Date: Thursday, March 04, 2010, 5:49 am
By: Tonya Pendleton, BlackAmericaWeb.com
My friend – whose favorite TV destination when he’s at my house is ESPN – came by one night during the recent Winter Olympics Games. Since I’d just upgraded from my old Sony picture-tube TV to a wall-mounted flatscreen with HD, I thought watching the Olympics was a winning suggestion.
But Mr. Sports screwed up his face with one of his patented “Is you crazy?” looks and said “The Olympics? Black people don’t watch the Olympics. Black people don’t do those kinds of sports.”
I then screwed up my face with one of my patented “Boy, you are ignorant” looks and said, “Are you serious? What about Shani Davis?”
The answer: “He’s the exception.”
Sorry, but I’m not about to call him Shani “The Exception” Davis, despite the fact that it does have a nice ring to it. I’d prefer to consider that Davis is instead exceptional at something that doesn’t require a certain color to do.
As a lifelong fan of the Olympic Games, both summer and winter, it really burns me up when people express the above sentiment, as though there were something wrong with a black person watching sports that are conducted mostly on ice and snow. I acknowledge that, as people of African descent, there are some pretty good reasons why we don’t historically excel at certain sports. The fact is that Africa, the Caribbean and other countries that have a predominant population of people of color do not generally have ice and snow in their weather patterns.
That would be the same reason why athletes from Austria, Norway, The Netherlands and this Winter Games’ host country, Canada, often outdo the rest of the world in skating, skiing, hockey and curling (for those of you who don’t watch the Winter Games, that’s a kind of shuffleboard played on the ice.)
Even in the U.S., surfing champions often originate in California, while skiing and snowboarding stars come from snow-prone states like Vermont, Utah, Colorado and New Hampshire.
Yes, there are often financial obstacles to black participation in these sports, as well as geographical ones. Serious skating, skiing and snowboarding require costly ice time or resort entry fees, as well as blades, skates, boards and skis.
But come on, people. Does that mean that black folks shouldn’t compete in a certain sport because it’s somehow not for us? Is that the reason that sailing, surfing, skiing, skating, rowing, lacrosse and other sports that are currently dominated by whites shouldn’t be a part of the young black athlete’s repertoire?
If that were the case, I guess Eldrick “Tiger” Woods and Venus and Serena Williams should never have picked up a golf club or a tennis racquet.
Summer Olympics gold medalist Cullen Jones, only the third African-American to represent the U.S. in swimming, learned to swim because of a near drowning. Sadly, nearly 60 percent of African-Americans children don’t learn to swim, which makes them three times as likely to drown as other children. But that doesn’t mean that African-Americans, as a rule, don’t swim. That kind of thinking is not just limited and ignorant – it’s dangerous.
If you’ve tried a snow or ice sport and simply disliked it, I can understand. I once took my nephews snowboarding when I was trying to learn myself, and one nephew loved it; the other absolutely hated it. All I’ve ever asked my nieces and nephews to do is to try it, whatever “it” is, before they decide whether or not they like it. For people to limit their children by saying that there are some things that blacks “don’t do” is unfathomable to me.
Thankfully, neither Cherie Davis, nor Ronald and Debra Jones, felt that way.
Shani Davis is certainly exceptional on the ice. He repeated as the long-track speedskating gold medalist in the 1,000 meters and won silver in the 1500. He is the reigning world record holder in both events. To see him glide around the speedskating oval is as amazing a visual feast as it is to see Reggie Bush run in a 83-yard punt return or Kobe Bryant hit a slam dunk.
Davis is not the only black person to medal in the Winter Olympics – figure skater Debi Thomas won bronze in 1988, bobsledder Vonetta Flowers won gold in 2002 (the first person of African descent to win a gold in the Winter Games), and Canadian bobsledder Shelly Ann-Brown won a silver this year. Both Ghana and Ethiopia sent skiers to the Winter Olympics, and while they weren’t expected to be competitive, they were there.
Davis and Flowers inspired parents in Washington, D.C. to start DC – ICE (Inner City Excitement), a black skating club. There are other organizations that focus on getting children of color involved in non-traditional sports. New York City has Figure Skating In Harlem, and Philadelphia has the Philadelphia Department of Recreation, the inner-city swim team that inspired the 2007 movie, “Pride.”
There is no reason why more young black athletes shouldn’t have the chance to be great in sports that don’t involve a ball, a bat, a ring or a field if the attitudes of the adults around them support it. Davis is definitely a great athlete, and we should salute the discipline, focus and determination it took for him to succeed.
Let’s just hope one day, he won’t have to be the exception.
