Rick Telander

In his 1974 classic, “Heaven is a Playground,” sports writer Rick Telander leaves a lot of important questions unanswered. For example, if a ghetto playground in Brooklyn is heaven for a basketball aficionado, how much of the playground is heaven and how much is hell for the black youth who seem trapped by its relative safety?

Outside of the playground? Broken glass. Graffiti. Heroine addicts. Deadly street gangs and drug dealers. Profiling cops. A society that serves ghetto youth distain and smells only the oder of failure.

Although the study is of the ghetto in 1974, it is still the world of Rodney King and Trayvon Martin. It is 150 years since Emancipation and still the black man is hunted on the streets of America. The reason why Black Lives Matter. The reason why incarceration rates of blacks are a disgrace.

Why basketball? What is it about this sport that yields so many outstanding athletes among black youth. Or football? Why do participation rates of blacks in pro baseball continue to drop?

I think the case of baseball has something to do with the participation of youth in parts of the world even more desperate than America’s ghettos. The barrio. The Caribbean wasteland. The favela.

Basketball and more particularly football are far more violent sports. The success of underprivileged youth in these sports, in fact the financial success of these sports is predicated upon the failure of youth to enter the mainstream. Pro sports is an indication of just how little America has progressed since Emancipation.

Where are the parents of these kids scrabbling hard to escape the ghetto? Where are the mentors? Where are the teachers? A place as big and sprawling and busy as New York has little time for the “losers” as Donald Trump would call them.

Even while author Rick Telander acknowledges seriousness of the ghetto trap for these youth, the tale is overlaid with some sentimental gauze that the home of basketball is really on these playgrounds. If he is right, then basketball is a mirror of the desperation of blacks to ever achieve equality when the deck is clearly stacked against them.

On a basketball court a boy is challenged by his peers. While not as deadly as a street brawl, it is someplace the boy can test his skill, his imagination, and his manliness. And it is a brutal competition nonetheless.… (mer)

This was a loan from a Wisconsin Badger-fan friend. It was read and the following review written in December 2005 and early January 2006.

I decided to read this loaned book in December, during the wasteland of time between college football's regular season and the worthwhile bowls. Little did I know that Auburn and Wisconsin would be matched up in the January 2, 2006, Capital One Bowl! It was with extra interest that I read this book.

It's an interesting read. From the perspective of the SEC, it's almost bizarre to think of fans who come to games to party as much as to cheer, fundraisers that barely charge an entrance fee, facilities in crumbling condition, etc. But the stories of athletes are heartwarming or heartwrenching - the anorexia, the pain of devotion to a non-revenue sport so low-key even serious injuries don't make the news, the issues of sex and sexuality. Having a psychologist just "around" to talk to athletes in whatever context they need was interesting. Here in the south we are more likely to have chaplains!

I had also always been curious about Donna Shalala, and enjoyed the insites into her leadership style.

It was especially poignant that the book chronicled the first days of Barry Alvarez' tenure as Badger's head coach, and his last game will be later today.

I'm sending this one back to its owner later today -- before kickoff. Then I'll settle down to cheer for the Auburn Tigers, but with an appreciation for UW and how far its athletic department has come.… (mer)