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1971: How one year and five men changed the course of Georgia football

"In the late 1950s, 5-year-old Clarence Pope would sit on a large rock in his backyard during Georgia football games. He lived five blocks east of Sanford Stadium, close enough to hear the announcers describe the game and the crowd erupt every so often. Pope held a small football while imagining what might be happening on the field. When the stadium noise seeped into the valley where Pope sat listening, he pretended to be the one making the play. He'd throw his football, catch it and run. "That's me," Pope said. "They're cheering for me." Richard Appleby and Horace King lived nearby on the other side of Athens, still able to feel the pulse of Georgia football. One hundred miles west in Rome, a young Chuck Kinnebrew watched Southeastern Conference football with his dad, and a fifth similar-aged boy, Larry West, grew up in Albany. All five eventually became Bulldogs, and in doing so, they carved out a piece of Georgia history that provided a foothold for those who followed. Every African American who has played at Georgia since 1971 has had something these five didn't — the ability to match those Sanford cheers with someone who looks like them. "I never thought of [playing at Georgia] because everything was black and white," Appleby said. But everything starts somewhere. Finding a way in Early in his childhood, Pope played pickup games in the neighborhood but nothing more organized than that until eighth grade. Kinnebrew participated in intramural-like games between West Rome, where he lived, and South Rome. A principal of a nearby junior high school organized the games, and the kids wore mismatched uniforms using unneeded equipment from local high schools. As for Appleby, who didn't join the school team as a tight end until 11th grade, he said he "became a legend" on Chase St. in Athens. Appleby, Pope and King, the three Athens natives, found their way into Sanford Stadium by purchasing a tray of sodas for a couple dollars and then selling them. Once King had sold enough to pay for what the tray cost him, he would find a spot near the band to watch the game. He remembers the matchup against Houston in 1968, when Houston's team had integrated and Georgia's hadn't. "The game ended up being a tie, but all the blacks in the neighborhood wanted Houston to win the game, not University of Georgia," King said. By the time King was inching toward high school graduation, more high schools, colleges and sports teams had become integrated. Georgia was next in line. "The good news was there were integrated high schools," former head coach Vince Dooley said. "That helped so much because it was a natural flow. It was going to happen, and it was happening." Being the first in the now long list of Georgia players who are African American wasn't a driving factor in Pope's decision. He didn't feel a sense of importance in what he was doing by playing at Georgia, at least not to the extent that he does now. Every new signing class and team of Bulldogs who stand along the sideline is now a diverse group. "It was big for me to not take it for granted," said DJ Shockley, who was a Georgia quarterback from 2001 to 2005. "Being so many years removed from when they paved the way, I wanted to make sure I paid homage to all the hard work they put in, especially to open up the door so a lot of guys like myself could come in and not have to worry about some of the stuff they went through." Kinnebrew's father, Robert, could see that significance when his son opted to become a Bulldog. When Kinnebrew was 6, his older sister, Vicki, received a tape recorder for Christmas. Later that night, Kinnebrew and his father started to play around with it. His father pretended to be a reporter and interviewed his son. Kinnebrew answered as best he could. Kinnebrew remembers the topic of one of the questions: "You're the first African American to ever play for Georgia. What is that like?" Over a decade later, when the defensive lineman was deciding which school he would attend, his dad found the tape. It was hardly audible, but that fictional interview had been preserved. "That's you," Kinnebrew remembers his dad saying as the tape was replayed. "I felt like I feel right now," he said, tearing up, as he thought back to hearing the tape. "It was pretty emotional." The next day, Kinnebrew decided to play for Georgia. The initial cost Being the first wasn't unfamiliar to Kinnebrew. In seventh grade, he began going to an integrated school and was one of only five African Americans there. It wasn't mandatory, but his dad knew it would give him a better education and prepare him for "living and working in a predominantly white world," Kinnebrew said. As a seventh and eighth grader, Kinnebrew played on the freshman team since he was too big to play with his similar-aged peers. He remembers being picked on, both because he was younger and because he was the only African American on the team. In the classroom he was singled out as he was the only African American in the enriched program, which consisted of the students with the highest academic potential. "During history classes, they would show films of Africa, you'd hear, 'N-----, n-----, n-----,' and stuff like that," Kinnebrew said. "That was very hurtful. But I knew eventually we would get through and past all of that." Integration in Athens came later. Burney-Harris High School and Athens High School consolidated to become Clarke Central prior to King, Appleby and Pope's senior year. On the high school field, Appleby said the African-American players felt their new head coach, Weyman Sellers, who has since died, displayed racist attitudes. Their experiences at Clarke Central led to some hesitation to attend Georgia and be part of its first integrated team. Dooley remembers King feeling unsure. "[Dooley's] words to me one time was he wouldn't treat me any different than he would treat his own kid," King said. "How could I go wrong with that?" It was a learning process for the coaches too, Dooley said. They had never coached African-American players. But Pope said there was never a trace of racism coming from the coaching staff at Georgia like it did in high school. However, there were still racist incidents within the team, such as name calling, accusations of stealing or pranks that seemed to go too far. Pope's first memory of being part of the Georgia team is one that fits that mold. "Sometimes I don't like to say this, but it's real," Pope said as he began the story. The freshmen were instructed to line up in front of the old McWhorter Hall. They stood on the sidewalk, while a few upperclassmen were positioned on an elevated tier of the staired entrance. One, who was wearing a hooded sheet, sat on a chair in the middle, Pope said. Beside him stood two others with shotguns, bandoliers and a Confederate battle flag. Pope can recall this event vividly. Kinnebrew and Appleby also remember. They think all the freshmen were in attendance but aren't entirely sure. Perhaps King was not there, but if he was in the line of players standing in front of McWhorter Hall, he has forgotten. ("Look, Horace was there for football," Kinnebrew said when told King did not remember this day.) The players did not know if this hazing-like incident had occurred in years prior, but it didn't happen again the next season. "I sensed it just being a spoof," Pope said. "But it was a spoof against me — that's the way I looked at it — because of the change." Wearing the regalia that resembled that of the Ku Klux Klan, the upperclassmen asked the freshmen to bow. None of the African American players complied. Them, not us Not long ago, the 1971 Georgia team had its 40th reunion in Athens. Since the five African Americans were on the freshman team at the time, they were not part of the Georgia varsity roster. When Dooley walked into the reunion, he was struck by the lack of African American players in the room. There were none. Then he realized why. That was the last team that wasn't integrated. The integration of Georgia football was poised to happen slightly earlier, though. James Hurley, an African American student, walked onto the team during spring practice of 1970. Before the fall season rolled around, however, Hurley had signed with Vanderbilt. Another athlete from Huntsville, Alabama, was recruited by Georgia in 1970 and seemed set to sign, but he flipped to Minnesota. When the five athletes earned scholarships to play at Georgia, their accomplishment began a series of firsts for the program. In 1971, which was 10 years after the integration of the university, they became the first African Americans to join the team. Four years later, King became the first African American from Georgia drafted to play in the NFL, and he had a nine-year professional career as a running back with the Detroit Lions. The next year, Appleby was drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he spent a year before his three years in the Canadian league. In 1972, King became the first African American to score a touchdown for Georgia's varsity team. Jared Klein, who is a professor of linguistics, classics, and Germanic and Slavic languages at Georgia, had recently begun teaching at Georgia. He grew up in Cleveland and then went to Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. He had never been south of the nation's capital and had long been around integrated teams. Klein wasn't at the game, but he remembers reading about it in the newspaper. "For somebody coming from up north, the fact that a black player had scored a touchdown would be about as much news as my having gone to the grocery store earlier in the day," Klein said. "I realized that it was probably quite important. That's why it's in my mind to this day." King still has a copy of a newspaper from that game, but not for the same reason. For him, that game became a personal turning point due to a postgame interview. "My words to the reporter were, 'Not such a big deal. I was just helping them win,'" King said. When he read that the next day, the weight of his words hit him. It wasn't about us. His touchdown was for them. He did not feel like part of the team yet. King said that was because his experiences from Clarke Central still lingered inside him. But reading those words and realizing he felt that way was all it took for that feeling to change. "That was the richness of it," King said. "From that day forward, I found a home." Laying the groundwork Since many players had family members in the crowd at games, afterwards they would go out to eat with their relatives. However, Pope was raised by his grandparents, and his family was never able to get tickets for the game. Following games, Pope instead went to the dorm and played pool. Kinnebrew, his roommate, soon realized that Pope was alone. By a few weekends into the season, Kinnebrew's family invited Pope to come with them, and Pope still remembers how genuine it felt. That was a surprising part about college for Pope. He didn't realize a bond with his teammates could extend into their families. "It was a brotherhood," said Pope, a linebacker. Pope roomed with Kinnebrew, and King with West, who was a defensive back and was unable to be reached for this story. Appleby called himself the "odd man out," since he lived with a white player, Steve Taylor, his freshman year. Still, they were all part of the same suite and shared a bathroom. Dooley said the five African Americans were kept together to make sure they felt comfortable. The friendship between the five players was built upon respect and mutual accountability, epitomized by what they called "rat court." Rat court was held whenever one of the five players did something wrong, whether that was disrespecting a woman or not cleaning borrowed hair clippers after using them. The meetings were held late at night, usually in Kinnebrew and Pope's room. The one who had done something wrong sat in the middle of the bed and the others gathered around him, Kinnebrew said. Then, they discussed why the action was not up to the standard they had set. "Rat court kept us straight internally," Kinnebrew said. "Our view was we all needed to be role models because we were under the microscope." They knew they were the first, and with that came responsibility. Of the five players, Kinnebrew, West and King earned degrees. That's what Kinnebrew is most proud of — his graduation ring. His dad wanted him to have it, and he's worn it every day since. Sometimes people think it's a championship ring, but this group of athletes never won a conference or national title. Although in a way, they laid the groundwork for the later Georgia athletes who did. "Our teams were average, which I regret, but it is what it is," Kinnebrew said. "We set the stage. Had we gotten in trouble, hadn't been good citizens, I think it would have made it more difficult for them to go out and recruit athletes." King once heard about "planting some shade trees you will never sit under." And maybe that's what his career at Georgia did — for the Herschel Walkers, the Champ Baileys, the DJ Shockleys, the Nick Chubbs and all the others who have played since. The seed was planted simply by being part of the team. Pope's first game inside Sanford Stadium on the varsity team was against Pittsburgh, and he jokes he's most famous for missing a tackle on Tony Dorsett, who eventually won a Heisman Trophy and a Super Bowl. During games, Pope never thought about the crowd, apart from the moment he first stepped onto the field before the game began. That's when he was able to appreciate the environment that surrounded him. The crowd's roar, certainly, could still be heard at his childhood home to the east. But now, he no longer had to pretend. The cheers were for him." -Emily Giambalvo

One year after protest rocked Missouri, the effects on the football team and university remain tangible

"One year after the Missouri football team went on strike in solidarity with protests against racism on campus, the effects remain tangible on both the team and the university. A year ago Monday, the same week that Clemson rolled over Florida State on its way to an undefeated season and Memphis fell to Navy, members of the University of Missouri football team gathered during their bye week. Some players were out of town, but others remained in Columbia, Mo., where an undercurrent of racial unrest had brewed that fall. Students reported repeated use of racial slurs, and an alleged swastika of feces was smeared on a building, but none of the campus incidents targeted football players directly. That mattered little. Last November, in a climate where athletes, especially football and basketball players, exist on a different plane than the average student, Missouri broke the mold. Four days before the team's Saturday meeting, a graduate student named Jonathan Butler had begun a hunger strike. A member of a campus group that organized under the name Concerned Student 1950, Butler vowed he wouldn't eat until University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe, whom his group deemed ineffective in resolving the racist climate, resigned. Concerned Student 1950 also put forth a list of demands asking for a number of initiatives related to racial awareness and inclusion that they hoped the university would adopt. Several football players met Butler last fall and were friendly with members of his group. As Butler's hunger strike persisted, the team called its meeting, and after discussing the impasse between the university and the graduate student, more than 30 players announced they would boycott football activities until Wolfe resigned. By Sunday, they'd clarify their message: They were boycotting until Butler ate, period, acting in support of a peer rather than to directly push administrative action. Also on Sunday, Missouri coach Gary Pinkel released a statement supporting the players who spoke out and confirming the team would not practice until Butler ate. With Pinkel's support, the players' actions gained clout, and within 72 hours, Wolfe had resigned and the team had returned to football. But for such a brief disturbance, the process the football players set in motion last fall has had long-lasting ripples. In many ways, Missouri is still reeling. According to data the school released in August, enrollment for the fall 2016 semester was down 8% compared to fall 2015, and the backlash to the school's handling of the boycott and protests—as well as the leadership vacuum it created—are in large part to blame for that drop. Anticipating that decline and a decline in donations, interim chancellor Hank Foley mandated a hiring freeze and instructed a 5% cut to the university's budget for the fiscal year that began in July, projecting a $32 million shortfall. These are the tangible effects of last fall, the ones that hit closest to home for the university. But on a broader scale, it's still hard to say what exactly that team's legacy is to Missouri, or to college football as a whole. On Saturday, Missouri lost its 11th straight SEC game, falling 31-21 to South Carolina. More than halfway through the 2016 season, the Tigers are 2-7, on pace for their worst record this century. A year ago, few would have predicted this sharp of a downturn or the turnover within the athletics department and the school's leadership. Pinkel, who coached the Tigers for 15 seasons, revealed his cancer diagnosis days after the boycott, resigned after the season and now works as an ambassador for the school. Mack Rhoades, then Missouri's athletics director, bolted for Baylor, of all places, in July; the school hired his replacement, Jim Sterk, from San Diego State in August. Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin stepped down during the protests, and his position has yet to be filled; Foley has been in office since last November. And, after a nearly yearlong search, the university filled Wolfe's post earlier this month with Mun Choi, the former provost at the University of Connecticut. Wolfe became the man at the center of Concerned Student 1950's vitriol in part because of his stature but also due to perceived inaction on his part. By October, students had begun to protest racial incidents on campus, and one such event was scheduled for the homecoming parade on Oct. 10. During that march, protesters blocked Wolfe's car, and he failed to acknowledge them. Ten days later, Concerned Student 1950 issued its list of demands. The group met with Wolfe on Oct. 26 but did not come to an agreement, and on Nov. 3, Butler began his hunger strike. While Missouri's campus in 2015-16 was 77% white and 7% black, 69% of the school's scholarship football players were black, compared to 48% of the team as a whole. Without question, the players' actions, led in large part by safeties Ian Simon and Anthony Sherrils, receiver J'Mon Moore and defensive end Charles Harris, expedited the university's response to Butler. The team was scheduled to play a neutral-site game against BYU the following Saturday in Kansas City, and to forfeit would have cost Missouri $1 million as well as a massive PR hit. Within hours of the announcement of the boycott, public opinion was divided on the players' actions; for every message of support for using their platform to spur change, there was another criticizing the men for acting beyond the scope of their (unpaid) jobs. The next 72 hours, Simon said in an interview Friday, were the most stressful of his life. "It was very eye-opening and enlightening," he added. "I got to see the world for what it was a little more firsthand, a little more realistically. I got to see things through a different lens, and a lot of people's true colors. I got an insight into how the world thinks." That Monday, not hours after the team's boycott began, Wolfe resigned, ending Butler's hunger strike. In the first interview he's given since leaving the university, the former system president and Columbia native told Sports Illustrated he did so as worries mounted about violence on Missouri's campus. "I could not live with myself if I allowed that to happen," Wolfe said. "The FBI was there over the weekend, and the highway patrol, and they were tracking some bad characters that were in Ferguson. They were professionals; they weren't students. ... I was faced with prioritizing my own interests... and we were making significant progress—at the expense of what? At the expense of a student getting killed, or students getting killed? The university going up in flames? The national guard on campus? I felt I had no choice." But for the football team, Wolfe's resignation was hardly the last straw. The boycott left the group energized and drained, proud of maintaining what Simon describes as a unified message but also upset at the backlash. Pinkel's support meant the world to his team, but by allying himself with its cause, the coach invited criticism. "It was so hard," Simon says of watching fans turn on Pinkel. "I honestly kind of felt like I let coach Pinkel down because of all the negative feedback he was getting. Talk about [taking Missouri] from the bottom to the top. This man took us to SEC championship games. This man has done so much for this university and this state, and to see people turn on him because he was supporting his players, it really hurt me." Then, barely four days after the boycott lifted and 24 hours before the team was set to kick off against BYU, Pinkel revealed he'd been diagnosed with lymphoma. Though the disease was in check, he said, he planned to retire at the end of the season. The timing was bizarre, but according to Wolfe, it was forced, the result of further dysfunction among the university's leadership. According to Wolfe, who went on the record confirming thoughts that have circulated in Columbia for nearly a year, Pinkel planned to coach the rest of the season before announcing his retirement, and members of the school's board of curators were aware of the arrangement. "Then the board leaked that he had cancer," Wolfe said. "The board leaked way too many things. So they leak it." Although the Tigers beat BYU on Nov. 14, they fell to Tennessee and Arkansas in consecutive weeks, finishing the year 5-7. Even so, Mizzou was in line for a bowl berth because only 75 of the 80 teams needed to fill the 40 bowls won six games last year. Rhoades declined the berth on behalf of the program. Instead of playing in December, Missouri would focus on replacing Pinkel, which it did with former Missouri linebacker Barry Odom, who'd served as an assistant coach for the team from 2003-11 and as its defensive coordinator in 2015. Scott Brooks is a former associate professor of sociology and black studies at Missouri, where he taught from 2012 through the 2015-16 school year. Not long after arriving in Columbia, he said in an interview last year, he began to notice the connections black football players at the school made with the city's greater black community. He also believes that for many athletes from Missouri, the months of conflict in Ferguson in 2014 bear an extra significance. That's why he wasn't surprised when the team announced the boycott. "While their core identity is as an athlete," he said, "they were reawakened to the fact that yeah, they have privilege, but they're still a black male." "I see it as a blessing and a curse," Brooks continued. "The blessing is that it helped to really bring to light that there are issues here. What did the black football players actually win? I mean, they gained the publicity, but if you end up getting dismissed, if you're a freshman or a sophomore, [a potential new school] may think that you're now a problem athlete. If you're going into the [NFL] draft, we know how owners and the NFL are about protecting the shield. Well the question is: Does this hurt these athletes? I can see it going both ways." In the 2016 NFL draft, three players from Missouri were picked in the fourth and fifth rounds. Center Evan Boehm went to Arizona as the 128th pick, guard Connor McGovern went to Denver at No. 144, and linebacker Kentrell Brothers went to the Vikings at No. 160. Of the most vocal players in the boycott, only Simon, who served as a sort of PR coordinator and spokesperson, was eligible for the draft. Despite participating in Missouri's pro day and speaking with several NFL teams, he went undrafted and unsigned. Simon now works as a custom suit salesman in Dallas, and looking back on the boycott, he said the team would do it again in a second. "I'm very proud of the fact that we as some young men, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 years old, there were no missteps," he said. "There was no stumble. We had a plan, and it couldn't have gone any better." Boehm said at the NFL combine in February that he felt the team handled the boycott well. "I don't think people were used to seeing college athletes make a stand for something they believe in," he continued. "People didn't realize that college athletes are human too, and we are people too. Did it bring a bad name to Missouri? Maybe in some people's eyes. ... I'm not saying every team should go on a boycott. But we are human, and we do have feelings, and yeah, we're out there playing football and trying to make a living for ourselves, but there's somebody inside those pads." And Boehm was right; what Missouri did was unique. It was calculated, coordinated and executed seamlessly. The actions were purposeful, hardly an advertisement in holding a school hostage for petty demands. If anything, it proved that even near-perfect execution for a cause of such magnitude can still have its obstacles and dissenters. Wolfe said he received a letter from a black player who supported him, and ESPN quoted an anonymous white player saying the locker room was divided over the boycott, though not necessarily along racial lines. Another anonymous player told Sports Illustrated last November that many players didn't fully understand the team's objectives that Saturday night or even Sunday, when news of the boycott spread. Still, the team did present a largely united front by streamlining its communication and instructing players to rely on leadership to give interviews. "You better know what you're talking about," Simon said, "because one misstep, one misquote, and you're drowning." During the boycott, Simon took on the role of devil's advocate, playing out every potential reaction to a proposed action. Recalling those days, he said he and his teammates developed a sense that it was them against the world, especially as the backlash gained strength. More than anything, they felt alone, until the text messages began rolling in. Players at schools across the country, often high school teammates of Missouri players, pledged unequivocal support. "That was very encouraging," Simon said, "especially when s--- really started to hit the fan... just the fact that we knew they had our backs, and that if something was to go down, we wouldn't be the last ones to be heard." As the first college team to undertake a movement of those stakes, Simon and his teammates had no idea what consequences they might face, although they went into the boycott fully aware of the spectrum of attention they'd garner, for better or for worse. The situation at Missouri was also unique in its language. From the outset, the players were adamant they didn't want to be the story. Theirs was an adopted cause. They saw it through until Butler ate, but they aligned themselves with his health and safety rather than with Concerned Student 1950's greater list of demands. When the boycott ended, the team returned to football, having promised Pinkel they'd devote themselves with the same all-consuming attention they had before. And though some players kept in touch with Concerned Student 1950, the group began to splinter by springtime and is inactive this fall. Butler disassociated himself after the hunger strike and held several speaking engagements, but he's made no news since last spring, when Heat Street, a conservative website, unearthed unflattering videos of him discussing drugs and talking insensitively about women. That said, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune, the university continues to work toward some of Concerned Student 1950's demands, namely an increase in black faculty, a 10-year plan to better retention rates for marginalized students and an uptick in the number of minority counselors at the Student Counseling Center. Still, for all the dysfunction at Missouri that the players' boycott brought to the forefront, it did raise the stakes for schools and athletes everywhere. Universities can't count on their most prominent and powerful students to hide behind their helmets, and athletes now have a precedent for how to spur change as well as an idea of the risks they run in doing so. For fans, the boycott called into question their priorities: Do wins and losses matter most, or do sports count for something beyond that? And is support contingent upon agreement with athletes whose opinions on matters of race and class and politics were, before the boycott, largely unknown? Last winter, Simon was training for his pro day in Dallas, and one night, he wore his old black and gold sweats to dinner with his father. As the spokesman for the boycott, Simon had become its most recognizable aside from Butler, but after leaving campus, that notoriety faded. That night, though, a Missouri graduate happened to be sitting in the same restaurant. While Simon and his father ate, the man approached them. He recognized Simon from television, he said, and he explained that he was also a Tiger." -SI Staff

Key Questions, Takeaways From the NCAA's NIL Announcement

"At first glance, the NCAA's announcement signals a momentous turning point in collegiate sports. But SI's legal expert Michael McCann warns that the uncertainty could prove disappointing later on. In a significant, but cautiously worded, announcement on Tuesday, the NCAA's Board of Governors informed the public that it has unanimously voted to permit college athletes "the opportunity to benefit from the use of their name, image and likeness." A Major Change—in Theory At first glance, the announcement signals a momentous turning point in collegiate sports. The NCAA has long denied college athletes the opportunity to gain from the commercial use of their identity rights. This is true in contracts related to intellectual property in video games as well as in camp sponsorships and merchandise and apparel dealings. The NCAA has premised this ban on its system of "amateurism." Amateurism captures the NCAA's overarching desire to clearly distinguish college athletes from professional athletes and, in what some view as a peculiar from of protection, "protect" college athletes from a sports business world that the NCAA often paints as rife with unethical agents and deceptive businesses. Critics charge the NCAA has manipulated amateurism to create a repressive system where college sports are professional for almost everyone—the well-paid coaches, staff, trainers, alumni officers, broadcast companies, apparel makers, stadium and arena construction companies, clothing makers, sneaker conglomerates and numerous other persons and entities that profit handsomely from the playing and broadcasting of college sports. The group missing from that list? The players. A few years ago, former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon proved that the NCAA's ban on athletes profiting from the use of their names, images and likenesses violated federal antitrust law. O'Bannon established that NCAA rules denying players compensation constituted an anti-competitive and unlawful agreement among competing colleges to set the value of players' identity rights at $0. Yet the effect of that ban has lingered in the years followed. This is because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the NCAA can comply with the O'Bannon ruling so long as the NCAA allows member schools the chance to offer college athletes the full cost of attendance (an amount that varies by school but is generally worth several thousands of dollars per year). Conceptually, Tuesday's announcement indicates that the NCAA is walking away from its longtime ban on players enjoying the fruits of their names, images and likenesses. When played out to its logical conclusion, the NCAA's new position will enable college athletes to sign endorsement deals, negotiate to have avatars of their identities published in video games (so, yes, a return to college sports video games), contract to sponsor camps, be paid to sign autographs, and get a check to have their last names appear on replica jerseys. To be clear, college players profiting from the use of their names, images and likenesses does not mean colleges pay them. It instead means these players can negotiate deals with businesses—video game publishers, camps, trading card shows, clothing makers, sneaker companies and other entities that know those players' identities are commercially valuable. ADVERTISEMENT SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING For college players whose peak marketability is while they are in college, the ability to negotiate their NIL rights could prove very significant. While some college stars will go on to the NFL or NBA, most won't and many others play in sports where there is an absence of pro leagues. So, at last, it appears that multi-year court cases and pressure by legislators have forced the NCAA to change or, as its critics like to say, evolve. The Specifics Might Tell Another Story Often in life, the devil is in the details. Fine print that we tend to initially gloss over out of exuberance sometimes later on causes great disappointment and aggravation. With that life lesson in mind, the NCAA's announcement is devoid of any policies or procedures that clarify what the announcement actually means. The NCAA's announcement follows a recommendation by the NCAA Board of Governors' "Federal and State Legislation Working Group." Since May, this group has been charged with studying "issues highlighted in recently proposed federal and state legislation related to student-athlete name, image and likeness." The 19-member group has been led by Big East commissioner Val Ackerman and Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith; university presidents, conference commissioners and three college athletes are also members. The group has also sought advice and counsel from various persons in the college sports industry. Tuesday's announcement indicates that from now until April 2020, the working group will "gather feedback" as well as study changes in the state and federal legislative environment. Also, the NCAA has tasked Division I, Division II and Division III sports to create any new rules on NILs by no later than January 2021. In other words, the time horizon for any meaningful change is likely a couple of years away. When that change comes, it might prove more superficial than transformative—and as explained below, could lead to a legal fight between the NCAA and both state and federal laws that compel the NCAA to do more than it is willing to do. To that point, the NCAA's announcement stresses that this forthcoming "opportunity" for college athletes must nonetheless be "consistent with the collegiate model." That ambiguous qualification could foretell major limitations. Notice the use of the word "opportunity." An opportunity suggests its leaders view players negotiating the use of their names, images and likeness as a privilege rather than a right. Words matter. The announcement also conspicuously emphasizes that any "modernization" of rules for NIL rights must be adopted in accordance with NCAA principles. Such language might mean the eventual NCAA rules dramatically limit the scope of changes. For instance, the new rules must "maintain the priorities of education and the collegiate experience" and "make clear the distinction between collegiate and professional opportunities." In addition, any compensation for NIL rights must clearly not constitute compensation for athletics performance or participation. Further, the new rules must clearly define college athletes as not employees. Also, NIL rights cannot interfere with the recruiting environment, nor can NIL payments be made to induce athletes to pick a particular college, remain at that college in lieu of transferring or transfer to another school. My 10 Questions Given the haziness of the NCAA's announcement, it's difficult to know how NIL rights will be handled. Here are 10 practical questions: 1) Will college athletes be able to be paid for their NIL rights? The NCAA statement references athletes receiving a "benefit," a word that might imply pay, but could alternatively mean a far more restrictive form of compensation—such as a debit account that athletes can use only for academic-related purposes (think of a gift card that only works in certain places, such as the book store or campus dining). 2) Will college athletes receive NIL "benefits" while in college or will any compensation be accessible only after their collegiate experience ends? In her ruling in the O'Bannon decision, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken held that schools would be obligated to pay men's basketball and football players up to $5,000 per year while they are in school for the use of their NIL rights. Transmission of such payment would have occurred after the players graduated. This stipulation was later vacated in the Ninth Circuit's ruling, but is the kind of system Judge Wilken articulated what the NCAA might have in mind? 3) Will college athletes be able to hire agents to help them negotiate NIL deals? The NCAA's statement doesn't reference that topic. If a player can't hire an agent, he or she would lose out on the opportunity to secure expert advice. An agent could also assure the athlete that any accumulation of NIL monies is accurately accounted for. 4) Will college athletes be allowed to join a trade association to help them negotiate NIL deals? A trade association would allow them to bargain with more leverage as a group than as an individual (and a trade association is something the NFLPA would like to see happen)? The NCAA's statement doesn't reference that topic. If college athletes could only negotiate as individuals, some—particularly lesser known players—would likely lose out on NIL opportunities. 5) Can a college's compliance staff reject a player's proposed endorsement deal or other proposed NIL contract? The NCAA seems inclined to ensure that colleges—not the athletes—ultimately control the extent to which athletes negotiate the use of their NIL rights. Michael Drake, who is chair of the NCAA board and president of Ohio State University, recently stressed that any NIL rule changes can't morph college sports into professional sports. That sentiment likely won't be lost on Gene Smith, the working group's co-chair whose boss at Ohio State is Drake. 6) Can a college's rejection of a player's proposed deal happen for any reason, or only if a proposed deal would conflict with a sponsor of the university? Imagine a college athlete wants to sign with New Balance, but her school already has a deal with Adidas. Or imagine a player wants to sign a deal with a company that the school finds "inappropriate" for some reason or another. There are so many possibilities. Different rules would lead to different answers. 7) How will schools determine whether a player's proposed NIL deal might in reality constitute compensation for him or her to play at a particular school? Imagine a local car dealership is owned by an influential alumnus and booster of a popular state university. Now imagine that alumnus pays a top recruit a substantial amount of money—say $500,000—in a purported endorsement deal. As luck would have it, the recruit picks the alma mater of the alumnus. The alumnus then insists the money is for an endorsement deal and consistent with the NCAA's NIL policy, but the NCAA is skeptical, especially since the payment seems very overpriced. What happens next? 8) Based on the preceding question, if NIL rights are used in deceptive ways to compensate players for what amounts to a decision to pick a school, could Title IX issues surface? Title IX is a complicated law, but in general requires that schools provide gender equity in athletic opportunities for their athletes. Legitimate contracts between athletes and private businesses for the commercial use of name, image and likeness should not run afoul of Title IX. Those negotiations do not involve the college—they involve the athlete and a third party. However, if such contracts are in reality designed for recruiting purposes of football players and men's basketball players, and if a school becomes aware of that practice or should become aware, there may be a problematic intersection for that school with Title IX. 9) What happens to NIL rights if a state declares that its public university athletes are employees? Is that more likely to happen if college athletes are paid for their NIL rights? Much has been written that football players at Northwestern University failed in 2015 to gain employee status in their petition to the National Labor Relations Board. That is true but the conclusion presents a very incomplete picture of whether college athletes ought to be considered employees. Specifically, while Northwestern players invoked the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) since they were enrolled at a private school, the NLRA only governs private employers. College athletes at state public universities could use applicable state labor laws to claim they are employees. In certain states, particularly those that are progressive, it's possible players could succeed in proving that they are employees. The accompanying impact on NIL rights would be fascinating and further complicate the legal landscape of college sports. 10) How might receipt of NIL rights impact a foreign players' immigration status? Some college athletes are foreign students who are typically enrolled on F-1 visas. These visas limit the number of hours a student on such a visa can work to 20 hours, which happens to match NCAA rules that limit college athletes to 20 hours per week for playing and practicing. To the extent college athletes are considered employees or to the extent their involvement in negotiation of NIL rights leads to reconsideration of their visa status, there could be immigration law complications. Again, the devil is in the details, particularly in a topic as complicated as this one. A headline that screams revolution might be accompanied by a story that is far more milquetoast. Since the story hasn't been written by the NCAA, it remains to be seen how well the headline and story match. The Legislative Band Plays on In the meantime, don't expect states legislators and members of Congress to refrain from pursuing legislative reforms related to college players' NIL rights. They will likely be skeptical of the NCAA until the NCAA gives them specific reasons to feel differently. California has adopted the Fair Pay to Play Act, which goes into effect in 2023 and which will make it illegal for California colleges to deny their athletes the chance to hire agents or gain compensation for the use of their NIL rights. Legislators in such states as Florida, Illinois, New York, South Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Kentucky and Minnesota have proposed, or plan to propose, similar bills. These states won't wait for the NCAA to clarify its position on NIL rights. Likewise, members of Congress who have introduced or plan to introduce federal legislation related to NIL rights aren't going to wait around for the NCAA. In that same vein, the prospect of a protracted legal fight over NIL rights continues. The NCAA is poised to challenge state laws that envision a system for NIL rights different from the one ultimately articulated by the NCAA. More specifically, the NCAA will argue that such state laws violate the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause. This area of the Constitution has been interpreted to forbid states from enacting laws that unduly impact commerce in other states. In the 1993 case NCAA v. Miller, the NCAA used the Commerce Clause to successfully defeat the State of Nevada guaranteeing new procedural rights for college athletes and coaches whom the NCAA claimed had engaged in wrongdoing. The NCAA persuaded the courts that it can't operate as a national entity if states adopt conflicting laws. The vulnerability of state laws is one reason why a federal approach to NIL right might make more sense than a state-by-state approach. Those who hoped that the NCAA's announcement on Tuesday would resolve the subject of NIL rights are bound to be disappointed by the uncertainty detailed above. The NIL rights game in college sports is still in the first half, let alone down-to-the-wire." -BY MICHAEL MCCANN

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: what sports have taught me about race in America

"Sports is one of the few areas in which Americans of all races can talk to each other. Right now, it may be the country's best hope for meaningful dialogue. s the Guardian's series on race and sports starts today - and we mark two years since Colin Kaepernick first knelt during the national anthem - I am reminded that whenever an NBA player comes close to shattering one of my dusty old records, eager journalists contact me to ask how I feel. Here's how I feel: At the time I set those records - most points scored, most blocked shots, most MVP awards, blah, blah, blah - I celebrated them because they confirmed that all my hard work and discipline since childhood was effective in me achieving my goal of becoming the best possible athlete. But that wasn't my only goal. The even greater significance those records had to me then, and has to me even more now, is in providing a platform to keep the discussion of social inequalities - whether racial, gender-related, or economic - alive and vibrant so that we may come together as a nation and fix them. Historically, that has been the greatness of the American spirit: we don't flinch at identifying our own faults and using our moral fortitude and ingenuity to become a better nation. In honoring that spirit, I pay tribute to two of my most important mentors, UCLA coach John Wooden and Muhammad Ali. It is Ali's voice I often hear in my head: "When you saw me in the boxing ring fighting, it wasn't just so I could beat my opponent. My fighting had a purpose. I had to be successful in order to get people to listen to the things I had to say." All sports records will inevitably be broken, but the day after they are, the world won't have changed. But every day you speak up about injustice, the next day the world may be just a little better for someone. Sports is the most popular form of entertainment, with Americans spending about $56bn on sports events last year, compared to about $11bn on movies. Seventy-two percent of 18- to 29-year-olds consider themselves sports fans, as do a majority of those older. This level of popularity has made sports more than just entertainment, it's also part of our national identity, a source of inspiration for personal achievement, and a means to teach our children valuable lessons about teamwork and social ethics. For African Americans, sports has all those values - but it also has some extra implications. For people of color, professional sports has always been a mirror of America's attitude toward race: as long as black players were restricted from taking the field, then the rest of black Americans would never truly be considered equal, meaning they would not be given equal educational or employment opportunities. Even after they were permitted to play, sports has been the public face of America, not what we sentimentally profess to believe when waving flags on the Fourth of July, but of our actual daily behavior. That is why whatever happens in sports regarding race, plays out on the national stage. Right now, sports may be the best hope for change regarding racial disparity because it has the best chance of informing white Americans of that disparity and motivating them to act. The problem is that this is not the message that those who profit from disparity want the public to hear. They attempt to silence voices of dissent in sports today just as they have throughout my lifetime and before. And that attempt is always disguised as an appeal to patriotism. They use the flag the way a magician uses a cape: to misdirect the audience from the manipulation. Poof! No racism here, folks. To white America, the history of US sports is a rising graph of remarkable achievements of physical and mental strength. To black America, it's that, but is also a consistent timeline of attempts to silence the voices of African Americans. In 1964, Ali's refusal to submit to the draft during the Vietnam War on the grounds that "my conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people" caused him to be sentenced to five years in prison, fined $10,000, and banned from boxing years. He gave up millions of dollars and faced prison to speak his truth. In 1971, his conviction was overturned by the US Supreme Court in an 8-0 decision, but the damage had already been done. During the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the podium and raised their gloved fists in the air during the national anthem. As a result, they were kicked off the team and sent back to the US where they were ostracized in the press and received death threats. But many black Americans felt pride that their own anger and frustration had been expressed out loud on an international stage. Carlos later said that it was not a black power salute, but a "human rights salute". Smith said, "We were concerned about the lack of black assistant coaches. About how Muhammad Ali got stripped of his title. About the lack of access to good housing and our kids not being able to attend the top colleges." That same year, Aretha Franklin sang the national anthem at the Democratic National Convention and her performance was widely criticized in the press as "disgraceful," "objectional," "nerve shattering". Editorials routinely decried "soul music" and referred to her in an insulting way as a "soul sister". Wrote one angry reader, "'Soul' has its place - where, I'm not sure - but certainly not in the performance of our country's anthem." Even her magnificent voice was too black for the national anthem and had to be silenced. In 2016, Colin Kaepernick's passive protest against racial injustice, the simple act of kneeling during the national anthem, ignited a firestorm of support and condemnation. Other players from other sports joined his non-verbal protest. Kaepernick himself was punished, and his NFL career appears to be over after he was blackballed by teams. The story continues. This month several NFL players kneeled or raised their fists during the national anthem, which prompted a tweet from President Trump, "Numerous players, from different teams, wanted to show their 'outrage' at something that most of them are unable to define." Trump - the pampered Great White Hope of One-Percenters, who has never known a day without wealth - tried to silence black men by telling the world that they didn't understand their own outrage. The national shame in this timeline isn't the insult to the national anthem but the insult to the nation's ideals that 50 years after Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in Mexico City, not that much has changed. Despite the hundreds of studies and statistics and experts' reports that confirm systemic racism is rampant in America - hindering education, employment, health, and life expectancy - we're still trying to convince some people that the Earth is round. Over the years, I have participated in some of these protests. In 1967, when I was only 20, I was the youngest member of the Cleveland Summit, a gathering of black athletes tasked with determining the sincerity of Ali's claim of being a conscientious objector. In 1968, a few months after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, I had been invited to play on the Olympic men's basketball team. I was torn because I knew that joining the team would signal that I supported the way people of color were being treated in America - which I didn't. But not joining the team could look like I didn't love America - which I did. Instead, I chose to teach kids in New York City how to play basketball and why they should stay in school. My decision not to play resulted in hate mail calling me, among other things, "an ungrateful ******". That word, "ungrateful," is the key to understanding what angers those who are so incensed at players' protests. They want black athletes to be grateful that they've been given a seat at the table and to therefore ignore their brothers and sisters who have little hope of achieving that kind of success. That success of some black athletes has a dark side for African Americans. Some see sports as a path for their children to escape the endless cycle of poverty. Parents pour all their energy into training and grooming their child to become a professional athlete, sometimes at the expense of their academic education. Yet, the odds of success are so slim that they are doing more damage to their child's future. Even those who make it to the pros usually have a short career: the average in the NFL is 3.3 years, and in the NBA 4.8 years - and most don't earn enough from those short careers to retire on. We can't promote professional sports as a real hope any more than we can endorse the lottery as a career strategy. That's why athletes are so motivated to speak out about the unequal opportunities that leave people desperate to cling to the hope of even a distant longshot. Advertisement I love sports. I love to see an athlete perform a physical feat so amazing that I marvel at what we are capable of. I love to see teams work together, to act selflessly in pursuit of a greater goal than individual glory. Sports energizes me and makes me hopeful about humanity. But I am even more energized and hopeful when I see those same athletes speak out against injustices because I know that in doing so, they are risking the careers that they spent their whole lives working towards. Their willingness to risk everything in order to give voice to the powerless - despite all efforts to silence them - makes me proud as an athlete and as an American. As Mark Twain once said, "[T]rue patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it." Athletes who speak out are proclaiming their loyalty to a constitution that demands equality and inclusiveness, not to the government officials who try to undermine those ideals by silencing its critics." - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

College Football's Real Evil Villain

"It is an understood principle of organized sports that if you play for a team that wins a championship — even if you were not actually playing while they won the championship — you get a championship ring. Championship rings are silly (they are outrageously ugly, first off; this Lakers monstrosity from 2002 looks like an Illuminati decoder ring), but they are ostensibly the goal of athletic endeavor. They are supposed to be why you play. New England Patriots/via GIPHY And everybody gets one. Nomar Garciaparra got one for the 2004 Red Sox even though he was traded to the Cubs midseason, ruining Jimmy Fallon's one good Saturday Night Live character; Colby Rasmus got one for the 2011 Cardinals even though trading him is essentially why that team won the World Series; a man named Sergio Kindle notched one measly tackle in one measly game for the Ravens back in 2012, and he got one. I have an associate whose old job was essentially washing the jockstraps of the 2006 Cardinals, and he got one. The joy of a championship makes one so jolly that eventually you're giving rings out at the holidays like fruitcakes. Which is why it was so shocking last week when Dabo Swinney, head coach of defending college football champion Clemson, announced that Kelly Bryant — who started four games for the Tigers last year, including a key 28-26 road victory over Texas A&M in which he threw for a touchdown and ran for another — would not be receiving a championship ring. The reason: After losing the starting job to freshman phenom Trevor Lawrence, Bryant — who had graduated from college and therefore could sit out the rest of the season and have one more year of eligibility in 2019 for another team — left the team and transferred to Missouri. ADVERTISEMENT At the time, both team and player seemed simpatico. But when Clemson went on and won a title behind Lawrence, Swinney purposefully kept a ring from Bryant when they were handed out in the fall. His reasoning was as simple as it was purposefully ignorant of decades of precedent: "He wasn't on the team." But this of course ignored the fact that the only autonomy Bryant had — the only autonomy he has ever had — was in leaving the team when Swinney decided not start him. If Bryant wanted to showcase his skills for the NFL, he had to leave Clemson. More to the point: If he ever wanted to make any money for the thing he has dedicated his entire life to, he had no choice but to leave. For this, Swinney has banished him. Maybe if he'd hung around and cleaned the jocks ... Get unlimited access to Intelligencer and everything else New York LEARN MORE » As another season of college football begins — the first game, between Miami and Florida, is just ten days away, and this resident of Athens, Georgia, has been hearing Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart screaming expletives at the teenagers under Smart's supervision on his morning run for weeks now — it is worth remembering just how increasingly difficult it can be to jump through all the ethical hoops necessary to remain a fan of the sport. And there's no better example why this is so than Dabo Swinney. Swinney is the toast of college football right now, the man whose Tigers have won two championships in three seasons and who wiped out hated Nick Saban and Alabama 44-16 in the college football playoff title game in January. Swinney is often seen as an affable contrast to the humorless intensity of Saban (and Smart, Saban's protégé), a former real-estate agent and devout Christian whose homespun style and easy way with a microphone has led him to be a longtime favorite of the college football press. But as he has grown more successful, and the game he coaches has become even more of a multibillion-dollar enterprise, that folksiness has taken on a darker tone. Because the way you succeed in college athletics is by wielding power. And no one has more power than Swinney. But unlike, say, Kentucky college basketball coach John Calipari, who has used this power to advocate for players and increased compensation, Swinney is as retrograde as Bear Bryant. And he is truly the face of his sport now. When Swinney won the national championship game in January, he was awarded more than $2 million in bonuses for the 2019 season in addition to the $6.8 million salary he'd already earned — a salary that jumped considerably when he signed a ten-year, $92 million contract after the season. That is a fortune he has made on the backs of his unpaid players. To be an FBS college football coach is to reap the harvest of an unjust system, but Swinney has gone beyond merely being complicit in this system. Instead, he has chosen to forcefully advocate for it. He has said he will quit college football entirely if players get paid, saying that, "as far as paying players, professionalizing college athletics, that's where you lose me. I'll go do something else, because there's enough entitlement in this world as it is." (He brazenly reiterated this stance after signing that new contract.) He has fought against players receiving stipends in addition to their scholarships. When Northwestern football players attempted to unionize a few years ago, he was one of the loudest voices in opposition. Swinney's stances against player autonomy, in both college and professional sports, are legendary. He criticized Colin Kaepernick's protest, saying that "it's not good to use the team as a platform" and that "two wrongs don't make a right" while citing Martin Luther King Jr., something he later had to apologize for. He claimed players don't pretend they have concussions to stay on the field and that football is "safer than it has ever been." (Both statements are false.) He once kicked a player off his team — and thus out of college — for "having a bad attitude." He doesn't tolerate cursing at his practices. Oh, and remember the Clemson football team's visit to the White House during the government shutdown, when President Trump gave out all that fast food? The Root reported that while most of Clemson's black players did not attend, the ones who did go did so because they feared Swinney would punish them otherwise. (Swinney denied this, as did several players.) Swinney's unsavoriness goes beyond seeking to maintain his own power and profits. He has said America doesn't have a "race problem, it has a sin problem." In 2016, he refused to investigate an allegation that Clemson players had used racial slurs against South Carolina players, saying he could forgive college students for making mistakes but not media for reporting on them. (He actually said that the reporters who published the allegations should have been fired.) He has said that activists should "move to another country." He even once called himself "Osama bin Dabo," which is sort of offensive but mostly just weird. College football is a sport that brings in more than a billion dollars a year and one that is under increased public pressure to bring at least some of that money closer to the players who are putting their minds and bodies on the line for free each week. So far, that money is just going to the middle-aged, mostly white men ordering them around: Clemson itself has three assistants who make more than $1 million a year. In a sign of just how imbalanced this has become, for the first time, in 2018, college athletic spending for coaches outpaced spending on scholarships. It is the sort of factoid that gives up the game. Steve Berkowitz✔@ByBerkowitz In FY18, NCAA Division I public schools' spending on compensation for administrators and support staff surpassed their spending on scholarships for the first time: https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances 98 11:36 AM - Aug 12, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy 125 people are talking about this Sure, it was fun to watch Clemson run all over Alabama in the national title game last year. Nick Saban is such a notorious villain at this point that it was undeniably pleasant to see him have to eat it a little bit. But it is worth noting: Of the two coaches on the field that night, Saban is the one who believes it's unfair not to pay college players, not Swinney. Whom are we supposed to be rooting against, again? Clemson comes into the 2019 season as the No. 1 ranked team in the country. There are several reasons for this, but the primary one is Trevor Lawrence, the long-haired, goofy, otherworldly talented quarterback who took Bryant's job at midseason. He is only a sophomore, which means he has two more seasons as a Tiger, according to NFL draft rules. If he were eligible for the draft right now, there is no question he would be the top overall pick. But he isn't, so he has to put tens of millions of future dollars on the line for 12 or more Saturdays next season, and then again the season after. If he suffers a career-ending injury at any point in the next two years, he will never earn a dime as a professional athlete. But he has to play anyway. Someone has to make money for Dabo Swinney. Someone has to make sure Dabo doesn't quit college football. Someone has to keep minting those rings." -By Will Leitch

TO ITALIAN-AMERICANS, `HE WAS SOMEONE JUST LIKE US'

"My father was 8 years old going on 9 when Joe DiMaggio broke in with the New York Yankees in 1936. As bulletins on DiMaggio's faltering condition filtered out of Florida like a distant but significant seismogram, my dad, the son of Italian immigrants, followed them with more sadness than the average fan. My grandfather, Frank, was a barber, and Dad used to help out in his shop, washing windows and sweeping up the clumps of hair on the floor. In those days, men had their names hand-painted on gilt-edged china shaving mugs and the ballgame was always on the radio. My grandfather had only a grade-school education, but he was an intelligent man who understood that banter was part of the job and the most universal banter was about baseball. So Dad swept and cleaned and listened to the older men. He and his father talked baseball, and they often discussed the great DiMaggio. At night, when he was supposed to be asleep, my father held a flashlight under the covers and devoured the stylized novels of Horatio Alger, titles like "Phil the Fiddler" and "Joe the Peddler." (Today, the author surely would have profiled "Sammy the Shoe-Shiner.") Dad made a connection between Alger's protagonists and DiMaggio. "I was reading about all those boys from poor families who were making it," my father said. "I thought, `If Joe DiMaggio could make it, why can't Vince DeSimone make it?' " It is hard for anyone from my generation or younger to appreciate fully what DiMaggio meant to Italian-Americans of my father's vintage. He was enough to turn some kids in my father's hometown in western Massachusetts--Red Sox country--toward Boston's historic rival, whose roster happened to be loaded with Italians. As a rookie, DiMaggio overlapped with the double-play combination of Frank Crosetti and Tony Lazzeri; later, he played with Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto. "Of course, all young boys like a winner, and the Yankees were winners," my father conceded. Ancestry didn't always determine baseball allegiance. Dad's closest boyhood friend, Leo DiPalma, resolutely refused to abandon the Red Sox, and they have yet to solve the DiMaggio-versus-Ted Williams question. Still, heritage was identity then. In Springfield, the sons of Irish and French and Italian blue-collar workers alternately boasted to and teased each other, using now-unprintable ethnic epithets. Having DiMaggio in your corner was a major plus. He was dapper, well-spoken, a touch mysterious, the epitome of class for a boy looking to improve his lot. I don't know if DiMaggio was thinking about the kids he might influence when he began to hold that image dear, but it worked. He was perceived as a gentleman at a time when other, uglier stereotypes were beginning to emerge about Italian-Americans and when fascism was rearing its head in the Old Country. My father said he never felt the direct sting of prejudice, save for one incident, legendary in our family circle, in which his high school home-room teacher called him "a little Mussolini." He retaliated by calling her "a little Hitler." The narrative becomes vague at this point, but suffice it to say this episode did not prevent Dad from becoming a successful corporate executive. Dad had to follow DiMaggio from afar. Paying for haircuts during the Depression was a luxury, and my grandfather's business suffered. The family rarely could afford baseball tickets and a trip across the state. So my father got to see DiMaggio play just a handful of times. The first occasion was at Fenway Park when Dad was in junior high. DiMaggio made a throw from the center-field wall that sailed over the catcher's head on the fly. Bad play. Great memory. Perhaps DiMaggio was even more alluring through a long lens. One of the first times my father took me to Yankee Stadium was the day Mickey Mantle's number was retired. Dad politely acknowledged the guest of honor, but he actually stood on his seat and applauded wildly when DiMaggio, one of many dignitaries on hand, was introduced. Also, Dad still gets annoyed when I sing the little jingle once used by a Boston radio station: "Better than his brother Joe/Dominic DiMaggio." I don't really mean it. I just like to see him react. My father loves going to games, and he will always be a Yankees fan. But he is not a hero worshiper. He is not really a collector either. His baseball cards, including a few of Joe D, vanished somewhere along the way, unfortunately for his retirement account. He does own a two-volume DiMaggio biography and an old Life magazine he found in a secondhand bookstore, featuring Joe on the cover. And one other item. A framed, sepia-toned photograph of DiMaggio at the plate, his lean body elongated by pinstriped flannel and torqued in the midst of his wondrously smooth swing. It is the only thing remotely resembling sports paraphernalia on display in my parents' home. Most of us would look at the photo and see a larger-than-life figure. My father sees a fisherman's son with soulful brown eyes and a toothy smile, the map of Italy sketched on his face. "He was someone just like us," my dad said." -Bonnie DeSimone, Tribune Staff WriterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Opinion: 'We were wrong,' as USOPC finally do right by Tommie Smith, John Carlos

It's never too late to acknowledge you were wrong. Fifty-plus years after the U.S. Olympic Committee vilified Tommie Smith and John Carlos for taking a stand against racism and discrimination, banishing them from the Mexico City team and leaving them to face scorn and condemnation at home, it is issuing a mea culpa. On Nov. 1, Smith and Carlos will be inducted into the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed because of their "character, conduct and off-field contributions," as well as their athletic achievements. "It sends the message that maybe we had to go back in time and make some conscious decisions about whether we were right or wrong," Carlos told USA TODAY Sports on Monday, after the 2019 class was announced."They've come to the conclusion that, 'Hey man, we were wrong. We were off-base in terms of humanity relative to the human rights era.' " Smith and Carlos were two of the best American athletes in their day. Smith won gold in the 200 meters at the 1968 Olympics, setting a world record that would stand for 11 years, while Carlos was the bronze medalist. At home, however, their country was in turmoil. The civil rights movement had forced Americans to take a hard look at who we were as a country, and the answer was often disappointing. The noble promise of all citizens being equal had been exposed as a lie, with segregation and discrimination sowing hate and bitter distrust. Then, six months before the Mexico City Games, the Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Robert Kennedy was killed two months later. Anger, indignation and fear raged across the country. The Olympics are supposed to be devoid of politics, the quest to go faster, higher and stronger transcending our divisions. But athletes are human before all else, Carlos said. You cannot celebrate the individual spirit while at the same time demanding it be ignored. "You have to realize this: You can't ever sign a waiver to disregard the fact you're involved in the human race," he said. "How can you disassociate yourself from the issues of human rights?" So as they stood on the medals podium and the Star-Spangled Banner played, Smith and Carlos bowed their heads and raised a black-gloved fist - Smith his right, Carlos his left. Both had taken off their shoes. The gesture is now iconic. At the time, however, it was seen by many as an outrage. They were kicked out of the Olympics and suspended from the U.S. team. Whatever endorsements and commercial opportunities their medals would have brought disappeared. There were even death threats. But history eventually has a way of putting things right, and so it is with Smith and Carlos. No one disputes the racism and social injustice that were so prevalent then, or the indignities it caused. Smith and Carlos are now seen as noble in their cause, leaders in the struggle for civil rights. Their alma mater, San Jose State, erected a statue of them in 2005. In 2016, they accompanied the U.S. team to the White House after the Rio Olympics. "It's great when an individual (goes) from the most hated individual in society and then becomes formative icons in society," Carlos said. "Then everyone wants to be attached to that history." It's instructive, too. Despite the passage of 50 years, the issues that led Smith and Carlos to bow their heads and raise their fists rage on. We are still not a society of equals, and we have a president and other political leaders who demonize people for the color of their skin, their gender and their religion. Like Smith and Carlos did, athletes are using their platforms to call attention to society's ills. When hammer thrower Gwen Berry and fencer Race Imboden won golds at the Pan-American Games last month, they protested during their medal ceremonies. The USOPC could have responded harshly, given that Berry and Imboden had signed the standard agreement promising not to make political displays during Olympic-type events. But it chose instead to put the athletes on probation, perhaps recognizing as Smith and Carlos did all those years ago that some things are more precious than medals. "Just tell everybody thanks for the acknowledgment," Carlos said, "and the fight goes on." -Nancy Armour

Split Image

""ON THE MORNING of Jan. 17, 2014, Madison Holleran awoke in her dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania. She had spent the previous night watching the movie The Parent Trap with her good friend Ingrid Hung. Madison went to class. She took a test. She told a few friends she would meet them later that night at the dining hall. She went to the Penn bookstore and bought gifts for her family. While she was there, her dad called. "Maddy, have you found a therapist down there yet?" he asked. "No, but don't worry, Daddy, I'll find one," she told him. But she had no intention of finding one. In fact, she was, at that exact moment, buying the items she would leave for her family at the top of a parking garage. Godiva chocolates for her dad. Two necklaces for her mom. Gingersnaps for her grandparents, who always had those cookies in their home. Outfits for her nephew, Hayes, who had been born two weeks earlier. The Happiness Project for Ingrid, with a note scribbled inside. And a picture of herself as a young kid, holding a tennis racket. Over winter break she had told her dad that she was borrowing that picture, that she needed it for something. She didn't say what. Then, on the evening of Jan. 17, just after dusk settled on the city, Madison took a running leap off the ninth level of a parking garage in downtown Philadelphia. She was 19 years old. Life, Instagrammed The Instagram account of Madison Holleran seemed to show a successful and happy college freshman. But behind the scenes, the University of Pennsylvania track athlete was struggling with her mental health. MADISON LOVED QUOTES. Sometimes she took a picture of the words, spotted in a magazine, and posted the image on social media. Other times she wrote down the quote -- in beautiful script, to be framed -- so she could revisit the sentiment anytime she wanted. She loved to draw, write in her journal and read. She enjoyed long runs, singing in the car, sushi, and bananas with peanut butter. She also loved her big New Jersey family. She was especially close with her dad, whom she called "Big Jimbo." He was her biggest fan. He came to her soccer games and track meets, always wrapping her in a hug afterward. He believed she could do anything. Family and friends used to joke that whenever they opened the Bergen Record, they saw a picture of Madison, another athletic feat captured in print: so many goals scored, so many track meets won. Life seemed good; life was good. Then Madison left for college. She had decided to run track at Penn, only two hours from home, but it felt like a foreign land to her. Everything seemed to change. Running had once made her feel alive, but at Penn she couldn't breathe. Her friends had once made everything better; now they just couldn't understand. EVERYONE IN MADISON'S LIFE holds a piece of her story, possesses a clue: a text message, a vacant look, a deleted Instagram post. In the days after she died, the people who knew her best converged on Allendale, New Jersey, her hometown; siblings (one brother, three sisters), parents (Jim and Stacy), high school friends, college classmates -- all offered their shattered piece to see whether they could rebuild Madison. It was as if they hoped she might be breathed back to life. As if they might then do and say the things they hadn't known she needed. Madison was beautiful, talented, successful -- very nearly the epitome of what every young girl is supposed to hope she becomes. But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly. She was a deep thinker, someone who was aware of the image she presented to the world, and someone who often struggled with what that image conveyed about her, with how people superficially read who she was, what her life was like. Photos from Madison's Facebook and Instagram completely concealed her reality. From right: Facebook; Instagram; LetsRun.com THE LIFE MADISON projected on her own Instagram feed was filled with shots that seemed to confirm everyone's expectations: Of course she was loving her first year of college. Of course she enjoyed running. Her mom remembers looking at a photo on her feed and saying, "Madison, you look like you're so happy at this party." "Mom," Madison said. "It's just a picture." Everyone presents an edited version of life on social media. People share moments that reflect an ideal life, an ideal self. Hundreds of years ago, we sent letters by horseback, containing only what we wanted the recipient to read. Fifty years ago, we spoke via the telephone, sharing only the details that constructed the self we wanted reflected. With Instagram, one thing has changed: the amount we consume of one another's edited lives. Young women growing up on Instagram are spending a significant chunk of each day absorbing others' filtered images while they walk through their own realities, unfiltered. In a recent survey conducted by the Girl Scouts, nearly 74 percent of girls agreed that other girls tried to make themselves look "cooler than they are" on social networking sites. No image captures the paradoxes of Madison's Instagram account more than the one she posted just an hour before jumping off the parking garage. Holiday lights are twinkling in the trees of Rittenhouse Square, and Madison put a filter on the image that produced an ethereal quality, almost as if the night is underwater. She seemed acutely aware that the life she was curating online was distinctly different from the one she was actually living. Yet she could not apply that same logic when she looked at the projected lives of others. Before going home for winter break, she asked Ingrid, who was also struggling at Penn, "What are you going to say when you go home to all your friends? I feel like all my friends are having so much fun at school." She and Ashley Montgomery, a friend and track teammate, followed a group of Penn upperclassmen on Instagram. They would scroll through pictures and say to each other, "This is what college is supposed to be like; this is what we want our life to be like." Madison's high school friends had told her they were also struggling. Emma Sullivan was running track at Boston College and having a hard time. Another friend, Jackie Reyneke, was playing basketball at Princeton and feeling overwhelmed. They had all shared some form of their struggles with Madison, yet in her mind, the lives her friends were projecting on social media trumped the reality they were privately sharing. This confused them, and it still does. Checking Instagram is like opening a magazine to see a fashion advertisement. Except an ad is branded as what it is: a staged image on glossy paper. Instagram is passed off as real life. Yes, people filter their photos to make them prettier. People are also often encouraged to put filters on their sadness, to brighten their reality so as not to "drag down" those around them. The myth still exists that happiness is a choice, which perpetuates the notion of depression as weakness. Life must be Instagrammed -- in more ways than one. The first time Jim Holleran realized his daughter was struggling was when she refused to come with him to the US Open, an annual tradition. Instagram MADISON ONCE POSTED a picture collage of her dad on Instagram with the caption, "Happy Father's Day to Big Jimbo, the greatest man I've ever known and ever will know. Love you with all my heart Daddio." Every summer they attended the U.S. Open, the last of the tennis grand slams. Madison loved watching the best female players, occasionally wondering aloud whether she could have played tennis at the highest level. "Of course you could," Jim said. The first inkling he had that his daughter wasn't doing well at Penn was when she refused to come with him to Flushing Meadows, site of the U.S. Open, just after the start of her freshman year. She said she was too swamped with schoolwork and practice. He offered to drive down to Philly from Allendale, a four-hour round trip, just so she could get a break from what he sensed had become a high-pressure environment. But Jim didn't press her. "I should have just driven down there and gotten her," he says, letting the sentence trail off. Madison's older sister Ashley had started college at Penn State just two years before. She was unhappy, so she transferred to Alabama, where life improved. Jim and Stacy thought Madison must be going through something similar. A change of scenery was what she needed. An easy fix like that and Madison would continue her upward trajectory. "This is normal," her sister Carli told her. "People leave home, they're unhappy, they transfer -- they figure it out." Madison shook her head: "It's not normal. It's not normal to feel like this." She started seeing a therapist during Thanksgiving break and would continue seeing the woman through winter break. The closest Madison came to a diagnosis was "battling anxiety." "There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that happened when she was younger, growing up, that makes sense of the decision she made," Stacy says. "Am I angry at her? Yes, of course I am." Everyone now agrees that Madison was depressed, though she had never previously exhibited symptoms. (Depression exists on Jim's side of the family.) Something had changed with her brain chemistry. She was not seeing the world in the same way she had before. She had lost weight too, had become so thin as to appear sick. The day before Madison returned to Penn for spring semester, she had a session with her therapist that Jim also attended. She admitted to having suicidal thoughts. "If you have suicidal thoughts, don't act them out," her doctor said. "Either call me or call someone in your family." Madison nodded. As a family, they had never talked about suicide. Jim never considered it a real possibility -- just the dramatic ending to someone else's story. As Carli explains: "Other people battle depression for years. With Madison, it feels like one day she was happy, the next she was sad and the day after she was gone." Jim feared that speaking about suicide would make its likelihood greater. He didn't raise the subject as he and Madison drove back to Philadelphia. Bill Schmitz Jr., former president of the American Association of Suicidology, points out that depression does not have a one-size-fits-all prognosis. "The course varies," he says. "In a way, it's the same as cancer. For some, we might prolong life for months, for years. For others, it can be very sudden." Jim drove Madison back to Philadelphia on Jan. 11. As they approached the exit off I-95, he offered to keep driving, to put Philly in the rearview mirror, to drive south, to the University of North Carolina or Vanderbilt University -- to somewhere, anywhere. She could enroll at a new school, start over. "Let's just keep driving," he said. "Let's enroll you somewhere else." She shook her head. She had promised to meet friends at a Penn basketball game. As he left his daughter that evening, Jim remembers looking at Madison and thinking, She's still not happy; that's not a happy kid I'm walking away from. A few days later, at the start of the spring semester, Stacy and Mackenzie, Madison's youngest sister, drove to Philadelphia to join Madison for a meeting with Steve Dolan, the head track coach at Penn. Madison had told Ingrid she was planning to quit the team. The three Hollerans walked into Dolan's office. Madison pulled out a letter she had written outlining why she wanted to quit. "I need to figure out if track is making me unhappy, or Penn, or if it's something else," she read from the letter. She also spoke of struggling with the training (at that point, she was being coached by an assistant, not Dolan) and with the dorm she was in. She talked about wanting to join a sorority. Dolan listened patiently, but the news surprised him. Madison seemed to have lost perspective, was seeing through a blurred lens, like some kind of dysmorphia. She had excelled in school (GPA of 3.5) and in track during the first semester, despite her constant fears that she was failing at both. To Dolan, she had appeared happy and content. "I support you, and I want you to be happy and healthy," Dolan said. "The decision is yours. Do you not want to keep training, keep running?" Ivy League track is demanding. Madison wasn't the first runner to tell Dolan she might quit. He saw a college freshman in transition, struggling to find her place. Madison folded the letter and put it away. "Yes, I do," she said after a pause. "I want to keep running." Later that week, Madison heard that another member of the track team had quit. "I can't believe that," she said longingly. "I really can't." As they walked out of Dolan's office, Stacy said, "He is one fabulous coach." They walked to Ingrid's dorm room, where Madison told her friend about the meeting, her voice lighter than anyone had heard in months. "I drove home feeling pretty good," Stacy says. "I thought she was actually getting better, or starting to. She seemed better, in my mind anyway. But now I know that she was putting on an act that week." The Hollerans are most interested in sharing Madison's life -- DVDs of her soccer highlights and, shown here, newspaper stories that covered her track meets. Courtesy Holleran Family MADISON SPENT WINTER break at home, in Allendale. Over the holiday, she went to her friend Emma Sullivan's house. Emma was one of her best friends; the two spoke more intimately, more deeply, than they did with others, sharing the fears they had about growing up and leaving home. "HER MOST PRESSING THOUGHT: IF SHE QUIT, WASN'T SHE JUST A FAILURE?" - She sat at the kitchen table with Emma and her mom. Snow fell heavily outside, sheets of white streaming outside the window. The three women sat there for hours. "Why are you not as happy as you used to be?" Emma asked. "Tell us how you're feeling," Emma's mom urged. Madison was unable to identify exactly what had cast her adrift. Was it the disappointment with Penn, once her dream school? Was she homesick? Was track overwhelming her? And the most pressing thought of all: If she quit, wasn't she just a failure? Wouldn't that be the first in what would become a lifetime of letdowns? Madison had always struggled to handle even garden-variety failure. She chased perfection. Once, when a track result wasn't what she expected, she broke down in tears. Outsiders thought she was so gifted she could just show up and run faster than everyone, not knowing how hard she prepared and trained. Madison kept her eyes down while sitting at the kitchen table. Emma remembers feeling that her best friend was lost -- just so lost. Like everyone in Madison's life, Emma urged her to transfer from Penn. "Yeah, it's kind of too late," Madison told Emma. "I'm already at Penn." She said this as if she were locked in a room, the key thrown away. That winter break, Madison wanted to keep her circle of seven friends close. They watched movies together. They slept over at one another's houses. And on the final night of break, they got together for a potluck dinner. (Madison brought store-bought sugar cookies; typically, she would have baked.) They called the night "The Last Supper" because, in the morning, the first among them would leave for the start of spring semester. As the evening ended, Madison said, "Love you, see you soon!" as if they'd all see one another in a few weeks, maybe over spring break, maybe sooner. Later, she sent a text message to Ingrid, a picture of the seven high school friends, arms around one another. "These are the types of friends we need to find at Penn," she said. Lincoln Agnew for ESPN The Magazine THE NIGHT OF Jan. 17 was chilly, but not unseasonably so. Madison walked the streets of the city, wearing jeans, a sweater and a coat. She carried a shopping bag filled with the goodbye gifts for her family. For a while, she responded to friends on iMessage. Then she stopped. Just after the sun went down, Madison began walking toward the parking garage at the corner of 15th Street and Spruce. "Madison?" came a voice from across the street. Lehigh soccer coach Eric Lambinus was standing on the street with assistant coach Amy Hough. The pair had recruited Madison out of high school, but at the last minute she chose Penn. The coaches were standing outside a restaurant. Eric waved to Madison, and she crossed the street toward them. "How are you?" he asked. Madison mentioned that she was cutting back on track but said otherwise everything was fine. Eric had heard through mutual friends that she was unhappy at Penn, but nothing appeared out of the ordinary. "What's in the bag?" he asked. "Some presents for my family," she said. After a few minutes, Eric told Madison: "Just know there are doors open for you still. There are opportunities." The coach needed to be careful with his words. He didn't want to appear to be poaching another school's student-athlete, but he also wanted to convey to Madison that if she wanted to start the transfer process, to play soccer at Lehigh as she had considered doing out of high school, that option was available. Madison had been one of the best prep soccer players in the state, winning two state titles with Northern Highlands. Madison thanked him. The two said goodbye. She walked away, toward the parking garage. Eric immediately called his wife to tell her about running into Madison, about what a coincidence it was. Perhaps the meeting was serendipitous, he thought. A block away, Madison began climbing the nine flights of stairs. When she reached the top, she placed the bag of gifts where it would easily be found. And a few minutes later -- maybe as few as five or as many as 15 -- she hurdled the silver-colored railing. She landed in the bike lane. A woman who did not see her fall stayed with her until an ambulance arrived. The woman believed Madison had passed out, perhaps drunk. Madison did not look like she had jumped from a building. She looked like she was asleep, the only scratch on her a small one, just above her eye. When Eric walked out of the restaurant a little over an hour later, he heard the wail of police cars and ambulances. Something had happened down the street. He walked the other way to avoid the commotion. "I've gone over that night probably 100 times in my mind," he says. "I wish I had spent a little more time with her, but really nothing seemed out of the ordinary." More than two hours after Madison jumped, at 9 p.m., Stacy received a call from the 215 area code. Even before she picked up, she felt unsettled. "Is Madison OK?" she said. It was Steve Dolan. He told Stacy something was wrong with Madison and he would find out more details and get back to her. Frightened, Stacy called some of Madison's friends at Penn. First on her list was Ingrid. "Where is Madison?" Stacy asked. "Have you seen her?" "No, I haven't, but we were supposed to eat dinner together tonight." "Something is wrong," Stacy said. Ingrid ran the quarter of a mile from her dorm room to Madison's, calling her friend's roommate on the way. The information to that point was limited: Nobody could find Madison. None of it made sense. Ingrid had just seen her friend that morning, and she had seemed the same as any other day. Ingrid burst into Madison's dorm room -- her friend left the door unlocked. Every other time she'd been there, Madison's bed was unmade, clothes draped across the chair. As Ingrid looked around, alarm bells went off in her mind. Madison's bed was crisply made. Within minutes, campus officials were in the room and Ingrid was back on the phone with her friend's mom, who had received a call from the chaplain. "She's gone," Stacy said. No one can say for sure why Madison chose that specific parking garage. Maybe it doesn't matter. Or maybe it does. Maybe comfort exists in believing there is order in the world, even when someone is making the most disorderly decision we know: running toward death instead of away from it. In their absence, we're left trying to pin meaning to air. Nine stories of air. Madison's last Instagram photo, posted an hour before she took her own life. Instagram PHILLY IS THE City of Murals. Hundreds of buildings are covered in artwork. There is art on the parking garage from which Madison jumped. On the south side of the structure, on the wall facing Spruce, is a small installation. Quotes, fragments of thoughts, are stenciled in white against a black background, like chalk on a blackboard. The most evocative phrase reads, "She had wings on." The wall looks like the rubble, the stacked words from poems never published. She had wings on. Madison left a suicide note that began, "I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out, and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in." Previously, in her journal, she had written "Help!" at the top of one page, followed at the bottom by "No, no more help." She also left a copy of the young adult book Reconstructing Amelia, which tells the story of a devastated single mother who pieces together clues about the death of her daughter, who supposedly killed herself by jumping off a building at her prep school. In the book, nothing is as it seems. And at the end, the mother discovers that Amelia didn't jump; she was pushed. Jim cannot bring himself to read the book. "Sometimes it's hard to tell how fast the current's moving until you're headed over a waterfall," the author writes. Madison seemed to see a version of herself in Amelia, in the perfectly crafted veneer that never felt like an honest reflection of her interior life. As though she could never find validation for her struggle because how could someone so beautiful, so seemingly put together, be unhappy? This is illogical, of course. Like thinking a computer's hard drive can't malfunction simply because the screen hasn't a scratch. The day after Madison jumped, Jim walked to the top of the parking garage. He read the phrase, She had wings on. He spoke with Madison's friends. He compiled clues. Then he stopped. He could spend his life trying, in vain, to make his child whole again, he thought. Or he could work to keep others from breaking apart. The Hollerans are trying now to deliver a new message: It's OK to not be OK. It's OK to show people you're not OK. ASHLEY MONTGOMERY IS now a sophomore at Penn, and she still runs track. When she was a freshman, she and Madison would train together; the two were also close away from the sport. For Ashley, sophomore year has gone much better than freshman year, and she often thinks to herself, If only Maddy were around to feel this, to be here. Freshman year of college can be like running an obstacle course wearing a blindfold. Nothing prepares you for how hard the workouts will be, how long they last, what each class will be like, which events are fun and which should be avoided. Once, as she and Ashley ran through the Penn campus, Madison spotted a quote on the side of a building, part of a mural. She stopped to take a picture. Then she uploaded the image to Instagram. A few hours later, when Ashley went to Instagram to see the picture, the image was gone. Madison had deleted it. After Madison died, Ashley went running, hoping to find the mural that had caught the attention of her friend. She couldn't. "We all shared what we knew, and some things were answered," Ashley says. "But we could only do so much. The puzzle will never be complete." THE TOP OF the parking garage slopes upward. There is a wall, then a silver-colored railing. Because Madison landed out in the street, her friends and family are convinced she took a running leap over the side, clearing the barrier just like she once cleared hurdles on the track. At first glance, a running leap off a nine-story building makes little sense. Why not something that seems gentler, easier? (Whatever that means.) Maybe this is because all we can think about, standing at great heights, is the moment of impact, the violence of a falling body hitting concrete. This is exactly what Jim thought of when he went to the top of the parking garage on Jan. 18, 2014, the morning after -- peering over the railing and wondering what that final moment, the impact, must have felt like for his daughter. Emma hasn't made sense of the act, or the method, but says if forced to make sense of it -- and Madison has forced her to do so -- she can maybe understand why Madison chose jumping. "If you run and jump, it's freeing -- to just do that. You just jump and it happens. And it's over with. And you don't have to struggle. I can picture her walking up there and just setting her mind to it and knowing it could happen -- that's something I can see her doing. When she gets on that line in track, it's like, 'I'm doing this.' She was always so determined, with everything that she did. Maybe even too determined sometimes." "WITH MADISON, IT FEELS LIKE ONE DAY SHE WAS HAPPY, THE NEXT SHE WAS SAD AND THE DAY AFTER SHE WAS GONE." - CARLI, MADISON'S SISTER In high school, Emma and Madison talked about what life would be like as they grew older. (Most of Madison's friends said she rarely spoke of the future with them.) What it would be like to get married, have a family. Both were scared of growing up. Madison never even got her driver's license. "We were both so fearful of what was to come," Emma says. "The way her mind worked, it threw her off when she didn't know what the next step was, or what the future would hold. Knowing the end result was something she always wanted." But maybe Madison had stopped projecting into the future. Maybe picturing the concrete at the base of the parking garage was as impossible as imagining herself in old age. Maybe she could only imagine the freedom of flying." -ESPN

Talent. A Football Scholarship. Then Crushing Depression.

A promising wide receiver hit rock bottom with mental illness and is among a number of college athletes learning about, and dealing with, depression. Something was wrong. He could sense it. The feeling had been stalking him for months. The lights were off in his bedroom, and the darkness closed in on him. Isaiah Renfro, a top freshman wide receiver at the University of Washington, was at his home in South Los Angeles. He had to leave in the morning for spring practice, which was about to start in Seattle. But he could tell: Another storm was coming, a gale of anxiety and depression. He slammed his suitcase shut and stood near his bed, steeling for a struggle that he was never sure he could win. He breathed hard, and tried to stay on his feet. Now the tempest was upon him. All the pressure. The worries. Football. Family. The feeling that he could never measure up. He saw only one way out. He went to the kitchen, careful not to wake his mother or little sister. From the refrigerator, he took a bottle of vodka. In a medicine cabinet, he found some Dilaudid, a powerful opioid painkiller he had used after an injury. He poured the pills into one hand. With the other he drank the vodka. He washed down one pill after another, pill after pill after pill. Marc Stein's Newsletter Marc Stein has covered Jordan. He's covered Kobe. And LeBron vs. the Warriors. Go behind the N.B.A.'s curtain with basketball's foremost expert. SIGN UP ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story He typed a note on his iPhone: "If I die before I wake, I pray to the Lord my momma straight, there is always food on my sister's plate." Back in his bedroom, he lay his head against a pillow and waited. "It is time," he said to himself. "It is time to leave this world. It is time. It is time." You have 3 free articles remaining. Subscribe to The Times • • • Maybe you have never heard of Isaiah Renfro. He did not start at the University of Washington, nor did he play in the N.F.L. But you should know his struggle. There are scores like him, young athletes on college campuses grappling with mental illness — a crisis that is only now getting serious attention. What experts know is this: Recent studies place suicide as the third leading cause of death for college athletes, behind motor vehicle accidents and medical issues. And nearly 25 percent of college athletes who participated in a widely touted 2016 study led by researchers at Drexel University displayed signs of depressive symptoms. Editors' Picks Ralph Ellison's Letters Offer the Pleasures of Big Ideas and Everyday Life Paris Might Be the Best City for Italian Food (Outside Italy) A Deep-Sea Magma Monster Gets a Body Scan Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Since that percentage is roughly in line with the general college population, the findings countered a long-held belief that athletes are less likely than their peers to become depressed — largely because they benefit from regular, emotion-lifting exercise. As the stigma of mental illness has eased, the reporting of cases has increased. But experts also believe that young athletes now face more stress, which contributes to mental illness, than ever before. "Performance and parental pressure, social media, more games on TV, more players who think they can go to the pros," said Timothy Neal, the director of athletic training education at Concordia University in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a nationally recognized expert on mental health and college sports. The N.C.A.A. is playing catch-up. "We are still so young in addressing this," said Brian Hainline, a neurologist who in 2013 became the N.C.A.A.'s first chief medical officer. He cited increasing concern not only about depression, but also about bipolar, eating, anxiety and attention deficit disorders, as well as addiction. "Mental health is our single most important priority." What happened to Isaiah Renfro seemed to be a result of this combustible mix, where brain chemistry meets the burdens of reaching success and then maintaining it. He was hardly alone in his struggle. A descent from the pinnacle of college football Isaiah was fast and strong. Bush Hamdan, Washington's offensive coordinator, said he marveled at the sight of the young wide receiver sprinting across the field as a freshman. "Size, speed, physicality, he checked off all the boxes." Image At Washington in 2015, Isaiah Renfro tried to haul in a pass in a game against Washington State.Credit...Sean Brown/Cal Sport Media, via Associated Press If everything had gone according to plan, Isaiah would have been a senior for the Huskies this season. Hamdan could imagine him in a leading role on the current team, which is ranked among the best in college football. "Even when I look at our roster now," he said, "there is a big hole there, a great big hole. Because Isaiah was that talented." ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story He had been one of Coach Chris Petersen's first recruits, and the Huskies awarded him a full athletic scholarship. But from his initial moment on campus, in the summer of 2015, he did not feel right. Part of the reason was the grueling slog of practice: the long hours, the intense workouts and the interminable team meetings — day after day, week after week. He had little time to gain a sense of his surroundings. From his dorm to Husky Stadium, he walked a slightly uphill path. He was so sore it felt as if he were climbing a mountain. "Culture shock," he told friends back in Los Angeles. He knew he would be playing elite college football. "But all of a sudden," he said, he was "part of this big machine." It made him feel like a cog. He nonetheless cast aside his growing anguish and melancholy and showed striking prowess for an 18-year-old. Instead of holding him out for a season, a common approach for freshmen so they can learn the rigors of major-college football, the coaches played him right away. He had a breakout performance in a victory against Arizona. On his second catch, he broke three tackles and picked up 10 extra yards. "Isaiah Renfro in the red zone! Impressive!" Petersen told reporters. Winter approached. Isaiah joked and smiled to hide his darkening mood. He feared his coaches and teammates would think he was weak. He had always been a good student, and among the smartest players on any of his teams. But now he did not let on that while studying he often found himself sitting frozen in front of his laptop, his head spinning with so many thoughts he could not hold on to any of them. Or that on the field there were times when he would run to the line of scrimmage, unable to recall what his quarterback had just told him to do. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Image As a freshman at the University of Washington in 2015. From his initial moments on campus, he didn't feel right.Credit...Jesse Beals/Associated Press He confided to his mother that he felt awful. Her response, thinking he was merely homesick, was: Buck up. He could not. While in Tempe, for a game against Arizona State, a sense of deep fear, anguish and guilt seized him. He locked himself in his hotel bathroom. He punched a mirror with all his strength, to see how much he could feel. He would remember feeling nothing. The next afternoon, he caught three passes for 30 yards. A week later, the Huskies took a five-hour bus ride to Corvallis, Ore., to play Oregon State. He and his girlfriend had argued, and he felt as if his blood were ablaze. On the bus, he felt dizzy. He closed his eyes and blacked out, he said. Nobody noticed. He woke up just as the Huskies reached their hotel. Over the phone to his mother, his voice sounded flat and distant. It had been that way for too long, and she realized Isaiah's problem had to be more than homesickness. Worried, she reached out to a sports psychologist in Washington's athletic department. Isaiah began meeting with her. He told her about his deepest emotions. Together, they focused on why he was playing football. Was he doing it for himself? Or because excelling on the gridiron was something others expected and wanted of him? Once, he went into a private room near her office and cried. The therapy helped. He told his mother that the sessions were keeping his life from crumbling. What he didn't tell her was that he had begun to have suicidal thoughts. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Hamdan recalled December of that season, the weeks before a bowl game against Southern Mississippi, when he first began to realize how badly Isaiah was struggling. "You'd look at him," Hamdan said, "and he just seemed vacant." Still, neither Hamdan nor any of the other coaches knew the depths of Isaiah's despair. One morning, walking in the wet, gloomy darkness, Isaiah saw a city bus across from Husky Stadium. What if he threw himself in front of it? he recalled thinking. Would he die? He hoped so. A tumultuous childhood yields to stardom Named for the Old Testament prophet of salvation, Isaiah was born and raised in Los Angeles. His parents, Chieko Woods and Barry Renfro, split up when he was 18 months old. For the rest of his childhood, he bounced between them, living in neighborhoods that ranged from the middle-class suburbs of north L.A. to the city's more impoverished south. Football steadied him. His father remembered teaching 2-year-old Isaiah hand-eye coordination by tossing miniature footballs to him and backing up a step every time he caught one with confidence. By junior high, he was the fastest, the toughest and the most coordinated player in his youth football league. Yet he was also sensitive and anxious. Image In a childhood photo.Credit...Chieko Woods Image Isaiah was one of the toughest and most skillful players in his youth football league.Credit...Chieko Woods He suffered terrible night terrors into his years as a toddler. In junior high, he bit his fingernails to the nub. By the start of high school, he battled a constant upset stomach, which worsened whenever he felt the pressure of a looming game. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story "If he wasn't playing well, or if he played well and the team lost," Chieko Woods recalled, "he took everything just so hard." That included his relationship with his hard-charging father. "My dad was a football coach first with me," Isaiah would say when he tried to understand his anguish. "Anything he didn't accomplish, he wanted me to accomplish. He played football and didn't make it to the N.F.L., so my football was basically his life." At first, his father said, he did not want Isaiah to play tackle football at all. But after Isaiah announced he wanted to make it to Division I football in college and then move to the pros, he supported his son with extra coaching and prodding, running his boy through drills and spending what little extra money he had on tutors to hone Isaiah's skills. "You've got to get some kind of pressure, some kind of push, if you want to play D-I football or pro football," said Barry Renfro, who played at Miami of Ohio in the 1990s. "I had visions of me playing in the N.F.L. I didn't make it to the Promised Land, but I know how to get there and I know what it takes. He got pushed to a degree, but it was hardly nothing tyrannical or nothing crazy." By the time he was a high school senior, Isaiah had come to pride himself on being strong: The kid without a weakness, the savior of others. Zay, as he became known, was smart and witty. He was 6-foot-2 and had a wide, expressive face. He loved art and fashion. His friends were diverse: white and black, Asian and Latino, rich and poor. "The guy just had it all," Brock Bell, one of his football teammates, said. "On the outside, always so happy. Carefree. It looked like he was so comfortable in his own skin." Yet there were cracks. Few knew that his charisma could fade when he was alone. Sometimes he fled to his room, silent and sad to the marrow. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story At the time, he was living with his father. They argued bitterly, prompting Isaiah to move in with classmates. His sadness became more intense. He vowed never to speak to his father again. He vowed, too, that one day he would play in the N.F.L. and have the means to move his mother and half sister out of the blighted neighborhood they lived in as they struggled financially. His drive resulted in injuries. He ripped a meniscus and wrenched his back. During the first half of one game, he rammed his head so hard into a tackler's knee that he had trouble remembering the rest of the night. A friend urged him to sit out for a while. But he refused. "Who else is going to play my part?" he said. "Who else is going to carry the team? Who else?" Mark Serve, the offensive coordinator for Sierra Canyon School, where Isaiah played high school ball, recalled an outburst the normally unruffled wide receiver had after an opposing team taunted him with racial insults in a game. At halftime, he fell apart, blaming himself for letting his teammates down and raging at the opposing players. "Did you hear what they're saying?" Isaiah shouted, tears flowing, when Serve confronted him. "Did you hear? Why are they calling me that? Why? I'm not going to take it anymore!" ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Serve, who is black and Latino, understood Isaiah's anger. But because of Isaiah's usual composure, the response seemed outsized, frenetic, unhinged. "Looking back on it now," Serve said, "I wonder about that moment. Was that a sign? What, exactly, did we miss?" Image Isaiah Woods, formerly Renfro, put out a hand to feel a sudden downpour as he waited to welcome guests to a university sports function in April.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times From a hospital bed, reminders of the past Isaiah first tried to kill himself shortly after Christmas in 2015. He swallowed leftover pills that University of Washington Medical Center records show were Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication. They were not strong enough to do the job. He felt dizzy and sick to his stomach, but somehow, a few hours later, he trudged somberly off to practice. That day, he crossed a threshold that psychologists say is dangerous: Going from thinking about suicide to actually attempting it increased the chances that another, more lethal attempt would follow. Isaiah soldiered through the Seattle winter. In March, during a break, he went home to his mother's house in Los Angeles. It was there that he drank the vodka, there that he swallowed the Dilaudid, there that he lay on his bed and told himself it was finally time to leave this world. "It is time. It is time." But hours later, he woke up. He wrote on his cellphone: "You're alive. "I'm not supposed to be here." He told no one what he had done. He still felt a duty to his team. He returned to Seattle, determined to endure. But there were signs he would not make it. Rob Scheidegger, head trainer for the Huskies, noticed. "This wasn't the happy-go-lucky-seeming kid who I had met earlier in the year." ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story He decided to visit Isaiah in his dorm room. There was nothing on the walls. No photos. No posters. The curtains were closed. The room reminded Scheidegger of a cave. Isaiah stood near the door. He moved and spoke slowly. Scheidegger told him to reach out to the athletic department psychologist. He did. But by dawn, another storm seized him. "I need to go to the hospital," he remembered telling the psychologist over the phone. "I need to go now." Image Credit... At the hospital, a doctor wrote on his intake form: "Suicidal ideation, worsened recently by life stressors." Isaiah had "a plan, along with means to carry out this plan (prescription anxiety and depression medications)." He was assigned a room in the psychiatric unit. "In there by myself, cut off from the world, I felt like a crazy person,'' Isaiah recalled. "I mean, I had to face it: I was really in a psych ward." His days were filled with rest, contemplation and therapy. Doctors told him that the mental illness he struggled against was not his fault, that depression and anxiety had deep biological roots, which probably were affecting his brain chemistry. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Isaiah barely communicated with his parents. His emotions toward both, he said, were too raw. He also did not want his teammates to know where he was. He had long been able to keep his troubles from his coaches. But by now Coach Petersen knew. Through a spokesman, Petersen declined to be interviewed for this article, but several people said he had begun meeting regularly with his staff to discuss Isaiah and to make sure he was getting the help he needed. As much as he respected Petersen, Isaiah did not want to talk to him. Doing so would have reminded him of football — which he was trying to get away from. "Inside the hospital, I could think," Isaiah said. "I just finally had the space to do what I needed to do to heal." Sometimes he ambled along a tree-lined path on the hospital grounds. Husky Stadium loomed across the street. Image The view from the University of Washington Medical Center included Husky Stadium, which was situated nearby.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Spring practice was in full swing. He could hear the air horns that signaled drills. With each blast, he flinched. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story What he thought of most was quitting college and football, for good. Isaiah was back in Los Angeles with friends when he tweeted his decision. The tweet was from his heart and to the point. Zay Woods@WaveGodZay Been debating on posting this but this is me taking steps in the right direction to becoming myself again.. 1,730 6:05 PM - May 29, 2016 Twitter Ads info and privacy 739 people are talking about this A return home with eyes on a fresh start We met at Du-Par's, a venerable diner at the Original Farmers Market in Los Angeles. It was late February, just over two years since Isaiah Renfro had last stepped onto a football field. His smile was open and hopeful. He told me that he wanted to tell his story to ease the stigma of mental illness, especially for young black athletes like himself. Helping others soothed him. He still needed that. He recalled the jolt he had felt upon hearing the news that Washington State quarterback Tyler Hilinski had committed suicide just a few weeks previously. Isaiah had known Hilinski, who was also from Southern California. They had played in some of the same summer football leagues. Even though he was taking an antidepressant, he told me that coming home to Los Angeles had not unfolded the way he had hoped. A few weeks after returning, a judge granted Isaiah's petition to change his surname to Woods, his mother's maiden name, from Renfro. Meant to signal a fresh start, the change provided a boost, however short-lived. "I had no confidence in myself," Isaiah said. "I was just shattered. No self-belief to start moving forward." ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story He endured weeks and months of rudderless inactivity and doubts. He lived with his mother, but that, too, became a source of stress at times. It was hard not to feel he had let her down. There were long walks in the Los Angeles foothills and a job in an ice cream shop near Venice Beach, which forced him to be around people. Image Isaiah with his mother, Chieko Woods, at a football practice at Portland State.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times A big part of surviving was Madison Bickel, whom he met when she came to Los Angeles on a visit from college in Portland, Ore. Bright, ambitious and empathetic, she centered him. He told me they had begun talking about his future. Aside from catching a few televised minutes of the 2016 national championship semifinal between Washington and the University of Alabama, he had not paid attention to any sports since leaving Seattle. But football, he had come to realize, was still deeply a part of him. He missed the camaraderie. Missed the competition. Missed lining up against a defensive back, matching wits and physical skill. What if he went back to the game? He decided it would not be wise to return to the bright lights and the grind of a big-time school like Washington. Maybe Portland State, a team that played home games in front of a few thousand fans and had just gone winless for an entire season. Portland State, which occasionally played the best-known schools but was in a conference stocked with unheralded teams like the Southern Utah Thunderbirds. He loved the idea. He could join Madison. Maybe he could get back into the game he still loved, but with less stress. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Before long, he was back at Sierra Canyon, practicing under Coach Serve's watchful eye. At first, he felt tentative, but he also felt something good: He finally realized he needed to prove that he could handle stress and succeed. For himself. For no one else. A second, uneasy chance He sat on a leather chair in the small office of Bruce Barnum, the head coach at Portland State. He looked Barnum in the eye and unspooled his story. Image Portland State Coach Bruce Barnum welcomed his players' increase in concern about mental illness. "It used to be that kids never came to me about this stuff," he said.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Image Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Image Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times "He didn't hold back," Barnum said. "He told me about all the dark closets, all the difficulty he had experienced. His willingness to confront this stood out in a way that I'll never forget." Barnum had a keen sensitivity to the emotions of his players after two of them died in 2016: one from an overdose and another from a complication after a tonsillectomy. That same year, a player's child was killed in a car accident. The losses had cast a cloud over the team. But even apart from those terrible deaths, Barnum said he had seen an increase in concern about mental illness among his players. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story "It used to be that kids never came to me about this stuff," he said. "It did exist, but nobody wanted to talk about it. Now they are coming to me all the time with things that are serious — a handful in just the last few months." To Barnum, Isaiah was not just a significant talent; he was also someone who could be a beacon, proof to his team that mental illness could be tamed. "I will be paying attention if you come here," Barnum told Isaiah. "But I can't know everything. Come to me if you need help. I know where to get it." Isaiah accepted a full scholarship. He started college in time for three weeks of spring practice in March. I watched a lot of those practices. After two years off and all that he had gone through, he was not what he was at Washington, but there were flickers of it when he would acrobatically snatch the ball amid a thicket of defenders. Image Isaiah Woods on Portland State's campus in August.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Image Picking up his Portland State uniform.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Image At the university library, during a rough stretch over the summer.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Isaiah told me there were still times when he could feel stress gathering. But so far there had been no full-blown storms. "Progress," he said. "Yep, progress." He emerged as a leader. His fun-loving side was starting to show. He led his teammates in a music video. There he was, shirtless, dancing in the Portland State locker room, holding a boom box that blared the rap hit "I Bet You Won't" as other players leapt around him. Zay Woods@WaveGodZay Me: "Mom can I sleepover my friend's house?"Mom: "Hurry up and go before I change my mind!"Me: 2,584 4:07 PM - Jun 8, 2018 · Portland, OR Twitter Ads info and privacy 749 people are talking about this Word spread about what he had been through and his willingness to discuss it. It was not long before teammates came to him for advice on dealing with their own emotional and mental troubles, as Barnum had hoped. "Isaiah is so easy to talk to about stuff I normally wouldn't tell anybody," said one player, who confided to me his own struggles with depression. "It's easy because he will just listen and then come up with some wisdom.'' Yet one day over the summer, the tempest holding just off shore rumbled in. It came after his girlfriend's car broke down during a trip they took to Crater Lake. They were stranded for a while and got a hotel room, where panic suddenly tore through him. "Oh, my God, I thought I was doing better than this," he said, moaning. Madison tried holding him as he trembled. "I thought I was past this part," he told her. "I will never be able to beat it. I'll never beat it. It's just too much." ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Finally, he slept. When he awoke, his mind was blank, as if it were trying to push away the pain. A few days later, I asked Isaiah and Madison what had caused the panic attack. Isaiah said he could not be sure. Just as he could not be sure what had caused his underlying depression and anxiety in the first place. Image Madison Bickel kept a close eye on Woods as he went through a rough patch over the summer. He had suffered a panic attack, and was also weak and fatigued from a virus that had kept him from working out for nearly a month.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Madison chimed in, pointing out recent studies linking depression to concussions and the blows to the head common in football. It was something she worried about. But Isaiah said he did not. He said the studies were too new, too inconclusive. Besides, he figured, wide receivers get hit in the head far less than linemen or linebackers. What about Hilinski, the Washington State quarterback who had killed himself, the young player Isaiah had known? The autopsy showed signs of early-stage chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the condition that many researchers have linked to a host of health issues, including deep depression. Isaiah said he did not know about Hilinski's brain-study results. And he was resolute. "It is not going to stop me," he said. In August, weak and thin from a virus that had kept him from working out for nearly a month, he worked his way in once more with the team. A few practices in, he strained a ligament in his knee and was forced to the sideline for days more. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story He grew gloomy, convinced he was letting down his teammates, letting down the coaches who had given him a second chance. Saddled with growing despair, he began having trouble getting out of bed for morning treatments on his knee. Barnum noticed. He met with Isaiah in his office again. "There is no pressure here," Barnum recalled saying. "Even if you never play a snap for us, just having you here and seeing you graduate, seeing you keep learning about yourself, that'll be enough." He made sure Isaiah connected with counselors. It was an important step. Since leaving Seattle, Isaiah had refused to visit a psychologist. He had insisted he was strong enough to forge past tough times with willpower and a daily antidepressant. Now he began seeing a therapist again. "I'll have to manage it for the rest of my life," he said of his mental illness. "You see, it doesn't just go away like most people think." He paused and gathered his thoughts.

Before Kaepernick, The 'Syracuse 8' Were Blackballed By Pro Football

"They met in secret, away from their white coaches and teammates. "We used to meet at midnight," former Syracuse football player Dana Harrell says. "And we could have met earlier. But we used to meet at midnight, to lay out our thoughts and plans, just like the slaves." Harrell was one of nine college football players the international media would — incorrectly — call the "Syracuse 8." It was the late 1960s, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Bobby Kennedy. Dana and his black teammates didn't just see racial injustice. They lived it. And they wanted to do something about it. The Syracuse 8 held some of their secret meetings on campus. But whenever they were hungry, they went to Ben's Kitchen. They were all working-class kids from inner cities. And they talked about their plans over plates of barbecue chicken, collard greens and cornbread — among the prostitutes and hustlers and the nightly craps game. "For the people of color in the city, that was the place, that was the joint," says Abdullah Alif Muhammad, Dana's teammate, who back then was known as Al Newton. "When all the other places closed, that's the place where you would go to get something to eat." "And trust me there were no spies or infiltrators there," Dana says. Plans For A Boycott At the time, Syracuse was a nationally prominent football program. Dana and his teammates had inherited the proud legacy of Jim Brown, one of the greatest football players of all time, and Ernie Davis, who became the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy in 1961. Throughout the 1960s, Syracuse rode a wave of success, appearing in bowl games and filling the rosters of NFL teams. But the Syracuse 8 were considering something that would put their NFL careers in jeopardy: a boycott. And let's be clear about this: They all wanted to play. None of them had signed their letters of intent to Syracuse expecting to sit out. But there was a lot about their Syracuse experience they didn't anticipate. The Realities Of Being A Black Football Player At Syracuse It was a short ride from the airport to the university, but that's all it took to educate running back Greg Allen about the realities of being a black football player at Syracuse. Greg was driven to campus by the coach who recruited him. "We get in the car and we begin, you know, the small talk. You know, 'Greg, Gee, I'm glad you're here,' " he recalls. " 'We want you to have a good time while you're at Syracuse. We want you to get a good education. We want you to grow. We want you to have a great career as a football player. But the one thing we're gonna ask you to do is not date any white girls while you're here.' "It was a little bit of a shock for me, because I knew that I had traveled north of the Mason-Dixon Line, not below it." And there was more. Alif was a proud alum of Rindge Technical School with a near perfect math SAT score. He wanted to be an engineer, but ... "They wouldn't allow me to take a calculus course, a math course, because it was during football practice," he says. "And the only option was to take a calculus honors class. And the assumption was, 'You're a football player, what are you doing over here?' And I felt, kind of, insulted. And it was kind of like, you know, they wanted me to take general reading classes and general education classes. And it was like, 'Wait a minute — no, no, no, no, no, no. I didn't come here for that.' " "It's dehumanizing. My talents, my own personal desires and wishes and goals and dreams, take a back seat to this thing called race or racism." Greg Allen Greg Allen was told he couldn't be a biology major because he wouldn't have time for labs. But he says that policy didn't apply to white players. A Petition For Equal Access So, the Syracuse 8 drafted a petition asking the administration to give black and white players the same access to tutors and academic advisers. But most of the requests the group hashed out at Ben's Kitchen would benefit both black and white players. Take the team doctor: "Our medical doctor for our football team was a gynecologist by training," Greg says. Alif says the recommendation for every injury was ice and rest. More than that, Greg says the doctor was hesitant to touch black bodies. "You know, there were two sets of latex gloves. And anything that could be avoided, was avoided. You're at a major university, and at the time one of the best football programs in the country, and you don't think enough of your players to get them expert medical care." The next item on the list had to do with playing time. The big southern schools still weren't integrated. They wouldn't play against teams with black players. And Dana says, north of the "Cotton Curtain," schools followed unofficial rules about how many black players could be on the field at the same time. Even at home games. "You could have three outstanding halfbacks, but you wouldn't play them all together, because you didn't want the 'big money boosters' — that's what I call them — the big money boosters to accuse the program of going black," he says. "It's dehumanizing," Greg says. "My talents, my own personal desires and wishes and goals and dreams, take a back seat to this thing called race or racism." The players felt if the team had a black assistant coach, many of these issues would go away. But by the spring of 1970, they'd been asking their coaches to hire a black assistant for a year. It hadn't happened. Meanwhile, Greg Allen attended a meeting where a group of students and university leaders discussed starting a black studies program at Syracuse. 'You Can't Be Black And Be A Football Player' A couple days later, he got a call to meet with head football coach Ben Schwartzwalder. "So I walked into the coach's office, and I sat down, and he peered at me over his glasses," Greg says, "and he looked at me and he said, 'What's this I hear about you and this black crap?' " Greg started to explain his position, but he says the coach really wasn't listening. Syracuse head football coach Ben Schwartzwalder. (Courtesy Syracuse University Press) "So he looks me in the eye, and he said, 'Well then, you have a decision to make. You can't be black and be a football player.' Of course, I was a little taken back. I said, 'Well, coach, you know, I'm going to be black all my life. I'm only going to be a football player for a short period of time, but I don't see how one would interfere with the other.' " These were the issues Alif and Dana and Greg and the other black players talked about when they met at Ben's Kitchen. By the way, Greg liked it there, too. "Great soul food, so yeah, it was a good place," he says. For Greg and his teammates, Syracuse University was also a good place. There was no sense in transferring. They felt no other school would have been better or worse. So "we decided to stay and fight for the soul of this great university," Dana says. As spring approached, the players decided to appeal to the coach one more time. If they didn't see substantial efforts to address their grievances, they'd walk out of spring practice. Not a game or an alumni event — nothing that would put the program at risk. Just spring practice. "When we found out that, you know, the coach really wasn't going to meet our requests, we didn't show up for practice the next day," Greg says. "We knew if we had someone leak it to the press, that we would get the attention that we thought we deserved." 'No One Was Really Interested In Our Perspective' The players got that attention, but they soon discovered that they weren't in control of the narrative. The media seized on one of their requests in particular — that the school hire a black assistant coach. The other demands, the ones that would benefit everyone, they were forgotten. Greg says the papers labeled the Syracuse 8 as "black dissidents" or "black militants" or sometimes just "the blacks." "We were never asked any questions, or the media never contacted us to get any of our opinions," Greg says. "No one was really interested in our perspective." The nine members of the Syracuse 8 were suspended from the team. Some of their white teammates threatened to boycott if the black players were allowed back. Soon, Dana says, the chancellor's office was flooded with letters from alumni. " 'We want them off the team, we want their scholarships revoked,' " Dana recalls. "Some of them wanted us out of Syracuse University. They called us everything except a child of God, by the way. And they would put under their signature how much they contribute every year." A Lot To Lose "Some of the fans threatened to boycott the games if we were ever allowed to come back. Where have we heard that before?" Dana asks. He's referring to Colin Kaepernick. And like Colin Kaepernick, the Syracuse 8 had a lot to lose. Each was the first member of his family to go to college. And each was now risking his scholarship to stand up for what he believed in. Once the story hit the papers, Dana Harrell got a call from his father. "Well, the conversation went like this: I went on like a 19-, 20-year-old young person would do about — you know, because everything's so clear when you're 19 and 20 years old," Dana says. "About what was right and what was wrong and what I felt I had to do. And he let me get it all out. And he said to me, 'Dana, when you're 40 years old and have a family and a mortgage and things you want to do for them, you're going to need that college degree.' Click." The players went home for the summer, not knowing what would come of their protest. Would they be allowed back on the team? Would they lose their scholarships? Over the summer, Jim Brown stepped in to help, acting as an intermediary between the players and Coach Schwartzwalder. It didn't work. But, on orders from the chancellor, Schwartzwalder did try to find a black assistant coach. As Alif remembered it, Jake Gaither, the head coach at Florida A&M, told him, " 'You know, you guys don't need a coach. You need a Martin Luther King. Who do you think's gonna step into that?' " Alif continued: "There's a lot of coaches that turned that job down. They knew the deal and they didn't want to step into that." When Alif returned to Syracuse in the fall, a black assistant coach had been hired, but Alif says, "He was not on the program listed as a coach. I remember going to a meeting, and the coaches were meeting with a blackboard with X's and O's, and he's sitting in the back of the room with his head down on the desk like he was sleeping. You talk about something that was hurtful. I mean it was like, 'Wait a minute. I sacrificed a career?' I felt deeply, deeply hurt." The Syracuse 8 decided to continue their boycott. They sat out the whole season. And the chancellor and a group of faculty members made their own stand: The Syracuse 8 would keep their scholarships. They would be allowed to graduate. And they did. "I turned that Type A focus from sports to academics, and it worked," Dana says. "But you sit there squirming on Sunday afternoon watching guys you played with and against. And you know they're still having fun. And it takes a while to get it out of your system." Of the nine, eight graduated from Syracuse University. Four went on to earn master's degrees. Dana Harrell went to law school. Another player completed the coursework for a Ph.D., but never finished his dissertation. With the faculty and the chancellor on their side, the Syracuse 8 started seeing changes at the school. But while their academic careers took off, their football careers stalled. After his sophomore season, Greg Allen was contacted by scouts from every NFL team. Then came the boycott. Greg played his senior year at Syracuse, but he didn't hear from a single NFL scout. He ended up in Canada, playing for the CFL. And that's when he discovered how far the influence of the NFL reached. "One day I was asked to come into the coach's office," Greg says, "and [the coach] says, 'Greg, we're gonna have to let you go.' And I said, 'Let me go? What are you talking about, Coach? I'm doing well here, you know. You said I was the best athlete in camp.' He said, 'Yeah, but you have a little bit too much baggage for us.' " Even in that moment, Greg didn't regret his decision to boycott. "It was pure anger," Greg says. "I was angry that I had to go through this only because I decided that institutional racism had no place at Syracuse University or any place else in this world." Returning To Syracuse The nine members of the Syracuse 8 moved on with their lives. They raised their families and launched successful careers. Dana Harrell moved to the Boston area, where he coached a Pop Warner football team. Alif Muhammad's youngest son was one of his players. "We weren't talking about the Syracuse 8 stuff, that's 36 years ago," Dana says. "Our kids didn't even know anything about it. Nothing." But back in Syracuse, people had started talking about the events of 1970. Alumni and some of the Syracuse 8's white teammates lobbied the university to make a formal apology. In 2006, the Syracuse 8 were invited back to receive the Chancellor's Medal — the university's highest honor — and their letterman's jackets — a few sizes larger than they would have been in 1970. They handed the jackets out during halftime of a home game against Louisville. "They had us in the tunnel, and they wanted us, when they called our names, for us to run out of the tunnel, like we did in our playing days," Dana says. "And we looked at them like they were crazy. We don't have two good knees between us. But the satisfaction was immeasurable." Greg adds: "There were nothing but smiles and old men welling up in tears. I almost don't have the words to describe it. It was a cleansing, a lifting of this baggage that I had been carrying around for years to have someone finally acknowledge thatwe didn't do this, you know, to spite the university or to hurt the university. We were trying to make the university and this world just a better place." It took 36 years for the Syracuse 8 to meet again on that football field, instead of at Ben's Kitchen -- 36 years for Syracuse to apologize and recognize the players were on the right side of history. Thirty-six years. So we asked Dana Harrell: How long before Colin Kaepernick's critics see him in a different light? Will someone someday ask him to run out on a football field in front of a cheering crowd? "I'm gonna answer that first with a quote," Dana says. " 'The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.' Dr. King gave that answer when he was asked, how long did he think it would take for African-Americans to get full rights here in America? "And he said, 'How long? Not long.' So that's my answer." The nine members of the Syracuse 8 were Dana Harrell, Greg Allen, Alif Muhammad, John Lobon, Ronald Womack, Clarence McGill, Richard Bulls, John Godbolt and Duane Walker." -Karen Given

Like Jackie Robinson, baseball should honor Curt Flood's sacrifice

On Oct. 7, 1969, Curt Flood changed the business of baseball forever when he refused a trade from St. Louis to Philadelphia. Flood's act of defiance set the stage for free agency. Although Flood never benefited from his principled stand, generations of players would become millionaires. The only remaining outrage is that Flood continues to be kept out of the Baseball Hall of Fame, where he belongs as a contributor. This story was originally published on April 15. Across Major League Baseball, April 15 has been designated as Jackie Robinson Day in honor of the memory and legacy of the man who broke baseball's color barrier and helped change the United States. But Major League Baseball should also recognize the 50th anniversary of the actions of a man who revolutionized baseball's business model and boldly began the process of setting his fellow players free. In October 1969, Curt Flood, the St. Louis Cardinals' star outfielder and a 10-year veteran, was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. Flood, however, refused the assignment. It was a decision that sent tremors throughout the sports world. In a letter to commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Flood wrote: "After 12 years in the major leagues I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes." Flood challenged baseball's restrictive reserve clause and the game's antitrust status. His case went as far as the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. Although he lost his challenge, Flood made his mark. "It was an important moment in time because it was the precursor to all the events that took place in the 1970s that brought free agency to baseball," former MLB commissioner Bud Selig said during a phone interview last week. Flood's bold act of resistance transformed the business of baseball. He began the process of emancipation that freed players from the tyranny of owners and set the stage for free agency. His contribution to baseball, although highly debated at the time, is generally recognized as a benefit to players and the game. "Was it important in the context of baseball history? Absolutely," said Selig, who believes Flood paved the road to free agency while owners "weren't quite ready for it in 1970 and 1971." The turning point came in 1975 when pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally won arbitration. That ruling officially ushered in the era of free agency. But it was Flood who, in my mind, became the Crispus Attucks of Major League Baseball. Granted, the stakes were much higher in the case of Attucks, who lost his life. Flood lost his career. Few stars of Flood's day publicly supported him in his decision. A retired Jackie Robinson, however, testified on Flood's behalf. One of the most dramatic moments of the trial occurred when Robinson, whose health was declining because of diabetes, walked to the front of the courtroom using a cane. Flood described the moment in his book, The Way It Is. When Flood told Robinson, "I really appreciate your taking the time and effort to do this," Robinson replied, "Well, you can't be out there by yourself." "I remember these words very well," Flood wrote, " 'You can't be out there by yourself and I would be remiss if I didn't share these burdens with you.' " There was a connection between Flood and Robinson. Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, said, "Those two individuals were quite similar, probably more similar than people have given them credit for. That probably is why you saw Jackie at the trial to give his support. Both were very strong-willed, both were very determined and both had this tremendous self-belief. In both cases, those character traits were put to the test." In 1968, Sports Illustrated called Flood the best center fielder in baseball. He started for 10 seasons in St. Louis, including the Cardinals' World Series-winning teams of 1964 and 1967. Flood was a genius-level defensive player and amassed a 223-game errorless streak. But his greatest contribution to the game was resisting the Major League Baseball power structure and status quo. I asked Selig if he felt Flood was worthy of induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. "I've got to think about that," he said. "But it's a fair question." Former major league pitcher LaTroy Hawkins doesn't hesitate to say Flood should be in the Hall of Fame as a contributor, at the very least. "If you can be a coach and end up being a Hall of Fame coach, if you can be the head of a union and end up getting in the Hall of Fame that way, why can't you get in the Hall of Fame for being somebody that revolutionized the game?" Hawkins told me last week. "His stand revolutionized the game. It just didn't affect African American players; it affected every player in a positive way." Hawkins played for 11 teams in a 21-year career. He was a free agent six times during his career. "Curt Flood impacted me in the way that I was able to go out and get my full market value," Hawkins said. "I was able to go out and pick and choose what team I wanted to play for. That was a direct connection to what Curt Flood stood for." Said Selig: "Overall, I think free agency has worked out well for baseball. I know there were concerns about free agency in the 1960s and 1970s, and I think rightfully so. Change always brings concern in anything in life, not only in baseball but overall. But most of this generation and even the past generation have gotten used to free agency. It's the way of life now." Flood was a game-changer. His act of courage in 1969 was one of three significant acts of defiance by black athletes at the time. In 1967, Muhammad Ali refused induction into the U.S. Army; in 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos demonstrated on the victory stand at the Mexico City Games. All of those athletes sacrificed their careers to advance the cause of human rights. While nearly everyone accepts Robinson's cultural impact on baseball, not everyone is thrilled by the transformation of the business model that Flood set in motion when he said "no." This likely may be at the root of some resistance to Flood's induction. "Dad took on the world when he did that," said Shelly Flood, one of Flood's five children. "He took on some very wealthy, powerful people. He felt as though they were very angry with him, but he felt compelled to do what he needed to do." Curt Flood should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a contributor and a player. There is a direct line between free agents such as Bryce Harper and Manny Machado in 2019 and the door that Flood opened in 1969. Flood helped set the captives free." -William Rhoden

Everyone Is Going Through Something

"On November 5th, right after halftime against the Hawks, I had a panic attack. It came out of nowhere. I'd never had one before. I didn't even know if they were real. But it was real — as real as a broken hand or a sprained ankle. Since that day, almost everything about the way I think about my mental health has changed. "I DID ONE SEEMINGLY LITTLE THING THAT TURNED OUT TO BE A BIG THING." Kevin Love discusses his decision to seek help after suffering from a panic attack. (0:54) I've never been comfortable sharing much about myself. I turned 29 in September and for pretty much 29 years of my life I have been protective about anything and everything in my inner life. I was comfortable talking about basketball — but that came natural. It was much harder to share personal stuff, and looking back now I know I could have really benefited from having someone to talk to over the years. But I didn't share — not to my family, not to my best friends, not in public. Today, I've realized I need to change that. I want to share some of my thoughts about my panic attack and what's happened since. If you're suffering silently like I was, then you know how it can feel like nobody really gets it. Partly, I want to do it for me, but mostly, I want to do it because people don't talk about mental health enough. And men and boys are probably the farthest behind. I know it from experience. Growing up, you figure out really quickly how a boy is supposed to act. You learn what it takes to "be a man." It's like a playbook: Be strong. Don't talk about your feelings. Get through it on your own. So for 29 years of my life, I followed that playbook. And look, I'm probably not telling you anything new here. These values about men and toughness are so ordinary that they're everywhere ... and invisible at the same time, surrounding us like air or water. They're a lot like depression or anxiety in that way. So for 29 years, I thought about mental health as someone else's problem. Sure, I knew on some level that some people benefited from asking for help or opening up. I just never thought it was for me. To me, it was form of weakness that could derail my success in sports or make me seem weird or different. Christian Petersen/Getty Images Then came the panic attack. It happened during a game. It was November 5th, two months and three days after I turned 29. We were at home against the Hawks — 10th game of the season. A perfect storm of things was about to collide. I was stressed about issues I'd been having with my family. I wasn't sleeping well. On the court, I think the expectations for the season, combined with our 4-5 start, were weighing on me. I knew something was wrong almost right after tip-off. I was winded within the first few possessions. That was strange. And my game was just off. I played 15 minutes of the first half and made one basket and two free throws. After halftime, it all hit the fan. Coach Lue called a timeout in the third quarter. When I got to the bench, I felt my heart racing faster than usual. Then I was having trouble catching my breath. It's hard to describe, but everything was spinning, like my brain was trying to climb out of my head. The air felt thick and heavy. My mouth was like chalk. I remember our assistant coach yelling something about a defensive set. I nodded, but I didn't hear much of what he said. By that point, I was freaking out. When I got up to walk out of the huddle, I knew I couldn't reenter the game — like, literally couldn't do it physically. Coach Lue came up to me. I think he could sense something was wrong. I blurted something like, "I'll be right back," and I ran back to the locker room. I was running from room to room, like I was looking for something I couldn't find. Really I was just hoping my heart would stop racing. It was like my body was trying to say to me, You're about to die. I ended up on the floor in the training room, lying on my back, trying to get enough air to breathe. The next part was a blur. Someone from the Cavs accompanied me to the Cleveland Clinic. They ran a bunch of tests. Everything seemed to check out, which was a relief. But I remember leaving the hospital thinking, Wait ... then what the hell just happened? Jed Jacobsohn/The Players' Tribune I was back for our next game against the Bucks two days later. We won, and I had 32. I remember how relieved I was to be back on the court and feeling more like myself. But I distinctly remember being more relieved than anything that nobody had found out why I had left the game against Atlanta. A few people in the organization knew, sure, but most people didn't and no one had written about it. A few more days passed. Things were going great on the court, but something was weighing on me. Why was I so concerned with people finding out? It was a wake-up call, that moment. I'd thought the hardest part was over after I had the panic attack. It was the opposite. Now I was left wondering why it happened — and why I didn't want to talk about it. Call it a stigma or call it fear or insecurity — you can call it a number of things — but what I was worried about wasn't just my own inner struggles but how difficult it was to talk about them. I didn't want people to perceive me as somehow less reliable as a teammate, and it all went back to the playbook I'd learned growing up. This was new territory for me, and it was pretty confusing. But I was certain about one thing: I couldn't bury what had happened and try to move forward. As much as part of me wanted to, I couldn't allow myself to dismiss the panic attack and everything underneath it. I didn't want to have to deal with everything sometime in the future, when it might be worse. I knew that much. So I did one seemingly little thing that turned out to be a big thing. The Cavs helped me find a therapist, and I set up an appointment. I gotta stop right here and just say: I'm the last person who'd have thought I'd be seeing a therapist. I remember when I was two or three years into the league, a friend asked me why NBA players didn't see therapists. I scoffed at the idea. No way any of us is gonna talk to someone. I was 20 or 21 years old, and I'd grown up around basketball. And on basketball teams? Nobody talked about what they were struggling with on the inside. I remember thinking, What are my problems? I'm healthy. I play basketball for a living. What do I have to worry about? I'd never heard of any pro athlete talking about mental health, and I didn't want to be the only one. I didn't want to look weak. Honestly, I just didn't think I needed it. It's like the playbook said — figure it out on your own, like everyone else around me always had. Jeff Haynes/NBAE/Getty Images But it's kind of strange when you think about it. In the NBA, you have trained professionals to fine-tune your life in so many areas. Coaches, trainers and nutritionists have had a presence in my life for years. But none of those people could help me in the way I needed when I was lying on the floor struggling to breathe. Still, I went to my first appointment with the therapist with some skepticism. I had one foot out the door. But he surprised me. For one thing, basketball wasn't the main focus. He had a sense that the NBA wasn't the main reason I was there that day, which turned out to be refreshing. Instead, we talked about a range of non-basketball things, and I realized how many issues come from places that you may not realize until you really look into them. I think it's easy to assume we know ourselves, but once you peel back the layers it's amazing how much there is to still discover. A message from Kevin Love's Grandma Volume 90% "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KEVIN." Kevin's grandmother records a greeting for his 25th birthday in 2013. (0:33) Since then, we've met up whenever I was back in town, probably a few times each month. One of the biggest breakthroughs happened one day in December when we got to talking about my Grandma Carol. She was the pillar of our family. Growing up, she lived with us, and in a lot of ways she was like another parent to me and my brother and sister. She was the woman who had a shrine to each of her grandkids in her room — pictures, awards, letters pinned up on the wall. And she was someone with simple values that I admired. It was funny, I once gave her a random pair of new Nikes, and she was so blown away that she called me to say thank you a handful of times over the year that followed. When I made the NBA, she was getting older, and I didn't see her as often as I used to. During my sixth year with the T-Wolves, Grandma Carol made plans to visit me in Minnesota for Thanksgiving. Then right before the trip, she was hospitalized for an issue with her arteries. She had to cancel her trip. Then her condition got worse quickly, and she fell into a coma. A few days later, she was gone. I was devastated for a long time. But I hadn't really ever talked about it. Telling a stranger about my grandma made me see how much pain it was still causing me. Digging into it, I realized that what hurt most was not being able to say a proper goodbye. I'd never had a chance to really grieve, and I felt terrible that I hadn't been in better touch with her in her last years. But I had buried those emotions since her passing and said to myself, I have to focus on basketball. I'll deal with it later. Be a man. The reason I'm telling you about my grandma isn't really even about her. I still miss her a ton and I'm probably still grieving in a way, but I wanted to share that story because of how eye-opening it was to talk about it. In the short time I've been meeting with the therapist, I've seen the power of saying things out loud in a setting like that. And it's not some magical process. It's terrifying and awkward and hard, at least in my experience so far. I know you don't just get rid of problems by talking about them, but I've learned that over time maybe you can better understand them and make them more manageable. Look, I'm not saying, Everyone go see a therapist. The biggest lesson for me since November wasn't about a therapist — it was about confronting the fact that I needed help. Brandon Dill/AP Images One of the reasons I wanted to write this comes from reading DeMar's comments last week about depression. I've played against DeMar for years, but I never could've guessed that he was struggling with anything. It really makes you think about how we are all walking around with experiences and struggles — all kinds of things — and we sometimes think we're the only ones going through them. The reality is that we probably have a lot in common with what our friends and colleagues and neighbors are dealing with. So I'm not saying everyone should share all their deepest secrets — not everything should be public and it's every person's choice. But creating a better environment for talking about mental health ... that's where we need to get to. Because just by sharing what he shared, DeMar probably helped some people — and maybe a lot more people than we know — feel like they aren't crazy or weird to be struggling with depression. His comments helped take some power away from that stigma, and I think that's where the hope is. I want to make it clear that I don't have things figured out about all of this. I'm just starting to do the hard work of getting to know myself. For 29 years, I avoided that. Now, I'm trying to be truthful with myself. I'm trying to be good to the people in my life. I'm trying to face the uncomfortable stuff in life while also enjoying, and being grateful for, the good stuff. I'm trying to embrace it all, the good, bad and ugly. I want to end with something I'm trying to remind myself about these days: Everyone is going through something that we can't see. I want to write that again: Everyone is going through something that we can't see. The thing is, because we can't see it, we don't know who's going through what and we don't know when and we don't always know why. Mental health is an invisible thing, but it touches all of us at some point or another. It's part of life. Like DeMar said, "You never know what that person is going through." Mental health isn't just an athlete thing. What you do for a living doesn't have to define who you are. This is an everyone thing. No matter what our circumstances, we're all carrying around things that hurt — and they can hurt us if we keep them buried inside. Not talking about our inner lives robs us of really getting to know ourselves and robs us of the chance to reach out to others in need. So if you're reading this and you're having a hard time, no matter how big or small it seems to you, I want to remind you that you're not weird or different for sharing what you're going through. Just the opposite. It could be the most important thing you do. It was for me." -Kevin Love

When athletes share their battles with mental illness

Michael Phelps locked himself in his bedroom for four days three years ago. He'd been arrested a second time for DUI. He was despondent and adrift. He thought about suicide. "I didn't want to be alive," he tells USA TODAY Sports. "I didn't want to see anyone else. I didn't want to see another day." Family and friends — "a life-saving support group," Phelps calls them — urged him to seek professional help. He got it. And now he wants others who are suffering from mental health issues to find the help they need. Some will scoff at this. Phelps is the golden boy of the Olympic Games. Fame and fortune are his. Really, what could be so bad in his life? That is never the right question. People from all walks of life suffer from a range of mental illnesses. Roughly 44 million Americans experienced some form of mental illness in 2015 (the most recent year for which numbers are available), according to estimates by the National Institute of Mental Health. That's nearly one in five people aged 18 or over. Athletes may be at increased risk, according to research by Lynette Hughes and Gerard Leavey of the Northern Ireland Association of Mental Health, who found that factors such as injuries, competitive failure and overtraining can lead to psychological distress. An NCAA survey of athletes found over the course of a year that 30% reported feeling depressed while half said they experienced high levels of anxiety. Brent Walker, associate athletic director for championship performance at Columbia University, says he didn't want to deal with the mental health side of performance when he began working in the field. Now, he says, "it is difficult to separate the mental health piece from the performance side of it." NBA legend Jerry West has struggled for decades with dark bouts of depression and low self-esteem. Sometimes people tell him he's brave for speaking openly about it. He says that's not courageous so much as honest. "Some people hide their pain," West says. "I'm not proud of the fact that I don't feel good about myself a lot of the time, but it's nothing I'm ashamed of." New York Giants wide receiver Brandon Marshall calls mental health awareness and acceptance "the civil rights movement of our era." He was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in 2011 and spoke about the importance of destigmatizing mental illness in March at an NFL owners meeting. Giants owner John Mara said you could've heard a pin drop: "He raised our consciousness." Wilbert Leonard, a sociology professor at Illinois State, says he thinks consciousness in the broader world can be raised by prominent voices from the sports world — like Phelps, West and Marshall — and perhaps begin to chip away the societal stigma too often attached to mental illness. "It's John Wayne syndrome, that stiff upper lip — keeping your feelings to yourself and not letting anyone know you're hurting," Leonard says. "That plays out in the sports world and it plays out in the larger society." Athletes face pressure to perform, often in the face of intense public scrutiny, while competing in a culture that inhibits them from seeking the help they need. "For the longest time, I thought asking for help was a sign of weakness because that's kind of what society teaches us," Phelps says. "That's especially true from an athlete's perspective. If we ask for help, then we're not this big macho athlete that people can look up to. Well, you know what? If someone wants to call me weak for asking for help, that's their problem. Because I'm saving my own life." The first time Imani Boyette tried to kill herself she was 10. "The worst pain in the world is waking up and knowing you can't even kill yourself, that it's not in your control," she says. "What people don't realize about suicide is that it's like you're brainwashed. None of my attempts made sense, but it feels like the perfect answer to make the pain stop in the moment. You think it will all be better if you can just disappear." Boyette, 22, is a center for the WNBA's Atlanta Dream. She suffers from clinically diagnosed severe depression that she attributes to a combination of circumstance (she was raped as a child by a family member) and happenstance (her biological makeup). "You feel like because you're not happy — when you should be happy — that you're hurting people around you and a burden," she says. "At a certain point, it just gets easier to shut up because people get sick of hearing you're not OK when you're not sick on the outside." Boyette says she tried to kill herself three times. "I wasn't looking for help," she says. "I wasn't looking for resources. ... I didn't have anybody I could talk to, I could touch, who understands this hell I'm in." That's why Boyette is telling her story. She wants to be the role model she wishes she'd had in her darkest hours, not that it's easy to do. "Sometimes, I walk in a room and regret being so naked and vulnerable, but this is bigger than me," she says. "I believe my purpose is to talk about the things that people are uncomfortable or afraid to talk about. ... I need to talk about sexual abuse, because we don't talk about it enough ... The thing about childhood sexual abuse is people look at you like you're this delicate piece of china. Or, they look at you disgusted, but don't want to be disgusted." Her brother, JaVale McGee, plays for the NBA champion Golden State Warriors and her husband, Paul Boyette Jr., is a defensive tackle for the Oakland Raiders. They met when both were athletes at the University of Texas. She told him then about her childhood abuse, by way of explanation of her night terrors. "After I got married, I went into a deep depression, which makes no sense whatsoever," she says. "It's, like, the happiest time in your life. And it's hard to convince your husband this is not because I don't love you. I just can't love you out of this depression, out of this fog." She describes the days when she can't even get out of bed or brush her teeth. It's as if she were in a straightjacket, she says, screaming in a soundproof room where no one can hear her, even her husband. Soon the screams are more like echoes and she envisions a glass wall where she presses her hand against his. "I tell him just being there is enough," she says, eyes moist. "You don't have to understand or see my pain, but just acknowledge it. And be there." Mardy Fish was ready to play Roger Federer in the fourth round of the 2012 U.S. Open when he mysteriously withdrew from one of the biggest matches of his life for "health reasons," as his handlers said at the time. It was for severe anxiety disorder, which over time had led Fish to panic attacks, sleepless nights and days barricaded inside his home. Fish, 35, once the top-ranked American tennis player and now retired from the sport, says he no longer sees his anxiety as the enemy. "It's OK not to be OK," he says. "To show weakness, we're told in sports, is to deserve shame. But showing weakness, addressing your mental health, is strength." Sports is measured in the binary way of wins and losses; facing up to anxiety is more complicated than that. "There is no quick fix where all of a sudden you wake up and it's gone," Fish says. "There is no sports movie ending here. This is the reality of sports stars being real people." He says 2012 is when "it all came crashing down" and he could no longer find his "happy place." His psychiatrist prescribed medication. That helped. He has since slowly begun to ween himself and set small goals. One was traveling alone for the first time in years. "With my anxiety, I essentially need to be around someone at all times," Fish says. "When I'd sleep, I had to be with my wife. She's been an angel this whole time, for me." Fish married Stacey Gardner, an attorney and model, in 2008. "I'm so glad my struggles happened when they happened," Fish says. "I can't imagine being single and young, going through this. My support system has been massive." Fish took off the 2014 Tour to have a catheter ablation operation to correct misfiring electric impulses in his heart, then made a brief return to competitive tennis in 2015. He has since become a serious golfer. He finished tied for second in the American Century Championship celebrity tournament recently, behind former pitcher Mark Mulder and ahead of NBA star Stephen Curry, who was fourth. Isn't golf stressful? "The truth is you want stress in your life," Fish says. "You don't want an actual anxiety-free life. What would the fun be there?" Rick Ankiel was on the mound for the St. Louis Cardinals against the Atlanta Braves in Game 1 of the 2000 National League Division Series when he found he couldn't do what had always come so naturally. Ankiel, the pitcher, couldn't pitch anymore. He threw five wild pitches in an inning; no major leaguer had done that since 1890. More starts produced more wild pitches. He was never the same. Baseball people said he had the yips — jitters that make it nearly impossible for an athlete to throw a strike or sink a putt — though in his case severe anxiety was at the root of it. "For anyone who hasn't had it happen to them, they don't understand how deep and how dark it is," he says. "It consumes you. It's not just on the field. It never goes away. ... It's this ongoing battle with your own brain. You know what you want to do — in your heart. But your body and brain won't let you do it." Ankiel would eventually have to give up his pitching career. Remarkably, he would come back years later as an outfielder. He is one of two players in major league history who have started a postseason game as a pitcher and hit a home run in the postseason as a position player. (The other? Some fellow by the name of Babe Ruth.) Anxiety on the mound led to obsessive thoughts in his daily routine. TV analysts called him weak. They said he lacked mental toughness. "I can't imagine how bad it'd be with social media nowadays," he says. "There's such a stigma, especially with men, that you can't falter, and that you shouldn't get help." Ankiel found himself envious of players who had physical injuries that rehab could fix. He turned to therapy, breathing exercises and different medications — mostly to no avail. "Nobody really had any answer," he says. "There's no remedy or cure." Ankiel was USA TODAY Sports' high school baseball player of the year in 1997. Some touted him as the second coming of Sandy Koufax. And then, poof, it was gone. "It was beyond frightening and scary," he says. "We're getting paid millions, but that doesn't mean we're immune to inner pain and torture." Ankiel wrote about all of this in The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips and the Pitch that Changed My Life, which came out this year. It tells of how he tried vodka and marijuana to calm himself. Nothing worked. Enter Harvey Dorfman, the late sports psychologist, who became a father figure in Ankiel's darkest hours and helped "save my life" as his pitching career unraveled. Dorfman, who wrote The Mental Game of Baseball, helped Ankiel face his abusive childhood. "For athletes, you want to try to turn over every stone possible to be at the best of your ability," Ankiel says. "So if there's a doctor or counselor who can help you, why not turn over that stone? Having a culture conducive to mental health is big. I think we're getting there. Just about every (MLB) team has a psychology department. I'm glad we're starting to understand. We're all human, and I think the more we talk about mental health, the better." Royce White left the NBA three years ago amid demands for a better mental health initiative from the league. Today, playing basketball in Canada, he speaks bluntly about mental illness and salts his conversation with colorful metaphors and off-color language. "It's not about the NBA," he says. "If (expletive) WalMart didn't have a (reasonable mental health) policy, I would have done the same thing there, too." He grew up in Minneapolis, largely raised by a single mother and grandmother. Speaking his mind always came naturally. "I didn't have men around me growing up who saw having anxiety as weak or not tough enough," White says. "I grew up with a lot of diversity. Instead of having that traditional one-male role model, I was allowed to have many. And maybe it's just where I'm from, but that whole masculinity (stereotype) — men can't show weakness (crap) — wasn't around." One of White's male role models was his fiery high school coach, Dave Thorson, now an assistant coach at Drake, who led White to therapy. An in-school family practitioner ultimately diagnosed him with generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. Since, he's embraced his illnesses rather than hide them in silence. "The million dollar question is, 'Does what you go through make you better or worse?' I actually look at my anxiety as a blessing," says White, who was an All-America under Fred Hoiberg at Iowa State in 2011-12. White, the Houston Rockets' first-round draft choice (16th pick overall) in 2012, says the headlines that surfaced in 2013 — referencing the panic attacks and anxiety he experiences on planes — were blown out of proportion and misleading because his overall message was calling for a more prudent mental health policy and better understanding. White flew 20 times at Iowa State and now flies with his team in Canada. "It's been painted as me wanting special treatment because of anxiety," White says. "No, I'm saying I need the same type of support as anyone who is struggling. Call it whatever the hell you want to call it. There are specific injury doctors for players" with bum knees and sprained ankles. White says when he requested an individual doctor, NBA officials then told him if they made an accommodation for him they'd have to do it for 450 players. He played in just three NBA games — zero points and seven personal fouls for the Sacramento Kings — as he bounced around the NBA and its developmental league for several seasons. Kathy Behrens, NBA president of social responsibility and player programs, offered no comment on White's case specifically other than to say the league has "great respect for Royce speaking about his struggles." She says the NBA is not new to the issue but has "a growing understanding of the importance of the subject." She says players currently have access to mental health professionals through the player assistance program, and that the NBA is in the process of finalizing a refined mental health policy for the new collective bargaining agreement. Last season White played for the London (Ont.) Lightning of the National Basketball League of Canada, where he is the reigning league MVP and the Lightning are the reigning champion. His last affiliation with the NBA was the Los Angeles Clippers' summer league team in 2015. "It's not about me in the NBA," White says. "You hear all the time about mental health stigma and people being ashamed. Well, there are people across the country who need help, say they need help, and aren't getting it. We should be talking about them, too. "Mental health is bigger than diagnosis and labels." Swimmer Allison Schmitt executed a flip turn, as she'd done many thousands of times before, as she competed in an event in Austin, Texas, in 2015. And then, out of nowhere, midway through the 400-meter freestyle, she quit. "That last 200 meters I was like, (expletive) this," she says. "I knew I gave up, but I didn't know why." The answer, as it turned out, was what she calls "the invisible illness" — depression. Michael Phelps, her friend and frequent training partner — was at the meet. Months earlier, Phelps and Schmit sat in a burrito restaurant and discussed the suicide that week of actor Robin Williams. Schmitt had said she could understand why he did it. At that point, Schmitt says, "Michael knew something was up." Schmitt had contemplated suicide herself. She'd thought about driving off the road on a snowy night to make it appear as accident. Phelps approached her on the pool deck after she quit on that 400 free. Bob Bowman, who coached them both, also arrived. And Schmitt's pain soon came pouring out — the tears, the sadness, the emptiness. Schmitt says she began seeing a psychologist soon after. Therapy, she says, "makes training for the Olympics seem easy." She found it difficult to be vulnerable and talk about her weaknesses. She'd been taught all her life to rush through, persevere and come out stronger. She felt embarrassed and ashamed. "But now, therapy is the best tool I've encountered in this life," Schmitt says. "For a lot of athletes, their arena is their sanctuary. But for a lot of struggling people in society, the therapy room is a place of peace they can't find anywhere else." Not long after her tearful epiphany on the pool deck, Schmitt found out her 17-year-old cousin in Pennsylvania had committed suicide. Schmitt says this promising basketball player "had it all going for her. She was the life of the party, always making people laugh." Schmitt pauses. "But, no one knew how dark of a place she was in." This galvanized Schmitt. "In sports, you get second chances," she says. "In life, you don't always get a second chance." This, Schmitt says, is why she is pursuing her master's degree at Arizona State to become a licensed clinical social worker and counselor. (She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Georgia in psychology.) She realized after her cousin's suicide that mental health struggles should not be hidden. "Depression is something that's in you," she says. "It's not wanting to get out of bed, continuously feeling sad and down on yourself. It's not wanting to exist, sometimes. There's no on-and-off light switch. When I hear coaches, athletes telling people to 'snap' out of it, it makes me mad. Because you could be pushing them down that dark hole further." Brandon Marshall remembers a group therapy session when he noticed the scars on the wrists of the woman sitting next to him. "I was just like, damn, this (expletive) is real," Marshall says. "Here I am, this big macho football player, and these people were fighting for their lives. That was when I truly realized what being tough meant. "I realized that someone needs to stand up for these people. This has become my purpose on this planet. Football is just my platform." This was during Marshall's three-month stay in 2011 at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital and affiliate of Harvard Medical School, where he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. That was the first time he had a name for the illness that had led him to run-ins with the law and light-switch behavior he never understood. He says his diagnosis had a salutary effect on his family, including his mother, Diane Bolden. Marshall says she was able to confront her own depression and is now five years sober. "I made everyone around me healthy," he says. Marshall and his wife Michi founded Project 375, an organization dedicated to eradicating the stigma surrounding mental health by raising awareness. "Where we are now with mental health is where cancer and HIV were 20 years ago," Marshall says. "It's extremely important for us to have this conversation not just in sports, but in society. It's important for us to change the narrative. "There are over 100 million people living with some type of mental illness and those people then touch so many people in their lives." Marshall says borderline personality disorder has many variations but is typically marked by impulsive behavior and a lack of the skills to self-regulate emotions. "It's a lot of preventative work," he says. "I know when my most stressful times are, and so I plan for it. During the season, it's very stressful. So I have to be proactive. BPD can be different from one person to the next. For me, I don't use medication. I consult my doctor on FaceTime or Skype when needed. I meditate. I use my Christian faith to hold me accountable." NFL players are seen as gladiators who can fight through anything, Marshall says. "Well, we can do that — by being honest and vulnerable," he says. "This is America's sport, so whenever we're able to take our masks off — to 90 million people, avid football fans — it provides the ability to move culture." Jerry West is Mr. Clutch. He's The Logo. He's a master architect, building teams behind the scenes. He's also, at 79, a lifelong sufferer of depression. Or, as he calls it, the dark place. "This is something that doesn't go away, this depression," West says. "When I go through it, it's almost always based on my (low) self-worth and self-esteem." West sees his suffering less as an illness and more as a product of a tormented childhood of abuse at the hands of his father. That's part of why West turned to basketball as a scrawny kid — a "misfit with no confidence," in his words — in West Virginia. It was a safe haven where he could build confidence. "Everyone is driven by different things in life," West says. "To some degree, based on some of the things I saw growing up, I was looking for an escape. I was just looking for something that I'd be appreciated for. I guess I was looking for a sanctuary." Sometimes he played all by himself in a fantasy world where he always splashed a game-winning buzzer-beater. "For anyone who saw me," he says, "they probably said, 'My God, this kid is crazy.' " He emerged from childhood sanctuary to be one of the greatest players in history. The darkness never left him, though. "I feel that same sadness at times now," he says. He took his West Virginia Mountaineers to the championship game of the NCAA tournament, where they lost. His Los Angeles Lakers made the NBA Finals nine times — and lost eight. "I've learned way more in my life through failure than I ever did from success," he says. He didn't feel the elation he thought he would when the Lakers won the NBA title at last in 1972. "All I could do right then," he says, "was go back to the other losses." Team camaraderie buoyed him during his playing days. As a team executive — with the Lakers, Memphis Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors and, newly, the Los Angeles Clippers — he's often alone in his day-to-day operations. "You're the judge, jury and executioner," he says. The kid who wanted to be a hero, sinking all those game-winners in imaginary games, says he never wanted credit for his successes as an executive, though he helped to build dynasties with the Lakers and the Warriors. "You'll never see me on a (championship) podium or in a picture," West notes. "It was never about me. Yet, on the other hand, there are times when I'd be down and out and you feel like you'd want someone to come up and say, 'Hey, you're pretty good at what you're doing.' That's when the (depression) kicks in." West says he thinks he's able to see talent and character through a different lens than other executives. "Some of these kids, these players, they're survivors," he says. "In many cases I thought I was a survivor. That's who I'm attracted to. Someone who's been through something. And I always want to know, who was the person who made you feel? Or when was the moment when you felt like you belonged? Instead of going inward." Freud theorized that pain turned inward becomes depression. "It's got to go somewhere," West says. For a long time, he had no idea why he felt the way he felt. "I thought this was how all people felt," he says. "I've always been different. But I like to think I'm different in a good way." For most of his solid-gold life, Michael Phelps saw himself in much the same way as the outside world did. "I saw myself as a swimmer and nothing else," he says. "I didn't know who I really was. And neither did anybody else. At the age of 30, I found myself. And I decided I wanted to show the world not Michael Phelps the swimmer, but who I really was." Phelps is 32 now and he wants the world to see him as husband, father and, yes, history's most decorated Olympian — but also as a depression sufferer. "It's good for athletes to be open about who they are and for people to see we're far from perfect," Phelps says. "We're not gods. I'm human like everybody else." When Phelps opened up about his difficulties he found he could help others while helping himself. "Once I started talking about my struggles outside the pool, the healthier I felt," he says. "Now I have kids and adults come up to me and say they were able to open up because I was open about my life." Phelps retired after the 2012 Summer Games in London — or so he said — but ended up coming back for a last hurrah in Rio in 2016, this time with his infant son Boomer and newlywed wife Nicole to cheer him on. Now he swears he's really retired. And he doesn't have to worry about what's next; his calling as an advocate for mental health found him. "My talent was in the swimming pool, but it's led me to something else in life," Phelps says. "It's a duty. It's an honor to talk about mental health. But I'm really just being my authentic self, sharing my story." That story of mental anguish includes ongoing "depression spells." He remembers they'd often come after his Olympic highs. All that glitters isn't gold. "You're at the highest level of sport you can possibly get," he says. "Then you'll want to do something new, something crazy. That high to low can put you in a dark spot." Sometimes that darkness was consuming. "Isolation can be crippling," Phelps says. "When I'd see my therapist, I remember beforehand how much I hated going. Then every time after I'd walk out the door, I felt like a million bucks." Now he says he has the tools to get through the dark times and "I'm able to be a better husband, a better father, a better son, a better friend." -Scott Gleeson and Erik Brady USA TODAY

Football's Polynesian moment: Samoa's athletic outliers are paying a steep price for their commitment to the game

"On Jan. 30, the Polynesian Football Hall of Fame honored five men as its third class of inductees. Troy Polamalu, the recently retired Pittsburgh Steeler with the incandescent smile and wild hair, will attract the most attention. He's the only inductee well known outside of small circles of fans. But each of these men—Alopati "Al" Lolotai, Charley Ane, Rocky Freitas, Vai Sikahema and Polamalu—embodies the intimate, if painful, connection between football and Polynesian culture. Football has reached a crossroads, its future imperiled by the very physicality driving its popularity. The number of boys playing Pop Warner and high school ball plunged over the last decade as the neurological, physical and fiscal costs of the game became more troubling. That's on top of the already severe decline in the game's scholastic ranks in the Rust Belt—football's original heartland—during the 1980s and '90s. But one group has bucked that trend—Polynesians, especially Samoans in American Samoa, Hawaii, California and Utah, as well as in pockets of Texas and the Pacific Northwest. American Samoa is the only place outside the United States where football has taken hold at the grass roots, the only one that sends its native sons to the NFL. In just a few decades, the sons of Samoa and Tonga, mostly young men who came of age in the States, have quietly become the most disproportionately over-represented demographic in college and professional football. Football has become the story Samoans tell about themselves to the world. But the narrative has grown bittersweet. While creating a stunning micro-culture of sporting excellence, these athletic outliers are paying a steep price for their commitment to the game. Sadly, that which makes them so good at football—their extraordinary internalization of discipline and warrior self-image that drives them to play with no fefe (no fear)—also makes them especially vulnerable. Nobody lived and died that irony more than Junior Seau, who became the first Samoan in the Pro Football Hall of Fame after a 20-season NFL career in which, inexplicably, he was never diagnosed with a concussion. Not long after retiring, Seau shot himself in the chest, unable to live with the demons of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the tragic downside of playing with no fefe. The five inductees have seen more clearly than most what football gives to those who play it and what it takes from them. They span the 80 seasons since Al Lolotai became the first Samoan to enter the NFL in the wake of World War II. Charley Ane, the second Samoan in the NFL, surpassed Lolotai on the field, earning two championship rings with the Detroit Lions. Rockne "Rocky" Freitas, a native Hawaiian who starred at every level of the game before returning home, became an educator, most recently as the chancellor of the West Oahu campus of the University of Hawaii. Vai Sikahema, born in Nukuʻalofa, Tonga, became the kingdom's first NFL player. He played for Brigham Young University's 1984 championship team and forged a Pro Bowl career before becoming a journalist in Philadelphia and a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Troy Polamalu, the 2010 NFL defensive player of the year and two-time Super Bowl champion, will almost certainly join Junior Seau in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as soon as he is eligible. Over the last four years, Polamalu and his wife, Theodora, have taken hundreds of coaches, educators and medical personnel to American Samoa, where their Faʻa Samoa Initiative works with youth to build social capital by imparting life skills to help in the classroom and workplace as much as on the ball field. Paladins of a culture of sport in which community meant more than money, these men mattered as much after they stopped playing as during their athletic prime. While each excelled on the field, what sets them apart from most athletes was their life-long sense of tautua, what Samoans call service. Each gave back as much as he got from the highly competitive culture that provided the drive to succeed. That commitment brought Al Lolotai back to American Samoa in the late 1960s, and will bring Polamalu there for years to come. Born in what was then German Western Samoa, Al Lolotai moved to American Samoa and then to Laʻie on the north shore of Oahu, where the Mormons built a temple early last century as a gathering spot for converts from the South Pacific. Lolotai joined the Washington Redskins after World War II. Though owner George Preston Marshall long resisted playing African-Americans, the dark-skinned Lolotai apparently did not affront his or Washington fans' racial sensibilities. Lolotai gained greater notoriety as a wrestler after leaving football. Performing as Sweet Leilani, he won multiple championships, the last when he was 58. His nephew Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson would also play football and wrestle before becoming one of Hollywood's more bankable actors. Lolotai's most enduring legacy came when he returned to direct health education and sport in American Samoa's schools in the late 1960s. "He started our sports programs out of nothing," Tufele Liʻamatua, the director of Samoan affairs, told me in 2011, shortly before his death. "He helped bring football to our island." Honolulu-born Charley Ane, whose father was recruited to Hawaii to play industrial league baseball, became the first Samoan at the Punahou School. There, at USC, and with the Detroit Lions, Ane was the archetypal Samoan, the quintessential teammate who brought the locker room together. In Detroit, Ane's blocking gave quarterback Bobby Layne time to do what he did best—improvise like a jazz musician. Detroit made it to the NFL championship game three times in Ane's first five years and won twice. Teammates voted him their captain for the 1958 and 1959 seasons. And when his playing days were over, Ane gave back as a coach at five high schools. Freitas and Sikahema came later, but like Lolotai and Ane, remained rooted in community and service. Junior Seau's selection to the Pro Football Hall of Fame last summer and Marcus Mariotta's Heisman Trophy honors a few months before—both firsts for Samoans—herald a growing wave of Polynesian talent. They are the descendants of a people who resisted conquest and colonization, but embraced Christianity in the 1800s and the U.S. military during World War II. The confluence of religion, military discipline and Faʻa Samoa (in the way of Samoa) created a football culture that coaches cherish. Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent the last years of his life in Western Samoa, once called Samoans "god's best, at least, god's sweetest works." The more I know about these men and their back stories, the more I realize why Stevenson fell in love with Polynesians and their culture. But there's a cost to this devotion to football, to playing with no fefe. Samoan boys, who train year-round on fields blistered with volcanic pebbles and use helmets that should have been discarded long ago, incur far too much neurological damage. They have a difficult time adjusting to college and maximizing the benefit of an athletic scholarship. More important, this micro-culture of football excellence coexists with a public health crisis. Samoans and Tongans are among the most diabetic and obese people on the planet, the consequence of forsaking a traditional diet for cheap and fast food. Polynesians and youth from other disadvantaged communities may be the salvation of America's most successful sporting enterprise at a time when the sons of better-off families are deserting the game. But the five men to be inducted into the Polynesian Football Hall of Fame this month tell a much deeper and meaningful story of sport and community." -Rob Ruck

Fists of Fury

"Start with the image, a still life of protest. It captures a vital moment in history, yet its meaning evolves, as time measures what has—and has not—been learned. It tells the story of a battle fought, in a war neither won nor lost, but ongoing. Of a place and a time, not so different from here and now. Of sports and division, it was fifty years ago this month. "Fifty years! Can you believe that?" says Tommie Smith, a man of 24 in the image, a much older man of 74 today. Fifty years. In the scene, Smith stands on the top of the Olympic podium, the number 1 painted beneath his feet, which are purposefully sheathed only in black socks, with a single black Puma sneaker also perched on the platform. He is a black man wearing a black scarf beneath his red, white and blue USA sweats, and a black glove on his right hand, which is thrust skyward, his arm so straight, it looks as if he is trying to reach into the grey overcast and bring rain. This was on the evening of Oct. 16, 1968, in Mexico City. A Wednesday. Many Americans saw this scene on square black-and-white televisions while eating dinner. Smith had won the gold medal in the 200 meters. It hangs from his neck as "The Star-Spangled Banner" plays. His head is bowed, his face intense. Behind him, facing the medalists' flags, is bronze medalist John Carlos of the U.S., then 23. The two men were training partners of a kind in California, but not close friends. Carlos is also shoeless in black socks, a sneaker on the platform. Beads hang from his neck, behind his medal. He has a black glove on his left hand, which is raised. His arm is slightly bent, his pose more casual than Smith's, but no less forceful and eloquent. There is a third man in the image, silver medalist Peter Norman, a 26-year-old Australian. He is wearing the green uniform of his country and, like Smith and Carlos, a white button pinned to his chest. Norman is looking up at the flags, smiling. Fifty years. That is the singular moment, one of the most iconic—and important and controversial—in sports history. This is a story about that moment, but just as much about the moments that followed, laid end-to-end, repeated, until they span months and years and decades, and encompass lives and legacies. Smith and Carlos were young black men protesting racial inequality, using the platform of the ceremonial playing of their national anthem at a sports event. Where they raised their fists, a half century later Colin Kaepernick would take a knee. "We're trying to recapture terrain that we thought was once conquered," says Harry Edwards, the septuagenarian sports sociologist who as a 25-year-old instructor in 1968 organized the movement that led to Smith's and Carlos's protest. The moment defines Smith and Carlos, as Kaepernick's defines him, and always will. It extracted a cost—opportunity lost, money never earned, families tested and broken. They were heroes to some, pariahs to others, lauded and threatened and belittled. Smith, as sweet a mover as ever set foot on a track (Lord, to have seen him race Usain Bolt), ran a few races after the Olympic final. Carlos ran until 1970, ranking first in the world in both the 100 and 200 meters. Both men only found footing in society many years after Mexico City and, ever so gradually, gained acceptance as leaders. In 2005, a 22-foot statue depicting the scene on the medal stand was dedicated at San Jose State, where both had been students and competed. Three years later ESPN awarded Smith and Carlos the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, and in September 2016 they were recognized at the White House by President Obama with members of the '16 U.S. Olympic team. Yet now they grapple with the state of race relations in their country, which some days makes them wonder what they accomplished 50 years ago. "Many struggles are not final victories," Edwards says. And each wonders alone. Both men have family and friends and the hard-earned respect of millions, but they do not have each other. Smith is a sharecropper's son, raised picking cotton in California's San Joaquin Valley, serious and dutiful. Carlos was born and raised in Harlem, with the soul of a hustler. They have never been close. "Oil and water," says Smith's wife, Delois. The protest and all that followed did not bring them closer. Smith and Carlos see each other on occasion—at various reunions of the 1968 Olympic team, or for paid speaking gigs. They are a set of two, keen to experiences that no other human—except perhaps Kaepernick, who has met with both men—can understand. Yet they are not a pair. They are one, and one. It is no simple matter to gain access to Smith or Carlos to talk to them about their story. They know how its meaning has evolved, and how it is acutely relevant. But their reticence is understandable. Both are weary. Carlos is as game as ever to take on the system (you'll see); Smith, as ever, is more cautious (you'll see). I started asking in late February, with emails and calls that went unanswered. I asked mutual friends to help. Nothing. Smith and Carlos speak in public regularly and sometimes together, but rarely these days sit for media interviews. In late May, I received a reply from Delois, who handles most of Tommie's affairs. (She is his third wife; they have been together for 21 years.) The email: "Call me tomorrow," and a phone number. When I called, Delois talked about the many times her husband had signed the cover of the May 22, 1967, issue of Sports Illustrated, which featured the 22-year-old Smith uncoiling from starting blocks in gold sweats, next to the headline: blazing quarter-miler. (He did not enter the 400 in Mexico City.) She also asked, "Is this a paid interview?" I told her that it was not. "I am going to grant you this interview with Dr. Smith," Delois then said, cheerfully. Tommie Smith has lived in a modest, two-story brick house in Stone Mountain, Ga., since 2005, when he retired after 27 years as a teacher and coach at Santa Monica (Calif.) College. We talked in his basement, which is a staggering monument to not just the evening of Oct. 16, 1968, but also to his remarkable (and remarkably short) track career, to his life, to a vital era in track and field, to the Olympics and to activism. The room is alive with memories. An Olympic flag, swiped by Smith from the Mexico City Olympic Stadium before the protest, decorated with the signatures of U.S. teammates Jim Hines, Al Oerter, Jim Ryun and others. A framed Newsweek cover from '68 with the headline, the angry black athlete. A picture of his childhood home in rural Lemoore, Calif. Another of his junior high basketball team, with Smith towering over his teammates as a 6' 2" eighth-grader. Dozens of black-and-white action photos of Smith setting some of his 11 world records between '66 and '68. And several shots of the medal stand protest, some signed by Carlos and Norman. Smith settles into a lounge chair and leans forward, engaged. "I don't talk to everybody," he says, "because I don't want to fight what's going on now in the country. I only want to talk about my belief in what I was doing." When, in the course of a two-hour interview, the subject turns to today's racial climate, Smith speaks slowly and carefully. He knows who he is and understands the power of his name. "I have to make all my words count," he says. "Have things changed in fifty years? Not as much as I hoped they would. At times it's as bad or worse than it was in the '60s because there are more things to become agitated about. And the people to fight those negatives are fewer because black folks don't have that leadership, black or white, like Dr. King or the Kennedys." Minutes later he resets, seeking an uplifting turn: "It's moving in a positive direction." When I ask him if he approves of President Trump (and his policies), Smith says, "His tenacity, but not where it's going. Nobody thought he would be here, so you have to admire. . . ." Smith stops and points his finger at me. "Now don't you say Tommie Smith likes Trump. Any leader needs to be strong, but not to the point where he becomes a tyrant. Like Putin. Putin is a tyrant." Carlos lives 20 minutes south of Smith. Fifty years after sharing the podium, they could shop at the same Kroger and both fly out of Hartsfield. That has not brought them closer. "People said we would be joined at the hip," says Smith. "That has not been the case. We're totally different people. I'm quiet and reclusive; he says what's on his mind. I'm an introvert; he's an extrovert. I count to 10 before I throw a rock and then maybe I throw a Wiffle ball instead. He throws the rock." Between February and late June, I called Carlos half a dozen times and sent an equal number of text messages. Colleagues who know Carlos told me that he was finished doing interviews. Forever. After leaving Smith's house, I made one last call, and Carlos answered. Then he threw some rocks. "Tim!" he shouted into his phone. "What the hell do I have to do to get you to stop calling me? I've been talking about this s--- for fifty years, and ain't nothing changed since Mexico City in 1968. Nothing! I've spoken and spoken and spoken, and it ain't gonna make no difference. It ain't enough. I could die and come back in another life, and things would be the same. You have to agree with that." I suggest that a story might amplify his message. "You write your article in Sports Illustrated," says Carlos. "You think that evil is defeated because people read that s---? That ain't gonna happen, my brother." At 73, John Wesley Carlos is a proud and passionate man, unfiltered. A few weeks later I talked with the oldest of his three children, Kimme, who is 52. "My father is a private person," she said. "But if you do talk with him, he will speak from the heart. It's all on the table." I spoke with John for 17 minutes. His initial response—it ain't gonna make no difference—sounds at first like resignation, but it's actually anger. Where Smith is careful and largely muted on social media, Carlos posts and shares furiously on two Facebook pages. Where Smith assiduously avoids the bullring of public discourse, Carlos seeks it, on his terms, advocating change. Last May he posted a 347-word criticism of the NFL's anthem policy and the President's support of that policy. I asked Carlos why he still fights. "Look at what you have in the White House," says Carlos. "That's the outer layer of America. That's the President, supplying his base. He called young black men sons of bitches for kneeling. Sons of bitches! He said they weren't respecting the military. What did he ever do in the military? What did any of his children do in the military? And then you've got police officers out there shooting young black men, and nobody is prosecuted. Nobody is sent to jail. It's the same b------- today that it was fifty years ago." Carlos was not impolite in this exchange. He was full of life and fury. Only on the subject of Smith did he mellow ever so slightly, shifting from prose to poetry. "You look at Dr. King and Malcolm X," says Carlos. "Each of those men had different methodologies for dealing with the complexities of society. But both came to the fight with courage. When the dust settles, O.K., Tommie Smith and I walk together for eternity, but we never got the chance to be together." With that, Carlos ended our conversation, but for this: He added suddenly, "Hey, Tim. I'm done. That's all I got. O.K.? That's it. O.K.?" O.K. The Mexico City protest was not spontaneous. It was part of an 18-month movement organized by Edwards. He had been an athlete at San Jose State, and that is where he first began organizing student protests. A boycott of the 1968 Olympics by black U.S. athletes had been discussed privately, and the idea went public after Smith won two medals at the World University Games in Tokyo in September '67, when Smith affirmed the possibility to a Japanese reporter. In late November the vague boycott talks coalesced into the formation, under Edwards, of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), which made four demands: the expulsion of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympics; the removal of IOC president Avery Brundage of the U.S., who had vigorously supported the awarding of the 1936 Games to Hitler's Germany; the hiring of more black coaches at college sports programs; and the restoration of Muhammad Ali's heavyweight championship title (which had been stripped in April '67 after he refused induction into the Army). In late 1967, Smith and his San Jose State teammate Lee Evans, a 400‑meter runner, committed to the boycott. According to an SI story that December, Smith said to Evans as they walked out of Smith's apartment, "All I hope is that this [boycott] does some good, that it doesn't create any chaos." But America was already ablaze in chaos. In the summer of 1967, there were race riots in Detroit and Newark. In January '68, the Tet offensive fueled antiwar sentiment and spurred demonstrations. On April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Two months later, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles. But despite growing frustration among African-Americans, the Mexico City boycott lost steam for many reasons, not least because many athletes didn't want to sacrifice years of training for a cause. They wanted medals. Boycott talk became protest talk, but no roles were assigned. Athletes would make their own choices. Ten days before the opening ceremony, at a student protest in Mexico City's Tlatelolco plaza, government troops killed scores of protestors. (The exact number has never been determined.) There was fear in the air when the Games began on Saturday, Oct. 12. Facing death threats at home and if he went to Mexico, Edwards did not attend. He would watch the Games from Montreal, where he was attending a writers' conference. Events willed Smith and Carlos forward. Before the start of the track and field competition, USOC officials arranged for Jesse Owens, a national hero for his performance at the Berlin Games, to speak to the black athletes. He discouraged them from demonstrating. "Jesse told those guys, 'If you do, you'll never get a job,' " says Edwards. "[U.S. 400-meter runner] Vince Matthews stood up and said, 'I already don't have a job.' In 1968 a black athlete didn't get a job. Maybe you got a job at the parks and recreation department in the town where you grew up." But the first black American to win a gold medal embraced Owens's words. On the night of Oct. 14, Hines became the first 100-meter runner to crack the 10-second barrier with fully automatic timing, setting a world record of 9.95. His protest was that he declined to shake Brundage's hand, a significant act that went largely unreported. He stood at attention for the anthem. "Jesse Owens was our leader, and we were under his instructions to do what was right and acceptable," says Hines, now 72 and living in his native Oakland. "I also followed my own instructions with respect to Brundage." Two nights later was the 200 meters. Pressure was building within the OPHR. Hines had not been a part of the OPHR meetings. On the afternoon of the 16th, Carlos and Smith won their 200-meter semifinals. Carlos had run a hand-timed 19.7 seconds, a world record, at the second of two Olympic trials, in the 7,382-foot altitude of Echo Summit, Calif., in September. (That mark was later disallowed because he had worn Puma spikes that were deemed too advantageous.) Carlos entered as the favorite, a status solidified when Smith tweaked a groin muscle decelerating past the finish in his semi. (In videos he can be seen limping off the track.) After the heat Smith retreated to a training room with Bud Winter, his college coach. "Bud loved ice," says Smith. "He put ice all over my leg." As Smith lay on a trainer's table, Evans approached. They had met as adolescents working the fields near Smith's home in Lemoore and Evans's in Madera. "Smith!" Tommie recalls Evans shouting at him. "We picked cotton, we cut grapes. You gonna let this stop you? You better get out there and win that race." Smith started from lane 3, with Carlos in lane 4. These were the first Olympic track races on an artificial surface rather than on cinders or on dirt. Smith ran a cautious turn, protecting his groin injury; Carlos, the more powerful sprinter, scorched the bend, swallowed up the stagger on the third U.S. starter, Larry Questad, and reached the straightaway with a one-meter lead over Smith. "I was in trouble," says Smith. "I was way behind the fastest man in the world." But with 80 meters to run, Smith burst forward and delivered 60 meters that are among the fastest by any human. Carlos turned to look as Smith shot past (more on this). Smith was a breathtaking runner—knees lifting, shoulders slightly hunched, the rest of his body placid. Where Bolt was a fury of movement and power, Smith was serene. Ten meters from the line, Smith raised his arms high and wide, then took his last seven strides that way. The automatic timer first froze at 19.78, and then was adjusted to 19.83. With Carlos's previous mark disallowed, Smith's time became the world record, and it stood for 11 years, and there's little doubt he left time on the track by prematurely celebrating. Carlos, staggering at the line, lost the silver to Norman but comfortably took the bronze. Soon afterward came the medal ceremony. The gloves. The socks. The moment. In the years that followed, Smith and Carlos would be seen as twins in a reductive narrative: tall black men with goatees, fast runners, militants. They were painted with the broadest of brushes and turned into caricatures of the angry black man, reviled and feared by many. The reality was different: Aside from being two of the fastest runners on earth, they had little else in common. Smith was born in Clarksville, Texas, the seventh of 12 children; his family came to California on a labor bus when he was seven. They settled in -Lemoore, worked in the fields and went to church on Sundays. Tommie was serious, thoughtful, pious. Lynda Huey arrived at San Jose State two years after Smith, a blonde sprinter raised in San Jose. They dated for a while and later became close friends before drifting apart in the 1990s. "When I met Tommie," says Huey, "he was very aware of his place in society. He didn't think we should be seen together, a black man and a white girl. He would leave the apartment first, and tell me to wait 15 minutes." Smith's track career was a runaway success. At one time he concurrently held world records for 200 meters, 220 yards and 400 meters. And if he was quiet, he was not unaware. In 1966, on the day that he set records in the 200 and the 220, he participated in a civil rights march in East Palo Alto. "I was a college student," says Smith. "I was no dummy. And I knew racism." SMITH AND CARLOS WERE TURNED INTO THE CARICATURES OF THE ANGRY BLACK MAN. BUT ASIDE FROM BEING TWO OF THE FASTEST MEN ON EARTH, THEY HAD LITTLE ELSE IN COMMON. - Carlos was born one day short of a year after Smith and hardened by realities that only New York City can confer. In his 2011 autobiography, The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World, written with Dave Zirin, he describes his childhood as a frenetic hustle, whether stealing food off freight trains (and giving it to poor families), playing the numbers for money or singing with his friends outside the Savoy Ballroom. His life and Smith's were different versions of black men growing up in 1950s and '60s America. Carlos earned a track scholarship to East Texas State, spent two years there and then moved home before transferring out West in 1968. Carlos wrote in his book that it was Edwards who had encouraged the move at a meeting in New York City in January '68, where Carlos says he also met Dr. King. Says Edwards, "I didn't know, or know of, John Carlos prior to him showing up at San Jose State in May 1968. He quickly became one of the most ardent and vociferous advocates of the OPHR. Carlos came on board in May 1968—four months before the Olympic trials at Lake Tahoe—and I'm glad he did." The arrival of Carlos changed the atmosphere at San Jose State, which was already known as Speed City. "It had been Tommie's kingdom," says Huey. "Then John came, and the energy was different. John's personality could be scary. And Tommie didn't want to be a part of that. I don't think they were ever friends." Carlos was the archetype of the trash-talking, big-stoned sprinter. In a 1991 retrospective, SI's Kenny Moore, who was a marathoner on the 1968 and '72 Olympic teams, called Carlos "a fountain of jive." Dick Fosbury, the gold medalist in the high jump at the '68 Games, became friends with Carlos and Smith at Team USA training camps that summer. "John Carlos was a street-smart, very confident, fun guy to be around," says Fosbury. "He had a walk, this strut, the way he carried himself. I was from small-town Oregon. I had never known anybody like 'Los. He struck me as a smart guy who could handle himself and any situation that came up. Tommie was thoughtful and a gentleman. They were different guys whose paths crossed." Their appearance on the stand remains riveting to this day, every element significant. Single shoes and bare feet covered only in black socks, signifying poverty at home. Carlos's beads, recalling the lynchings of black men. Smith's black scarf, highlighting a deep identity with his race. The gloves, the fists shoved upward for the world to see, suggesting defiance and unity. Edwards watched from an apartment in Montreal. He started the movement, but he takes no credit for the moment. "That was them," he says. "I didn't know what they were going to do. They had a monumental thing in front of them. First, somebody had to win. Then they had to wrestle with the whole issue of what to do. There was no clear path, no silver staircase. The scope of the demonstration: the beads, the shoes, the gloves. The courage and the commitment that they showed. They deserve every accolade that they get. They deserve to be the faces of a movement that defined an era." Smith and Carlos knew they would protest somehow; they just weren't sure what form it would take. They have never publicly agreed on who devised the specifics, but they agree that it came together only after the race, in the well of the stadium. "In the dungeon," says Smith. Smith's wife, Denise, had bought a pair of black gloves (Smith wore the right, Carlos the left). Carlos's wife, Kim, had brought beads with her from the U.S. Over the years each man has taken credit for orchestrating the moment. And again, the outcome overwhelms the details. In the end, they were together. At the first notes of the anthem, both men turned 90 degrees to the right and struck their poses. Carlos has said that his arm was bent to shield his face from sniper fire, Smith that his posture was ramrod straight as a remnant of his ROTC training. Smith told me, "I was afraid the whole time. I prayed. I said the Lord's Prayer all the way through. Then I listened to the national anthem, because that's a powerful thing, hearing that anthem knowing how many people died so that belief could remain a part of America."" -Tim Layden

Everyone Made Money Off My N.C.A.A. Career, Except Me

"Update: On October 29, 2019, the N.C.A.A. Board of Governors voted unanimously to start the process of allowing college athletes to profit from their names, images and likenesses, provided distinctions between amateur and professional athletes continue. An exuberant top-scoring floor routine by U.C.L.A.'s Katelyn Ohashi went viral this year, making her one of the most famous college gymnasts ever. But N.C.A.A rules prevented Ohashi from making any money from the performance. In this Video Op-Ed, Ohashi argues that college students should be given the ability to earn income from their athletic achievement. Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed a law to do just that. The Fair Pay to Play Act, would allow college athletes to strike endorsement deals, a move that would transform the entire business model of college sports. Changing the rules would be especially beneficial for women and athletes in sports that lack professional leagues. Sign up for David Leonhardt's newsletter David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning. Continue reading the main story But California's changes aren't scheduled to take effect until 2023, and that leaves the N.C.A.A. plenty of time to mount challenges to the law. If the law is upheld, the N.C.A.A. will have to decide whether to penalize California's universities with fines, or even expel them from the association. For now, California is betting that the huge size of its college system, and its influence in college sports, will make that impossible." -By Katelyn Ohashi

Baseball's culture clash: Vast majority of brawls involve differing ethnicities

A scene from the Texas Rangers' clubhouse at Oakland's Coliseum last week neatly captured the blending of cultures that's so prevalent in baseball. As Shin-Soo Choo highlights flashed on a TV screen, a group of seven Latin players sitting around a table - some born in the U.S., others abroad - howled in delight while the Korean outfielder yelled "take that'' in Spanish at the sight of every line drive. Baseball teams regularly bring together people from diverse backgrounds striving for a common cause, which in the best of circumstances results in the quintessential melting pot. But when the dynamic changes and the bonding element is replaced by the fire of competition, a different kind of brew arises and sometimes boils over. A USA TODAY Sports study of 67 bench-clearing incidents in Major League Baseball over the past five seasons found the main antagonists hailed from different ethnic backgrounds in 87% of the cases.Just more than half of them - 34 - pitted white Americans against foreign-born Latinos. Another four featured white Americans and U.S.-born Latinos. The figures are startling in a sport where white Americans compose about 60-65% of the population. Based on Opening-day figures, most of the rest is made up of players born outside the U.S. (26.5%) - the vast majority from Latin countries - African Americans (8%) and an undetermined number of Latinos born on U.S. soil. The season that will conclude Sunday has taken the squabbles to an even higher level, with all 16 bench-clearing instances pitting adversaries of different ethnicity. The Kansas City Royals were involved in four such episodes in the season's first three weeks, and Dominican-born pitcher Yordano Ventura was a participant in three of them, against Mike Trout, Brett Lawrie (Canadian) and Adam Eaton. In MLB playoffs, flaws create a parity party Fritz Polite, former president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport and a consultant to the NFL, said that while the institutionalized aspects of baseball are still dominated by whites, the participants have changed. "Whites still constitute the majority of the league, but there might be frictions with this slow tilt of percentages,'' Polite said. "It's not quite tilted yet, but it's leaning that way.'' Baseball confrontations often start with a hitter getting plunked, and though there may be several reasons for their high rate among different ethnic groups, many cases point to a culture clash. Baseball has long held to a tradition of unwritten rules of etiquette whose interpretation may vary, with factors such as age and country of origin as part of the mix. How much is a hitter allowed to "pimp'' or admire a home run? When is a bat-flip acceptable and when is it offensive? To what extent can a pitcher celebrate getting a big out? What's the difference between rejoicing over a favorable play and showing up the other team? What kind of actions demand retaliation? Nobody knows for sure, but there are consequences - typically in the form of a fastball to the ribs or a hard slide - for those who break the code. "With it being an unwritten rule, there's unwritten definitions to a celebration or a taunt,'' said well-traveled outfielder Jonny Gomes, now with the Royals. "It's in the eye of the beholder.'' And the application of the rules may depend on which uniform the supposed instigator wears. What irritates an opponents may be deemed amusing or colorful by a teammate. Houston Astros outfielder Carlos Gomez, a main participant in four dugout-emptying episodes in the last three seasons, is beloved by teammates, who feed off his energy and all-out hustle and defend his right to express himself on the field. MLB making inroads to attract African Americans Astros pitcher Dallas Keuchel calls him "personable and probably one of the better teammates I've seen.'' Opponents, on the other hand, often get irked over Gomez's flamboyant ways. Less than a month after joining the Astros via a July 30 trade with the Milwaukee Brewers, Gomez got into a yelling match with the New York Yankees dugout after displaying frustration over making an out in a blowout. Gomez, a Dominican native, argues that he doesn't try to disrespect opponents and notes that he never looks in their direction when celebrating a good deed. He'll even tip his hat to an opposing pitcher who has done especially masterful work in getting him out. "Why can a pitcher show you his emotions and you can't show yours to him? Those are baseball rules from a different time,'' Gomez told USA TODAY Sports in Spanish. "It gets to the point where, when you're by yourself, you think, 'What did I do? I didn't do anything inappropriate.' It's a bit frustrating, because all I've ever done is play the game with passion, with desire, with love, giving it my all, and a lot of people take it the wrong way.'' Count San Diego Padres pitcher Bud Norris among them. In a conversation about what's proper on-field behavior and what's not, Norris mentioned Gomez as a particularly egregious violator of the rules. While praising Gomez's ability, Norris said some of his actions are disrespectful. When told the large majority of the benches-clearing incidents involved players of different backgrounds, Norris nodded knowingly. "I think it's a culture shock,'' Norris said. "This is America's game. This is America's pastime, and over the last 10-15 years we've seen a very big world influence in this game, which we as a union and as players appreciate. We're opening this game to everyone that can play. However, if you're going to come into our country and make our American dollars, you need to respect a game that has been here for over a hundred years, and I think sometimes that can be misconstrued. There are some players that have antics, that have done things over the years that we don't necessarily agree with. "I understand you want to say it's a cultural thing or an upbringing thing. But by the time you get to the big leagues, you better have a pretty good understanding of what this league is and how long it's been around.'' After the episode in New York, Astros manager A.J. Hinch said baseball sometimes gets caught in between wanting to be entertaining and traditional. Those in the latter camp, often veteran players, usually feel compelled to play the role of rules police. In his final season with the Atlanta Braves, in 2013, Yankees catcher Brian McCann twice confronted opposing players he felt had pimped a home run too much, once Gomez and once Miami Marlins pitcher Jose Fernandez. San Francisco Giants left-hander Madison Bumgarner, only 26 but already a six-year veteran, has twice this season yelled at hitters - the Los Angeles Dodgers' Alex Guerrero and the Texas Rangers' Delino DeShields - simply for acting upset when they popped up against him. The incident with DeShields prompted the dugouts to empty, and Bumgarner wound up exchanging words with Rangers third baseman Adrian Beltre. Alan Klein, a professor of sociology at Northeastern University in Boston who has written two books on Dominican baseball, said antagonism against a different ethnic group may be harbored within the clubhouse and come out against opponents on the field. "I think that's more likely to come from white players than from Latin players,'' said Klein, speaking generally, not about any specific players. "There are white guys who celebrate exuberantly. But when the guy happens to have slightly darker skin, I think it becomes part of something larger. It's not just a guy celebrating, it's a Dominican celebrating.'' While there's a certain uniformity to the way the game is played in the U.S., the standards are quite different in other countries. In Korea, for example, bat-flipping is commonplace, without negative repercussions. In Latin countries, the pros typically play more to the crowd, and actions that are often called "antics'' in the U.S. are regarded as simply part of the show. Dominican-born reliever Fernando Abad of the Oakland Athletics said players often "dog'' or taunt each other, but it's considered fun, not disrespectful. "Baseball back home is very different than here,'' Abad said. "In Venezuela it's the same as in the Dominican, where players gesticulate and point a lot. Fans expect it. They're used to seeing the players do that. It's part of the custom.'' Rangers catcher Chris Gimenez, who has Spanish ancestry but was born and raised in Gilroy, Calif., just south of San Jose, said his experience playing winter ball in the DR and Venezuela was "an eye-opener.'' The fervor and exuberance he saw made it clear baseball is more than just a game in those countries, and he developed an understanding of what it's like to grow up in that kind of setting. "In Latin American countries, baseball is your life,'' said Gimenez, who does not speak Spanish. "There's just a love and passion for that, and it shows on the field. To be able to see that and be immersed in the culture and witness it first-hand, it helps you to understand it. I feel like that's why I have a little bit of a soft spot for it.'' Gomez would like to hear more sympathetic voices like that, but he's not about to change how he plays regardless. He might not have developed into a two-time All-Star otherwise. Gomez also points out Latin players are hardly the only ones who display boundless emotion. AL MVP favorite Josh Donaldson of the Toronto Blue Jays, the A's Lawrie and Cincinnati Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips stand out as players with a distinctive style. Not surprisingly, they've drawn the ire of opponents at times as well. Phillips was one of the main antagonists in the ugly brawls between the Reds and St. Louis Cardinals in August 2010. Phillips didn't get thrown at by a pitcher as part of that scuffle, which started when he and Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina exchanged words, but contends he's a favorite target of opponents. Since his first season with Cincinnati in 2006, Phillips has been hit by 72 pitches, nearly twice as many as the closest Red. "When they want to hit somebody on our team, they always want to hit me. I know that for a fact,'' said Phillips, who is African American. "I don't know why I'm always the one to get hit, but I take it as a compliment. But I don't like getting hit. It sucks.'' The purpose pitch remains the weapon of choice for laying down the laws of the game. Gomez, for example, believes it was no accident that lefty Paul Maholm hit him three times before their matchup of Sept. 25, 2013. When Gomez homered off Maholm in that game, he yelled at the pitcher as he rounded the bases, leading to the encounter with McCann. Gomez defends his actions that day as taking out his frustrations for getting hit, and he says displays of flair and exhilaration have become more accepted over time. But he notes that players' backgrounds do have an impact on how they approach the game. The large majority of American players, he points out, have much better educational opportunities than their counterparts born in Latin countries, who often carry the economic survival of their families on their shoulders. That's how Gomez felt when he first arrived in the U.S. in 2004 as a scared and homesick 18-year-old, desperately missing his relatives but knowing he had to forge ahead without them. That fuels some of the fire he plays with. "We learn to play the game a different way than they do,'' Gomez said. "They play the game by the book, and I don't mean that as a criticism. We learn to play the game with our ability, with our passion. That's the difference.'' Contributing: Bob Nightengale, Joe Lemire and Scott Boeck" -Jorge L.Ortiz

The Meaning of Serena Williams

"There is no more exuberant winner than Serena Williams. She leaps into the air, she laughs, she grins, she pumps her fist, she points her index finger to the sky, signaling she's No. 1. Her joy is palpable. It brings me to my feet, and I grin right back at her, as if I've won something, too. Perhaps I have. There is a belief among some African-Americans that to defeat racism, they have to work harder, be smarter, be better. Only after they give 150 percent will white Americans recognize black excellence for what it is. But of course, once recognized, black excellence is then supposed to perform with good manners and forgiveness in the face of any racist slights or attacks. Black excellence is not supposed to be emotional as it pulls itself together to win after questionable calls. And in winning, it's not supposed to swagger, to leap and pump its fist, to state boldly, in the words of Kanye West, ''That's what it is, black excellence, baby.'' Imagine you have won 21 Grand Slam singles titles, with only four losses in your 25 appearances in the finals. Imagine that you've achieved two ''Serena Slams'' (four consecutive Slams in a row), the first more than 10 years ago and the second this year. A win at this year's U.S. Open would be your fifth and your first calendar-year Grand Slam — a feat last achieved by Steffi Graf in 1988, when you were just 6 years old. This win would also break your tie for the most U.S. Open titles in the Open era, surpassing the legendary Chris Evert, who herself has called you ''a phenomenon that once every hundred years comes around.'' Imagine that you're the player John McEnroe recently described as ''the greatest player, I think, that ever lived.'' Imagine that, despite all this, there were so many bad calls against you, you were given as one reason video replay needed to be used on the courts. Imagine that you have to contend with critiques of your body that perpetuate racist notions that black women are hypermasculine and unattractive. Imagine being asked to comment at a news conference before a tournament because the president of the Russian Tennis Federation, Shamil Tarpischev, has described you and your sister as ''brothers'' who are ''scary'' to look at. Imagine. The word ''win'' finds its roots in both joy and grace. Serena's grace comes because she won't be forced into stillness; she won't accept those racist projections onto her body without speaking back; she won't go gently into the white light of victory. Her excellence doesn't mask the struggle it takes to achieve each win. For black people, there is an unspoken script that demands the humble absorption of racist assaults, no matter the scale, because whites need to believe that it's no big deal. But Serena refuses to keep to that script. Somehow, along the way, she made a decision to be excellent while still being Serena. She would feel what she feels in front of everyone, in response to anyone. At Wimbledon this year, for example, in a match against the home favorite Heather Watson, Serena, interrupted during play by the deafening support of Watson, wagged her index finger at the crowd and said, ''Don't try me.'' She will tell an audience or an official that they are disrespectful or unjust, whether she says, simply, ''No, no, no'' or something much more forceful, as happened at the U.S. Open in 2009, when she told the lineswoman, ''I swear to God I am [expletive] going to take this [expletive] ball and shove it down your [expletive] throat.'' And in doing so, we actually see her. She shows us her joy, her humor and, yes, her rage. She gives us the whole range of what it is to be human, and there are those who can't bear it, who can't tolerate the humanity of an ordinary extraordinary person. In the essay ''Everybody's Protest Novel,'' James Baldwin wrote, ''our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult — that is, accept it.'' To accept the self, its humanity, is to discard the white racist gaze. Serena has freed herself from it. But that doesn't mean she won't be emotional or hurt by challenges to her humanity. It doesn't mean she won't battle for the right to be excellent. There is nothing wrong with Serena, but surely there is something wrong with the expectation that she be ''good'' while she is achieving greatness. Why should Serena not respond to racism? In whose world should it be answered with good manners? The notable difference between black excellence and white excellence is white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism. Imagine. Two years ago, recovering from cancer and to celebrate my 50th birthday, I flew from LAX to J.F.K. during Serena's semifinal match at the U.S. Open with the hope of seeing her play in the final. I had just passed through a year when so much was out of my control, and Serena epitomized not so much winning as the pure drive to win. I couldn't quite shake the feeling (I still can't quite shake it) that my body's frailty, not the cancer but the depth of my exhaustion, had been brought on in part by the constant onslaught of racism, whether something as terrible as the killing of Trayvon Martin or something as mundane as the guy who let the door slam in my face. The daily grind of being rendered invisible, or being attacked, whether physically or verbally, for being visible, wears a body down. Serena's strength and focus in the face of the realities we shared oddly consoled me. That Sunday in Arthur Ashe Stadium at the women's final, though the crowd generally seemed pro-Serena, the man seated next to me was cheering for the formidable tall blonde Victoria Azarenka. I asked him if he was American. ''Yes," he said.''We're at the U.S. Open. Why are you cheering for the player from Belarus?'' I asked. ''Oh, I just want the match to be competitive,'' he said. After Serena lost the second set, at the opening of the third, I turned to him again, and asked him, no doubt in my own frustration, why he was still cheering for Azarenka. He didn't answer, as was his prerogative. By the time it was clear that Serena was likely to win, his seat had been vacated. I had to admit to myself that in those moments I needed her to win, not just in the pure sense of a fan supporting her player, but to prove something that could never be proven, because if black excellence could cure us of anything, black people — or rather this black person — would be free from needing Serena to win. ''You don't understand me,'' Serena Williams said with a hint of impatience in her voice. ''I'm just about winning.'' She and I were facing each other on a sofa in her West Palm Beach home this July. She looked at me with wariness as if to say, Not you, too. I wanted to talk about the tennis records that she is presently positioned either to tie or to break and had tried more than once to steer the conversation toward them. But she was clear: ''It's not about getting 22 Grand Slams,'' she insisted. Before winning a calendar-year Grand Slam and matching Steffi Graf's record of 22 Slams, Serena would have to win seven matches and defend her U.S. Open title; those were the victories that she was thinking about. She was wearing an enviable pink jumpsuit with palm trees stamped all over it as if to reflect the trees surrounding her estate. It was a badass outfit, one only someone of her height and figure could rock. She explained to me that she learned not to look ahead too much by looking ahead. As she approached 18 Grand Slam wins in 2014, she said, ''I went too crazy. I felt I had to even up with Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.'' Instead, she didn't make it past the fourth round at the Australian Open, the second at the French Open or the third at Wimbledon. She tried to change her tactics and focused on getting only to the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open. Make it to the second week and see what happens, she thought. ''I started thinking like that, and then I got to 19. Actually I got to 21 just like that, so I'm not thinking about 22.'' She raised her water bottle to her lips, looking at me over its edge, as if to give me time to think of a different line of questioning. Three years ago she partnered with the French tennis coach Patrick Mouratoglou, and I've wondered if his coaching has been an antidote to negotiating American racism, a dynamic that informed the coaching of her father, Richard Williams. He didn't want its presence to prevent her and Venus from winning. In his autobiography, ''Black and White: The Way I See It,'' he describes toughening the girls' ''skin'' by bringing ''busloads of kids from the local schools into Compton to surround the courts while Venus and Serena practiced. I had the kids call them every curse word in the English language, including '******,' '' he writes. ''I paid them to do it and told them to 'do their worst.' '' His focus on racism meant that the sisters were engaged in two battles on and off the court. That level of vigilance, I know from my own life, can drain you. It's easier to shut up and pretend it's not happening, as the bitterness and stress build up. Mouratoglou shifted Serena's focus to records (even if, as she prepares for a Slam, she says she can't allow herself to think about them). Perhaps it's not surprising that she broke her boycott against Indian Wells, where the audience notoriously booed her with racial epithets in 2001, during their partnership. Serena's decisions now seem directed toward building her legacy. Mouratoglou has insisted that she can get to 24 Grand Slams, which is the most won by a single player — Margaret Court — to date. Serena laughed as she recalled one of her earliest conversations with Mouratoglou. She told him: ''I'm cool. I want to play tennis. I hate to lose. I want to win. But I don't have numbers in my head.'' He wouldn't allow that. ''Now we are getting numbers in your head,'' he told her. I asked how winning felt for her. I was imagining winning as a free space, one where the unconscious racist shenanigans of umpires, or the narratives about her body, her ''unnatural'' power, her perceived crassness no longer mattered. Unless racism destroyed the moment of winning so completely, as it did at Indian Wells, I thought it had to be the rare space free of all the stresses of black life. But Serena made it clear that she doesn't desire to dissociate from her history and her culture. She understands that even when she's focused only on winning, she is still representing. ''I play for me,'' Serena told me, ''but I also play and represent something much greater than me. I embrace that. I love that. I want that. So ultimately, when I am out there on the court, I am playing for me.'' Her next possible victory is at the U.S. Open, the major where she has been involved in the most drama — everything from outrageous line calls to probations and fines. Serena admitted to losing her cool in the face of some of what has gone down there. In 2011, for example, a chair umpire, Eva Asderaki, ruled against Serena for yelling ''Come on'' before a point was completed, and as Serena described it to me, she ''clutched her pearls'' and told Asderaki not to look at her. But she said in recent years she finally felt embraced by the crowd. ''No more incidents?'' I asked. Before she could answer, we both laughed, because of course it's not wholly in her control. Then suddenly Serena stopped. ''I don't want any incidents there,'' she said. ''But I'm always going to be myself. If anything happens, I'm always going to be myself, true to myself.'' I'm counting on it, I thought. Because just as important to me as her victories is her willingness to be an emotionally complete person while also being black. She wins, yes, but she also loses it. She jokes around, gets angry, is frustrated or joyous, and on and on. She is fearlessly on the side of Serena, in a culture that that has responded to living while black with death. This July, the London School of Marketing (L.S.M.) released its list of the most marketable sports stars, which included only two women in its Top 20: Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams. They were ranked 12th and 20th. Despite decisively trailing Serena on the tennis court (Serena leads in their head-to-head matchups 18-2, and has 21 majors and 247 weeks at No. 1 to Sharapova's five majors and 21 weeks at number 1), Sharapova has a financial advantage off the court. This month Forbes listed her as the highest-paid female athlete, worth more than $29 million to Serena's $24 million. When I asked Chris Evert about the L.S.M. list, she said, ''I think the corporate world still loves the good-looking blond girls.'' It's a preference Evert benefited from in her own illustrious career. I suggested that this had to do with race. Serena, on occasion, has herself been a blonde. But of course, for millions of consumers, possibly not the right kind of blonde. ''Maria was very aware of business and becoming a businesswoman at a much younger stage,'' Evert told me, adding, ''She works hard.'' She also suggested that any demonstration of corporate preference is about a certain ''type'' of look or image, not whiteness in general. When I asked Evert what she made of Eugenie Bouchard, the tall, blond Canadian who has yet to really distinguish herself in the sport, being named the world's most marketable athlete by the British magazine SportsPro this spring, she said, with a laugh, ''Well, there you have it.'' I took her statement to be perhaps a moment of agreement that Serena probably could not work her way to Sharapova's spot on Forbes's list. ''If they want to market someone who is white and blond, that's their choice,'' Serena told me when I asked her about her ranking. Her impatience had returned, but I wasn't sure if it was with me, the list or both. ''I have a lot of partners who are very happy to work with me.'' JPMorgan Chase, Wilson Sporting Goods, Pepsi and Nike are among the partners she was referring to. ''I can't sit here and say I should be higher on the list because I have won more.'' As for Sharapova, her nonrival rival, Serena was diplomatic: ''I'm happy for her, because she worked hard, too. There is enough at the table for everyone.'' There is another, perhaps more important, discussion to be had about what it means to be chosen by global corporations. It has to do with who is worthy, who is desirable, who is associated with the good life. As long as the white imagination markets itself by equating whiteness and blondness with aspirational living, stereotypes will remain fixed in place. Even though Serena is the best, even though she wins more Slams than anyone else, she is only superficially allowed to embody that in our culture, at least the marketable one. But Serena was less interested in the ramifications involved in being chosen, since she had no power in this arena, and more interested in understanding her role in relation to those who came before her: ''We have to be thankful, and we also have to be positive about it so the next black person can be No. 1 on that list,'' she told me. ''Maybe it was not meant to be me. Maybe it's meant to be the next person to be amazing, and I'm just opening the door. Zina Garrison, Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe and Venus opened so many doors for me. I'm just opening the next door for the next person.'' I was moved by Serena's positioning herself in relation to other African-Americans. A crucial component of white privilege is the idea that your accomplishments can be, have been, achieved on your own. The private clubs that housed the tennis courts remained closed to minorities well into the second half of the 20th century. Serena reminded me that in addition to being a phenomenon, she has come out of a long line of African-Americans who battled for the right to be excellent in a such a space that attached its value to its whiteness and worked overtime to keep it segregated. Serena's excellence comes with the ability to imagine herself achieving a new kind of history for all of us. As long as she remains healthy, she will most likely tie and eventually pass Graf's 22 majors, regardless of what happens at the U.S. Open this year. I want Serena to win, but I know better than to think her winning can end something she didn't start. But Serena is providing a new script, one in which winning doesn't carry the burden of curing racism, in which we win just to win — knowing that it is simply her excellence, baby." -Claudia Rankine

N.C.A.A. Considers Loosening Rules for Athletes Seeking Outside Deals

"The governing body for college sports appeared to soften its long-held stance that athletes should not profit from their fame. But it gave no details and said any rule changes required much more discussion. ATLANTA — The N.C.A.A. Board of Governors, under increasing pressure from legislatures around the country, voted Tuesday to pave the way for college athletes to profit off their fame, but the decision came with an elephant-size caveat: Any policy changes must maintain clear distinctions between amateur athletes and professional ones. The vote was a surprising turn by the N.C.A.A., which for years has resisted calls for athletes to be compensated for the use of their names, images and likenesses. The board was responding to a report from a committee studying the issue and was expected to do little more than give the committee extra time to do its work. The N.C.A.A. president, Mark Emmert, acknowledged that the passage of a bill in California that would permit sponsorships, the emergence of more than a dozen others like it nationwide and calls for change from prominent athletes like LeBron James had nudged his organization into action. Marc Stein's Newsletter Marc Stein has covered Jordan. He's covered Kobe. And LeBron vs. the Warriors. Go behind the N.B.A.'s curtain with basketball's foremost expert. Continue reading the main story "There's no question that the legislative efforts in Congress and in states has been a catalyst to change," Emmert said on Tuesday. "It's clear that the schools and the presidents are listening and have heard loud and clear that everybody agrees that this is an area that needs to be addressed." HOW WE GOT HERE Read about how the law known as the Fair Pay to Play Act came together, and get some answers to key questions. How drastic that change will be, though, remains in doubt. The N.C.A.A. committee — formed in May in response to the California bill — will continue to hash out how far the changes will go and how they will be enforced. You have 1 free article remaining. Subscribe to The Times The board's vote on Tuesday resulted in guidelines for the committee that included: affirming that athletes are not employees; treating financial opportunities for athletes the same as those for non-athletes unless there is "a compelling reason" not to do so; ensuring that new rules be transparent and enforceable; and prohibiting inducements to recruits beyond the cost of attendance. The committee will issue another report at the N.C.A.A.'s annual convention in January in Anaheim, Calif., and then final recommendations at a board of governors meeting in April. The board directed each of the three N.C.A.A. divisions to have a plan in place by January 2021. The California measure, which was written in a way to allow lawmakers to consider amendments based on any N.C.A.A. changes, will take effect in January 2023. "How can you hold onto it where it's fair for the students, but fair for the schools and in a way that supports this commercial enterprise that has made all these opportunities available?" said Val Ackerman, the commissioner of the Big East Conference and a co-chair of the N.C.A.A. committee on name, image and likeness issues. Opinion | Katelyn Ohashi, Lindsay Crouse and Alexander Stockton Everyone Made Money Off My N.C.A.A. Career, Except Me Oct. 9, 2019 N.C.A.A. Athletes Could Be Paid Under New California Law Sept. 30, 2019 Paying College Athletes: Answers to Key Questions on New Law Sept. 30, 2019 Nancy Skinner, a California state senator and an author of the bill that was signed into law last month, said she was cautiously optimistic about the N.C.A.A.'s move. "The devil is in the details," Skinner said in a telephone interview. "We'll have to see what the N.C.A.A. actually has in mind. I think in California, we've been very clear — we're not going to accept arbitrary limitations on an athlete's ability to generate income." The N.C.A.A.'s vote generated a great deal of attention from politicians on Tuesday: United States Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, responded by suggesting that athletic scholarships should be taxed like income, and the Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang asserted that the N.C.A.A. should go farther and allow athletes to receive some of the revenue they generate for their colleges. "We clearly have the N.C.A.A.'s attention," said Representative Mark Walker, a Republican from North Carolina who has sponsored a federal name, image and likeness bill. "Now, we need to have their action." The N.C.A.A. now must grapple with how to develop a coherent set of rules that can apply to a fencer at Yale just as it does to a football star at Alabama. It must also try to anticipate what financial opportunities might arise in an ever-changing social media landscape. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story The thorniness is nowhere more apparent than in recruiting. John DeGioia, the president of Georgetown who serves on the N.C.A.A. board of governors and on the committee, imagines a continuum for what will be permitted and what will not. For example, an endorsement deal with a local hardware store for an Olympic-caliber field hockey player might be permitted. A six-figure endorsement deal for a Kentucky basketball recruit from a booster who owns a car dealership probably would not. "That's one of the biggest elephants in the room," Gene Smith, the athletic director at Ohio State and Ackerman's co-chair of the committee, said of recruiting inducements. The 19-member committee has met three times in person and four times by conference call, as well as in smaller groups. Its members have spoken with college presidents, athletic directors, athletes, compliance directors, consultants, licensing agents and even social influencers to better grasp what is in play. Among the possibilities: creating a clearinghouse that would sign off on marketing opportunities. One consideration that was discussed only in a cursory manner on Tuesday was legal strategy. But Emmert said that would get more attention soon. In recent years, the N.C.A.A., spurred by the courts and by public opinion, has begun to ease restrictions on athletes that once seemed ironclad. It has permitted colleges to grant "cost of attendance" stipends to augment scholarships. It has loosened restrictions on transfers, providing athletes more opportunities to change schools without having to sit out a season. And it has allowed for more meals and access to mental health treatment. Though the courts have chipped away at the N.C.A.A.'s powers, they have largely refrained from upending the amateurism model that was put in place long before lucrative television contracts, shoe company deals and sponsorships agreements for football and men's basketball built college sports into a billion-dollar empire. But the wave of pending legislation had clearly unnerved the N.C.A.A. "The times are changing, and we certainly hear what's being said out there," said Michael V. Drake, the president of Ohio State and the chairman of the N.C.A.A. board of governors. "It's appropriate for the organization to modernize itself."" -By Billy Witz

Jeremy Lin row reveals deep-seated racism against Asian Americans

"The racist language directed at the NBA Asian American basketball player has been quite something to behold. f the many questions that have been asked about the jaw-dropping success of the New York Knicks' Jeremy Lin, who went from a barely known basketball player to one of the most famous athletes in America in a single game, one that has yet to be posed is: what is the connection between Lin and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's? While that aesthetically beautiful but morally bankrupt film is primarily remembered for Audrey Hepburn's Givenchy wardrobe, it is Rooney's turn as the speech-impaired upstairs neighbour, Mr Yunioshi, that, for me, really gives the movie its true flavour. It's hard to call a film glamorous when it features a white actor playing an Asian stereotype that would put a Tintin cartoon to shame. Which brings us back to Lin. Lin is an Asian American NBA basketball player, a first-generation son of Taiwanese immigrants and a Harvard graduate, the American dream given athletic form. Until 4 February, few even knew his name, but after that evening's game against the New Jersey Nets, in which he scored 25 points, and his continuing near-superhuman run of form ever since, the whole of New York and the American press entered into a state of "Linsanity" to the point that Lin is trying to trademark the coinage. There have been high-profile Asian-American athletes before, Michelle Kwan and Tiger Woods being the most obvious. There have also been Asian players in the NBA before, such as the now-retired 7ft 6in Yao Ming. But Lin is the first American in the league of Chinese or Taiwanese descent and this, it turns out, has been a difficult concept for some to grasp. One shouldn't expect thoughtful sensitivity from professional athletes or the most hysterical wing of the sports media, but the racist language and even flat-out racism directed at Lin has been quite something to behold. "Chink in the armor" was ESPN's take not once but twice when the Knicks lost a game last week, both as a headline added by ESPN writer Anthony Federico and then as a phrase used by the anchor Max Bretos (Federico has since been fired and Bretos received a 30-day suspension.) Those two muppets look the height of sophisticated decorum compared with Foxsports.com writer Jason Whitlock, whose response to Lin's triumph over the Lakers on Friday night was to tweet "Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight", a comment notable for being almost more misogynistic than racist. When the Madison Square Garden Network flashed up a photo of Lin, it superimposed it with a fortune cookie, presumably refraining from adding some chopsticks purely because it didn't have the graphics. Welterweight Floyd Mayweather has never been a modern-day Emily Post but his tweeted thought on Lin last week - "Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he's Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don't get the praise" - was impressive even by his standards. Also, "don't get the praise"? Come on, Floyd, you came ninth in Dancing with the Stars! How much more praise do you want? Nor does one need to look to the morons for examples. Chinstroking journal the Atlantic put forward the charming theory that Lin's success is due to his "philosophical heritage" - ah, so! And so inscrutable, too! Racism in sport is nothing new, as anyone familiar with English football could tell you. But Lin's high-profile success has highlighted a different problem, that of racism against Asian Americans in general. While no one would claim that racism against black people is no longer a problem in America, it is unthinkable that any news network or even half-brained TV presenter would use racial slurs against a black player equivalent to the Asian ones that have been used against Lin. This is because racism against Asians is not confronted as much and therefore is somehow seen as more acceptable - not even racist, even. A survey last year found that Asian American teenagers suffered far more bullying at school than any other demographic: 54% of Asian-American teenagers reported being bullied compared with 31.3% of white teens and 38.4% of black ones. In an extraordinary article in New York magazine last year, Wesley Yang wrote that to be an Asian American means being not just part of a "barely distinguishable" mass of "people who are good at math and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally". Asian Americans are, without question, barely represented culturally. Black roles in Hollywood are still by and large limited to maids, drug dealers and James Earl Jones, but Asian roles are invariable limited to camp villains, martial arts experts, dippy shop owners and exchange students soundtracked with a gong. So the answer to what connects Mickey Rooney and Jeremy Lin is that both reveal a side of America that even this most racially aware country tends to ignore. The difference is that Rooney encouraged those stereotypes, Lin overturns them, yet the response remains the same." -Hadley Freeman

The NFL's push for more black coaches is hurt by nepotism and white boardrooms

The NFL is trying to push diversity in its coaching ranks but the league's widely-praised model for recruiting minorities remains a flawed work-in-progress. he NFL's annual Black Monday, when teams routinely fire coaches as the regular season ends, left the league with a dwindling number of minority coaches. Of the eight coaches who left their position this season, five were minorities: Steve Wilks, Marvin Lewis, Vance Joseph, Hue Jackson and Todd Bowles. One, Wilks, was fired after only one year on the job. While some of those five may well be replaced by other minority coaches, the firings put the league in a difficult position. Roger Goodell, to his credit, has made the advancement of minority coaches one of the crucial issues during his run as NFL commissioner. The Rooney Rule, which requires all teams to interview a minority candidate for its openings at head coach and general manager, has been tweaked and improved. Several teams have adopted internship programs for ex-players looking to start a coaching career, and the league itself has plowed more resources into the development of minority coaches.Still: in a sport where a majority - close to 70% - of the players are black, the NFL now has only three minority head coaches: Mike Tomlin and Anthony Lynn, who are African American, and Ron Rivera, who is Hispanic. Two things can be true at once: there are not enough minority coaches in the NFL, and each of the firings on Monday was justified and reasonable given what we know about job security in football. Joseph strung together back-to-back losing seasons, the first time the Broncos have suffered that ignominy since the early 1970s. Bowles led the Jets to a 24-40 record in his four seasons in New York. Jackson went 3-36-1 in 40 games with the Cleveland Browns. Lewis spent 16 years in Cincinnati, failing to advance the Bengals beyond the opening round of the playoffs, an almost impressively bad accomplishment.Without context, Wilks' firing may seem the harshest: plenty of teams struggle in a coach's debut season. They're often afforded more time, even if only for team leadership to save some face. But Wilks' Cardinals weren't just bad, they were historically awful. Besides, impatience rules in the NFL: the Titans fired Mike Munchak after just one season and a lackluster playoff run.The bigger issue at hand is who is making the hiring-firing decisions, and why that puts minority coaches at a disadvantage when they attempt to jump to head coaching gigs. As of now, there will be only one minority general manager heading into the 2019 coaching cycle, and it is general managers who play a huge part in hiring head coaches. Raiders general manager Reggie McKenzie was fired last month, and legendary Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome is retiring at the end of the season, handing the reins to his longtime assistant Eric DeCosta, who is white. That leaves Chris Grier as the minority general manager in the NFL: he was promoted by the Miami Dolphins on Monday. Diversity at the decision-making level is what will ultimately lead to diversity on the sidelines. "Hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting," wrote Kellogg School of Management professor Lauren Rivera in a 2014 study. "It is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms. Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but culturally similar to themselves." Decision-makers are more likely to hire those who look like them, sound like them, run in the same social circles, or have the same social experiences. The NFL currently has two minority owners. When a person of color walks into a job interview in the NFL, there is a very good chance that they will see a bunch of white faces who have lived different social experiences. So much of this industry revolves around close, personal relationships. Twenty-two of the league's 32 teams have been owned by the same person or family for at least 20 years. They all have coaches and executives they are particularly connected to. Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis didn't hire Jon Gruden because he was the best person for the job. He did so because he liked him. And Gruden didn't oust McKenzie and hire Mike Mayock as his GM because Mayock has a more illustrious track record as a team builder. He did it because he and Mayock share the same sensibilities. In the past, this has worked to aid some minority candidates, too. Tony Dungy, who became the first black head-coach to win the Super Bowl when the Colts beat the Bears in 2007, has long been an advocate for fellow minorities. Dungy populated his own staffs with minority coaches and has consistently used his profile in the game to bring attention to the issue of diversity. And it's worked. Dungy and his former assistants account for a staggering 43% of minority head coaching hires over the past two decades and 39% since the Rooney Rule took effect. That is both sad and encouraging - the same nepotism rules seem to apply to all. Dungy empowered minority assistants, who subsequently went on to become head honchos and empower their own assistants. But there aren't too many minority coaches with Dungy's prestige walking around. The NFL tweaked its rules last year in a bid to prevent the kind of Gruden-Davis backroom deal. Owners are now required to sit in on all head coaching interviews. And gone are the days of the sham, in-house interviews with a person of color, meant only to satisfy the logistics of the Rooney Rule and not the spirit. Goodell and the league office, in a rare moment of leadership, understood the difficult position they were putting such minority coaches in. "You are really stuck between a rock and a hard place," a former African American NFL head coach told CBS Sports in 2016. "You have the pressure from the Fritz Pollard Alliance to take any interview you are offered 'for the good of the cause,' even if you felt like you are just being used. So you don't want to let them down." The league changed the language of the rule. Now owners and decision-makers are required to interview an out-of-house candidate or someone from the league's pre-approved list: the NFL's Career Developmental List. It is a far from perfect solution. But it is a start. One additional issue is the profile of head coaches teams are hiring. More and more they are hiring offensive assistants and quarterback coaches: 15 of the last 20 head coaching hires have had an offensive background. And coaches specializing in offense are overwhelmingly white. In 2018, there were 14 minority coordinators in the NFL, and only two were offensive coordinators. As such, this becomes a fairly simple equation: owners want flashy, exciting hires. An explosive offense is considered more exciting than a feisty defense. There are more white offensive coaches than minority ones. There are more white executives than minorities. People hire candidates with similar backgrounds. Therefore, more white coaches are hired than minority ones, regardless of the make-up of the league generally. All minority candidates have asked for is a fair chance to compete for the top jobs in their sport. To get there, the NFL needs to rethink its model. The Rooney Rule has helped progress, but it remains a flawed rule. Improving diversity at the executive level, and getting more minority coaches into offensive coaching positions is the only way forward." -Oliver Connolly