out these disproportionately long stories on a typewriter with astounding speed and refused to trim them, insisting people on the University campus would read every word,” Goldberg wrote in “Connecting,” the AP retiree newsletter.
Goldberg stopped trying to control their length when Feinstein threatened to throw him out of a window. The Chronicle’s offices are on the third floor.
Feinstein made The Chronicle a better paper. He wrote about athletes, coaches and fans. He wrote about sports with a hard focus on the people inhabiting them. He wrote with an irreverence seasoned by dry humor.
Previewing the men’s basketball ACC Tournament in March 1975, Feinstein wrote, “Then at 8 p.m., after the Duke-Clemson clash and several cocktail parties for the moneyed gentry that will be in attendance …” A few months later, he wrote that Duke football fans “in recent years have found themselves sitting around waiting for the roof to fall in.” In December 1975, after the season had ended, he wrote, “There was excitement in the ACC this season, but even though conference fans don’t like to admit it most of the football was pretty mediocre.”
When Harsha Murthy started working for The Chronicle in the fall of 1977, Feinstein had just graduated. Already legendary at 22, however, he had not really left the building.
“There was that tradition that John had established of going out and getting the story,” Murthy said.
While Murthy and his peers worked to uphold the standard set by Feinstein, he was busy arguing his way into stories in Washington. Solomon hired Feinstein as an intern for the Post when he graduated from Duke. In 1977, just a few years after breaking the Watergate scandal and publishing the Pentagon Papers, the Post was full of journalism giants of the present and future. They fazed young Feinstein for one day.
“And then he became Feinstein,” Solomon said.
When his internship ended, the Post’s Metro desk — then headed by Bob Woodward — hired him. Feinstein’s professional career began because of a dramatic love for sports and a determination to understand the people involved with them. But he conquered the shift to non-sports reporting, too. He built relationships with police officers (covering night cops) much like he had built them with coaches.
“The police liked him,” Solomon said. “He was there all the time.”
Solomon loved him and so did Woodward, but other editors could not stand Feinstein’s abrasive behavior. One editor in particular, Woodward said, repeatedly tried to fire Feinstein for “being Feinstein.” Woodward would not allow this.
“You want somebody to be aggressive and tough and maybe overbearing. Get the story,” Woodward said. “He was a star. You never … fire your star.”
So Woodward told the editor he would file a personnel report on Feinstein, which seemed to appease her. She complained again and was satisfied with another report. The Post, at the time, did not actually have a personnel department, so the “reports” went nowhere. For Woodward, Feinstein’s results demanded that the Post kept him as long as it could.
Feinstein went back to sports under Solomon when the job opened up. Sports writing was serious journalism for Feinstein; the subject of his story became the most important person in the world, whether it was Mike Krzyzewski or a minor league baseball player.
Maybe that drove his competitive instincts. Maybe they originated from his days as an athlete. Perhaps they came from his family.
Feinstein’s father was a serious man. Martin Feinstein was born in Brooklyn to Jewish-Russian immigrant parents. He was an army man, and then a music man, working for famed impresario Sol Hurok before taking over as executive director of the Kennedy Center the year before his son started at Duke. When John was in high school at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, Martin moved from New York to Washington, D.C. Martin Feinstein married three times; John twice.
Young Feinstein “was as competitive as any competitive ball player,” according to David Remnick, who bore witness to it as a sports reporter working alongside Feinstein in the early 1980s. At the Post, they called Feinstein “Junior,” because that was what people called John McEnroe, the star tennis player famous for his terrible temper.
Remnick liked Feinstein. He found him funny, maybe because he understood the humor of a middle-class Jewish boy from New York. He did great impressions. Of Dean Smith, of Solomon.
Not everyone found him so funny. He was direct, often rude. He believed his opinion to be fact; he listened to arguments, but rarely, if ever, changed his mind. Sometimes he would argue with colleagues or editors and they wouldn’t speak for months.
Barry Svrluga, a Duke graduate and sports writer at the Post, said Feinstein “wasn’t afraid to throw an elbow to get past the PR person.”
But there is little that anyone can think of to accuse Feinstein other than a harsh temper and a blatant disrespect for authority.
He “outworked everyone,” as Remnick put it, frequently writing and publishing books in the span of a year without halting his other commitments. He was fearless in his reporting, brave enough to spend the better part of a year with longtime Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight, one of the rare people in the world who might have outstripped Feinstein in attitude and ferocity.
Readers relied on Feinstein to find answers to questions most reporters never asked. He hated flying, so he drove to ask them.
Feinstein was generous in more than one way. He once sent opera tickets to Honigberg and his girlfriend, and he taught reporting to college students. He gave most of the hours of his life to other people, listening to and recording their stories, showing up with his stubborn curiosity and wide-open ears.
“He had a certain mensch-y quality about him,” Remnick said.
In the early 1990s, Feinstein came back to Duke. He formalized his role as teacher and became a visiting professor of journalism. Feinstein was already a giant in the field; he certainly did not teach for money.
Svrluga took a class with Feinstein his senior year. Ever opinionated, Feinstein told his students how to report, and provided plenty of feedback on their work. The class was a small seminar and Feinstein, for all of his volatility, made that space “a warm environment” for Svrluga. When Svrluga wrote a men’s basketball game preview that The Chronicle published, Feinstein walked into class the next day full of praise.
Most of Feinstein’s columns in The Chronicle — like most of his work — were unapologetic. His final was not. In his farewell column, he wrote with an unusually humble pen.
“As sports editor of this newspaper I have received a remarkable amount of help from the people around me … My only hope is that in the future I will have a chance to contribute to the lives of others as these people have contributed to my life. And I hope that those who follow me here, as writers, as students and as people will receive and return the same kind of help I have received. Maybe it’s corny. But that’s what I think life is all about.”
Feinstein was a grouch and a curmudgeon. A justified, but annoying, know-it-all. An oddball, a laugh. Certainly a great journalist.
Certainly someone who cared.
Feinstein (third from right) with other writers in The Chronicle's 1975 yearbook photo.
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