Diversity: Sports sections of daily newspapers still stuck in the 20th century

It happens every time a story with social significance spills into the playground, as was the case last week with Carl Nassib of the Las Vegas Raiders outing himself.

Sports scribes seized the moment, like West Coast grizzlies at the annual salmon run, and they went on a feeding frenzy, feverishly tapping opinion pieces favorable to Nassib, the first openly gay man to be included on an active National Football League roster. But their essays, although well-intentioned, were chock-full of assumptive generalities and shy on first-person perspective.

The wordsmiths wrote on auto pilot, as if following a template.

Nassib is brave. Check. Nassib is courageous. Check. Nassib is an inspiration. Check. Bravo for Nassib. Check.

It’s all meant as high praise, yet, in reality, it’s the piling on of platitudes.

And there’s a reason for that: They don’t know any better.

I mean, the rarest of species in major North American professional team sports is the openly gay male. There have been more confirmed sightings of Elvis, Sasquatch and Amelia Earhart. There is one at present, Carl Nassib. There’s never been more than one at any given time.

But the second rarest species is the openly gay sports scribe (newspaper division), male or female.

LZ Granderson

A handful exist in the United States—LZ Granderson of the Los Angeles Times most notable among them, and transgender female Christina Kahrl is the freshly minted sports editor of the San Francisco Chronicle—but I don’t know of any LGBT(etc.) writers working at dailies on the northern side of the vast, still-blockaded border.

I spent 30 years in the rag trade, shutting down in 1999, and any gay person scribbling sports during my time was coal miner deep into the closet.

So, if we do the math, there’s not been an out gay jock journo at a major daily in Canada in more than half a century. Perhaps not ever.

Even as we hear more female voices and see more Blacks and people of color on our TV sports networks, the toy departments in the rag trade remain stuck in the muck of the 20^th century, like an old jalopy spinning its wheels in a ditch.

When I took my leave from the business in ’99, both dailies in Winnipeg had a female scribbling sports. Today there are zero. There were no out gays then, there are no out gays now. There were no Blacks or people of color, there are zero today.

It’s much the same across the oft-frozen tundra. Sports sections at daily newspapers don’t do diversity.

Thus, when Carl Nassib comes out or Black athletes rise in protest of social injustice or another woman is beaten up/sexually assaulted, the scribes are at a disadvantage. Because they aren’t gay, Black or female, they’re incapable of drilling to the numb of the matter.

I mean, the very notion of straight men explaining what Nassib’s coming out means to the LGBT(etc.) collective and/or society is the highest level of absurd. It’s like having Tiger Woods for a driving instructor.

Therefore they traffic in platitudes, which comes across as trendy, if not patronizing.

Christina Kahrl

When Nassib said he “agonized” for 15 years—more than half his time on this planet—before coming out, those of us in the LGBT(etc.) collective got it. Fully. It’s why some of us, including myself, were moved to tears. We’ve felt the searing pain of the suffocating inner strife. We’ve lived the fear of losing/being denied employment or lodgings. We’ve lived the fear of losing friends and family. We’ve lived the fear of bullying and worse. We know what it’s like to be told conversion therapy will “cure” us. We know what it’s like to hear the Vatican refuse to bless our marriages because gay sex is a “sin.” We know the humility of being scorned and refused service. All that based solely on our preference in life/sexual partners and/or gender identity.

So, yes, we know Carl Nassib’s story because it’s our story. And we can tell it.

Sadly, sports editors across the land are not inclined toward giving diverse voices a share of their platform. They’re quite comfortable allowing straight, white, mostly male scribes to opine with an outlier perspective on stories that can only be told with LGBT, Black, or female insight earned through lived experience.

The irony, of course, is that numerous sports editors and scribes are quick to condemn the lack of diversity in, say, the National Hockey League and NASCAR, or at Augusta National Golf Club—and they’ll shame others for failing to promptly rise in protest against social and racist injustice—yet they don’t see a very white, very straight, very male business in their own mirror.

Sorry, but you can’t be part of the solution unless you recognize yourself as part of the problem.

Day tripping at the White House would be cool if JFK, Nixon or Obama were still there

The White House holds no rapture for me.

I’ve seen it from the street—during a drive-by while working as a travelling hockey writer in a distant lifetime—but I never felt the urge to ring the doorbell and ask for a peek inside.

Just as well, I suppose, because it was near the dinner hour that early-November day in 1979 and I’m thinking that the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW at the time—the gentleman peanut farmer from Plains, Ga., Jimmy Carter, his bride Rosalynn and little Amy—might have been breaking bread and likely were not inclined to entertain a wandering sports scribe from Canada.

So I merely requested that the cab driver ease his right foot from the gas pedal so I might take a lingering look at the shack sitting on 18 acres of presidential sprawl. Scant seconds later, the White House was in the rear-view mirror and we were soon passing the golden arches of a McDonald’s restaurant.

“How convenient for little Amy,” I recall thinking. “Ronald McDonald and a Happy Meal are only a block away.”

I reflect on my fleeting, non-eventful encounter with the hub of the free world today because the Pittsburgh Penguins have RSVP’d their intention to drop in on the Trumps sometime during the 2017-18 National Hockey League season. No doubt they’ll have the Stanley Cup in tow and we can only hope that the Resident-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump, won’t mistake it for a spittoon.

JFK

The Golden State Warriors, meanwhile, were in ponder of their invitation to touch elbows with Donald J. when the United States president, piqued by the hesitancy of star player Steph Curry, went all Soup Nazi and declared his temporary home in Washington, D.C., off limits to the National Basketball Association champions.

“I never promised you a Rose Garden!” he snapped.

Well, okay, the Apprentice President didn’t actually say that. More likely the Commander-in-Tweet called Curry a disrespectful SOB, then sat down to watch a NASCAR race or type out a list of mis-truths for his Paid Pinocchio, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to deliver to news snoops at her next press briefing. (“When President Trump said that some Nazis and white supremacists are ‘fine people’ and that National Football League players are ‘sons of bitches,’ that’s not what he meant. He meant something else entirely and you’re missing the president’s message completely if you think he meant something other than what you think he meant to say.”)

So I’m thinking: If granted the opportunity, would I want to attend the White House to meet this president? About as much as I want a Happy Meal.

There have been 13 U.S. presidents in my lifetime—in chronological order, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Papa George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. I have recollections of all but Truman, whose term in the White House expired when I was barely knee high to Jackie Kennedy.

Of the 13, I thought it’d be cool to meet three—JFK, Nixon and Obama.

Richard Nixon

I was raised Roman Catholic and the ruler-wielding nuns at St. Clements and St. Alphonsus schools assured us that JFK winning the White House in 1960 was a big deal. The reason it was important to have a Catholic in the Oval Office escaped me at the time, but my little mind determined it prudent to resist any urge to challenge the nuns on that issue and, thus, spare my knuckles a stinging rap. But I wanted to meet JFK. Maybe ask him about Khrushchev and air raid drills during the 1960s Cold War. You know, just one Catholic to another. I wept when JFK was gunned down. Still do whenever I see the film.

Nixon was a nasty bit of business and a man for whom I harbored no admiration, but he appealed to a morbid curiosity. I always wondered what made him tick. Picking his brain would have been a trip. I mostly wanted to ask him what the hell he was thinking during the My Lai massacre coverup. Shouldn’t the soldiers responsible for killing more than 500 unarmed, innocent Vietnamese civilians (most of them women, children and old men) be held accountable? He deserved impeachment for that, never mind Watergate, and I wanted answers.

I was sitting at the bar at Paparazzi Nightclub in Victoria the night Barack Obama was elected president. Our American neighbors had put a black man in the White House and pure joy in the form of tears fell from my eyes. I never thought I’d see that day. I’ve always wanted to shake his hand. I really don’t know what I’d say to President Obama, but it would be about peace and acceptance.

For me, any of those three would be worth a trip to the White House. The other 10, not so much.

Would Donald Trump call Jackie Robinson a “son of a bitch?”

Let us, for a moment, look beyond the cringe-worthy optic of the Pittsburgh Penguins seemingly walking in lockstep with some of the good, ol’ boys in NASCAR Cup racing, where the Confederate flag is as commonplace as country music, RVs and left turns.

Instead, it seems apropos to first point out that Jackie Robinson took a knee.

Jackie Robinson and Richard Nixon

Not physically, understand. After all, the first black man to participate in a 20th-century Major League Baseball game had an agreement with team owner Branch Rickey to play the part of the obedient, turn-the-other-cheek worker during the formative years of his 10-season tour of duty with the storied Boys of Summer, the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Robinson was, as New York Times columnist Arthur Daley opined, the right type of black man for the pioneering venture of breaking baseball’s color barrier.

“The muscular negro minds his own business and shrewdly makes no effort to push himself. He speaks intelligently when spoken to and already has made a strong impression,” Daley wrote of Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers in mid-April 1947.

That writing reeks of know-your-place-boy racism. It’s almost as if Daley believed Robinson was in Brooklyn to shine shoes and carry luggage rather than play baseball. But it’s just a small sampling of the rampant ridicule and discrimination that challenged the Dodgers infielder, who, as a lieutenant in the United States Army in 1944, was arrested, shackled and faced a court martial for declining a driver’s racist directive to “get to the back” of a military bus where the colored folk belonged. Robinson sometimes was required to eat at different restaurants and sleep in different hotels than his teammates, he received death threats and threats to his bride, Rachel, and their son, Jackie Jr. Long after he had become an established star in MLB, he and Rachel encountered numerous hindrances in seeking a home to purchase, road blocks based solely on the color of their skin.

Little wonder he wrote this in his 1972 autobiography I Never Had It Made:

“There I was, the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps, it was, but then again, perhaps, the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today, as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

The great Jackie Robinson, a man who served in the U.S. Military, could not stand for and sing the Star-Spangled Banner. Couldn’t salute the flag. He took a knee.

I wonder, would U.S. President Donald J. Trump call Robinson a “son of a bitch?”

That, after all, is the Apprentice President’s chosen insult for the numerous National Football League performers who, during the playing of the American national anthem, are taking a knee in protest of racial injustice. At least one player in MLB has done the same. Others have raised fists in protest, evoking the image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico. Still others, such as the members of the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers and Los Angeles Sparks of the Women’s National Basketball Association, have remained in their changing rooms.

Trump would like to see all the “sons of bitches” fired.

But not the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins. They’re a “great team” don’t you know. Bless their bent noses and gummy grins, because they’ve accepted Trump’s invitation to grovel and genuflect at the White House. And those dudes in NASCAR? They’ll fire any driver, pit crew worker or team employee who drops to one knee during the anthem. Hell ya, they will! It’ll earn you “a ride on a Greyhound bus” out of town growls team owner Richard Childress.

“Anybody that don’t stand for that ought to be out of the country. Period,” legendary driver Richard Petty scoffs in concert.

The commander-in-chief is “so proud” of ’em, bless their bent fenders and southern drawls. And, hey, it’s just a coincidence that NASCAR is the whitest sport in the world. They’re his kind of people because bossman Brian France endorsed his bid for the White House in 2016.

“If the people that like and watch NASCAR vote for Donald Trump, they can cancel the election right now,” he bleated. “Nobody else can win. Nobody.”

I’m not sure what Jackie Robinson would make of all this noise, but I know he was heavily involved in civil rights post-career. He campaigned openly for Richard Nixon during the 1960 presidential election and became pen pals with President John F. Kennedy, imploring JFK to get “angry” over racial injustice. So I’m guessing he’d align himself with NFL players and take a knee.

And if Donald Trump called him a “son of a bitch?” Little doubt Robinson would call the president a “son of a bitch” right the hell back.