Bloggin for Dollars...Again

Yeah, it's been a few weeks.


No, I'm not apologizing.


If you're wondering what I've been doing since I last posted, here's a quick rundown:


* Predicting the outcome of the Pacuiao-Cotto fight with frightening accuracy. Click that link again if you think I'm joking. No I'm not clairvoyant. I just really know the sweet science... and sometimes I get lucky.


* Celebrating my 33rd at Babaluu with the Cuban Sunday crew.


* Getting fat on thanksgiving with some help from Harold, Garrett, and my sister.


* Getting ripped with fast company.


But the biggest reason for my absence from this space is that I'm blogging for dollars again, and this time it's about something I love.


The fight game.


This particular idea is three years in the making, a week old on the web and full of value added.


Like video!





Understand that managers in the moribund world of print media live and die by web stats, basing each writer's worth as a human being on the number of hits his or her stories attract. I haven't seen the numbers on this blog yet, but I do know that the Mayweather-Pacquiao post  has generated 48 published comments so far. Granted, it's not ESPN-level traffic (1698 comments and counting for their Mayweather-Pacman story), but its an insane about of feedback for a post on a sport that's supposed to have died five years ago.


MOREOVER... The video embedded above -- the one I KNOW you all clicked on is as of this very moment the third-most popular video at thestar.com.


!!!!


Barack Obama's Nobel speech has me beat, but for right now I'm enjoying my two-spot lead over Chris Bosh and his new tattoos.


Help me maintain it.


Click again. Comment often. 


The industry's in trouble and some folks are doing desperate things in order to survive.


I'm just trying to build a brand.


One click at a time.

Recommended Reading

Part I – The NFL’s Jackie Robinson
     Now that I think of it I know just who Woody Strode was.
       In grade 11 history class we watched Spartacus, and the only scene that sticks with me today is the one in which the King (can’t remember his name) forces Spartacus to duel to the death against a tall black slave with sculpted muscles.  But instead of finishing off Spartacus, the slave rushes at the king and is killed by soldiers.

     I remember telling my dad that I never knew Romans had black slaves. And now I remember him telling me that the guy who played the slave was Woody Strode, a football star at UCLA and one of the first black men to play in the NFL.

     It’s funny how “facts” can crowd out memories.

     If you’d asked me last week which player re-integrated the NFL in 1946 I would have told you it was battering ram running back and Hall-of-Famer Marion Motley.        
     Would have bet my left pinkie on it.

     And right now I’d have nine fingers because, like the link says, Motley and Bill Willis were the first African-American players to join the AAFC, which didn’t merge with the NFL until 1950.

     It took Alexander Wolff’s story in the Oct. 12 issue of Sports Illustrated to remind me of what my pops had already taught me:

     The Jackie Robinsons of pro football weren’t Motley and Willis, but Strode and Kenny Washington, who signed with the Rams in 1946.

     Both men were stars at UCLA, standouts even among other future pros, so why was it that neither could secure and NFL contracts until they had reached their late 20s? What kind of pressure did the African-American news media apply to the Rams’ ownership to force them to do the right thing? And why has Motley’s story supplanted Strode and Washington’s as the accepted narrative of how the NFL’s unofficial color line was broken after 12 years of segregation?

     Wolff’s piece answers those questions and more.

     Reading it you can only imagine the danger these two pioneers faced as the only two black players in a deadly sport.

     And that is the one (small) beef I have with the piece.

     Strode and Washington entered the NFL as trailblazers but a previously unpublished interview with Strode reveals they didn’t leave the league feeling like heroes.

"Integrating the NFL was the low point of my life," Strode told SI in an unpublished interview before his death. "There was nothing nice about it. History doesn't know who we are. Kenny was one of the greatest backs in the history of the game, and kids today have no idea who he is…If I have to integrate heaven, I don't want to go."

Strong words, and if I could change anything about the piece I’d include a few more on-field anecdotes detailing the reality that inspired them, the flagrant racism these two men encountered and overcame daily at practices and in games. 
     We learn about what they put up with in college – from All-America snubs to cheap –shotting opponents – but I’d like to know a little more about what happened in the NFL to push Strode to the stunning conclusion that he’d rather go to hell than integrate heaven.
     But again, a nit-picking grievance of a strong story.
     Wolff takes a topic that’s been covered relentlessly for a generation and still uncovers something fresh, forcing us all to re-think what we think we know about the integration of big-time pro sports.
     If you have the time, it’s worth a read. And if you don’t have the time, find it.

Part II – Slavery by Another Name

Discovered this one last month in a bookstore at the Tampa Airport, tucked away in the bottom row of paperbacks in the American History section. Like Wolff’s story, it forced me to reconsider my knowledge of a subject about which I’d considered myself an expert.

Photo borrowed from www.slaverybyanothername.com
On one level, the continued existence of slavery in the U.S. shouldn’t surprise a guy like me.

I’ve known for a long time that the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free us all – that slaves in Union states like Maryland kept slaving right until the end of the Civil War.
      I also knew the Thirteenth Amendment didn’t ban slavery outright, that bondage is still legal in the U.S. if it’s part of a convict’s sentence. A good friend of mine – mentor, author and thinker Gary Freeman – is one of several very smart people working hard to close the loophole, but still it persists.
     In addition to all that many (and I hope most) of us are aware that whites employed numerous techniques – sharecropping, poll taxes, terrorism -- to keep Black citizens in the post-bellum South in a state of near-slavery.

Knowing all that it’s not tough to imagine that Southern states, even after the Civil War, would not just condone, but endorse, encourage and profit from Black bondage.
     That a network of so-called law enforcers would arrest Black citizens on the flimsiest charges, apply a series of fines, then sell these “convicts” to industrialists and plantation owners, who would pay the fine then force prisoners to work until they had satisfied the debt.
     That defined prison terms could morph into endless cycles of debt that bled into lifetimes spent performing soul-sapping, backbreaking, and uncompensated labour.

Photo borrowed from www.slaverybyanothername.com

     All of that is pretty easy to imagine if you’re familiar with the history of the post-reconstruction South. But imagining is one thing – confronting the jarring reality that all these things actually happened is quite another.
     And this book will jar you.
     Using and meticulous research and in painstaking detail author Douglas Blackmon tells the stories of the men and women on both sides of the system of Neo-slavery that drove much of the South’s economy deep into the 20^th century.
     He introduces us to John W. Pace, the Alabama plantation owner who purchased black convicts by the dozen and forced them to work on his farm.
     And to Warren Reese, the U.S. Attorney who was among the first to prosecute southerners for post-bellum slave trading.
     And to Green Cottinham, a black man born free but who died a slave in an Alabama coal mine.
     I know this post is starting to read like liner notes, but understand the publisher didn’t put me up to this.  Understand, too, that I wouldn’t waste space here if the book didn’t move me.
     More precisely, it kicked me in the gut with its brutal and unashamedly honest depiction of genocide for private and public profit, a system that reigned in the south for nearly three generations after the Civil War.
     Pick it up if you get the chance. It’s not an easy read, but it’s an enlightening one.

One Take, One Link, One Endorsement

ONE TAKE -- OSCAR-PAC MAN POST MORTEM

So the final numbers are in from the De la Hoya/Pacquiao pay per view, and it was a stunning success. Looks like both the Golden Boy and his promotional company made enough to survive the impending depression.

Wait, no, it was a huge disappointment. Looks like Golden Boy Promotions (and the sport of boxing) are headed down the toilet, along with the American auto industry, the newspaper business and the governor of Illinois.

I'm with neither ESPN nor the L.A. Times on this one. Instead, I'm with Mos Def because "I find it distressing -- there's never no in between...."

Let's put this in perspective.

Is the 1.25 million pay per view buys Oscar and Pac Man logged last weekend impressive next to the 2.4 million Oscar and Floyd Mayweather put up in May 2007?

Not exactly.

But it's a huge number considering 1) Pacquiao wasn't exactly a celebrity to most Americans before this fight, and probably still isn't one now, and 2) everybody's broke.

The folks at the L.A. Times -- owned by the newly bankrupt Tribune Company -- know as well as anyone how little money people to spend these days. Given the depth of the economic doo doo we're in my hat's off to anyone who can sell a 1.25 million of anything, especially when that "anything" is a sport that even top fighters say is dying.

ONE LINK -- NASTY, DISGUSTING, GRAPHIC

So why is boxing dying?

Most folks think its because most members of that coveted 18-35 white male demographic would rather watch stuff like the link I'm about to show you. Basically, it depicts an unusually tall and rake-thin UFC fighter going shin-to-shin with an opponent and emerging with a badly broken leg.

Like, shattered shinbone.

Like he'll never walk normally again broken.

This is Joe Theismannesque, and then some.

You've been warned. This link is graphic. Don't click if you've just eaten.

But if you love disgusting, catastrophic sports injuries, then click here.

ONE ENDORSEMENT -- BLACK MILK

These days it seems everything I love is dying.

A medium (newspapers).

A sport (boxing).

An art form (hip-hop).

They say they come in threes, and as much as I'd hate to see hip hop die, I'll pull the plug and dig the grave myself if I hear too many more Auto Tuners. Seriously, who really wants to sound like T-Pain?

Anyway, dying don't mean dead, and there still are some talented folks keeping hip hop alive, and that leads me to this week's endorsement:

Black Milk.

A Detroit-based DJ/Producer/MC and heir apparent to the late J-Dilla, and he's making great music these days. Stumbled across some of his tracks online a couple months back and now he's in heavy rotation on my iPod.

My favourite so far:

A welcome antidote to the spreading T-Painification of hip hop, and as long as he's making music the art form will survive.

Not sure what he can do about boxing and daily papers though...

* Photo of Pac Man smashing Oscar originally appeared here.