Sports

In ‘Raise a Fist, Take a Knee’, John Feinstein tells a story about race and sports that many people love that has yet to be told.


During the 1968 American Football League season, which began five months after Martin Luther King was assassinated on a hotel balcony in Memphis and a month before sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos took off. voice their silent strong voice in the Olympic medal stands in Mexico City, an Unknown Player from the even lesser known Nebraska-Omaha football program played 11 games as a midfielder. for the Denver Broncos, throwing 14 touchdown passes and finishing second in the AFL rookie of the year vote.

Marlin Briscoe never played quarterback in professional football again, although his career lasted until 1976, he won two Super Bowl rings with the Miami Dolphins and was named to the Pro Bowl once. . In his new book “Raise a Fist, Take a Knee,” released on Tuesday, author John Feinstein explains that Briscoe discovered he was no longer a quarterback by showing up at headquarters of the team before the second season when he learned that coach Lou Saban had scheduled a quarterback camp in front of training camp and did not invite Briscoe.

Briscoe arrives and finds Saban “in a meeting”. When it was over, Saban walked out with the team’s quarterbacks coach, two QBs that had been on the roster last season and two others had just been added.

Briscoe told Feinstein: “No one is going to look me in the eye. “In those days, you really couldn’t do much when a coach made a decision… So there was nothing I could do but ask to be released and look for a job. I really thought, given what I did last year, someone would give me a chance. ”
They did, only at wide receivers. He’s only thrown 9 more passes in his career.

The issue of racism in American sports clearly didn’t end with Jackie Robinson breaking the color line of Major League Baseball in 1947 or Duquesne’s Chuck Cooper becoming the first black player drafted by the NBA in 1947. 1950 or Perry Wallace becoming the first black basketball player in the Southeast Conference at Vanderbilt in 1967 or even Kevin Warren becoming the first black commissioner of the Power 5 college athletics convention when he received manage the Big Ten in 2020.

There are some people who want this conversation to go away, even though it still exists as an important issue in the sports world. Although Feinstein has created many of the best-selling books of the 44 books he has written, he told Sporting News that five publishers rejected the idea, one publisher not even bothering to consider the topic. export.

So “Raise a Fist, Take a Knee” may not be the most famous book Feinstein has ever authored. It is the most important.

It’s a big deal spanning a great period in our sports history, it could have filled the pages of an AZ encyclopedia. Carrying out such a project would be difficult even without the political issues surrounding it, which culminated with the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, a tragedy. The play is repeated throughout the pages of Feinstein’s books.

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“A lot of people I really think I need to talk to people I don’t know,” Feinstein said. “Usually when I start writing a book, it’s usually – at least in part – because I know some of the people involved. And obviously I know John Thompson, among others, but the hard part is making a list of the people I want to talk to and realizing that I won’t be able to talk to all of them. I can’t write a complete history… So my first thought was that I would write about how racist this polarized country is, but then when I did my report, I Realizing that is like saying tomorrow is Tuesday. We all know that, don’t we?

“So my goal has changed to try to understand what it’s like to be Black in 2021 – and even celebrities, even athletes, even coaches have to deal with it. face that.”

Feinstein writes that his first real encounter with race in sport was in October 1975, when he was a student at Duke writing part-time for the local newspaper, the Durham Herald-Sun . Feinstein was assigned to cover a Duke game against the Army, and freshman quarterback Mike Dunn entered the game as a substitute and led a massive touchdown that secured the win. Both of Feinstein’s papers focus on Dunn. However, to his surprise when he read the articles, the editors added that Dunn was a “black freshman defender” rather than just a “freshman defender”. Feinstein wrote. When Feinstein told this story to Doug Williams, the first black man to win a Super Bowl as a starter QB, Williams replied, “Boy, you’re naive. Back then, a black quarterback was a big deal all the time.”

During research for the book, Feinstein spoke at length with Thompson, the first in the race for the NCAA men’s basketball championship as head coach, before Thompson’s death in August 2020. Feinstein has interviewed transformative figures like James Harris, the first black man to launch in midfield. in the NFL, Tony Dungy, the first Black coach to win a Super Bowl, and Ozzie Newsome, the first Black general manager in the NFL, who was a tight finish to the Hall of Fame and won two Super Bowls with as a member of the Ravens front office.

“When I was in eighth grade in 1970, I went to practice for the Pop Warner football team,” Newsome told Feinstein. “At practice they told us to go to any set of positions we wanted to try… I started jogging into quarterback – that was where I was. Everyone standing there was white. I stopped and thought, ‘There’s no way they’d let me play midfield.’ I know that Marlin Briscoe had played position for the Broncos in the AFL a few years earlier. I also know he played well and they will make him a wide receiver next season. I went to where the wide receivers were. ”

Feinstein admits in the book he felt himself a curious candidate when he wrote it, but he was encouraged by African-American acquaintances, friends and colleagues. Thompson told Feinstein he “had to” do the book. Kevin Blackistone, who has worked for the Dallas Morning News, Washington Post, ESPN and is a professor at the University of Maryland, explains why Feinstein was able to write it.

“If I had written this book, it would have been vilified by a lot of people because a black guy trying to create racial problems was not there,” Blackistone said. “Some people will accuse you of being a white guy doing the same thing. But it will be different”.

It’s not a criticism of Feinstein’s book that some of the anecdotes are beginning to feel a bit repetitive. It’s a sadder reflection of how even the most prominent and successful African-American men can be forced into the same circumstances, over and over, with only details are changed.

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Nearly all of the main characters Feinstein interviewed were able to share their own stories about how often they were stopped for the DWB: “driving while Negro.”

That is, until he introduced Olympic gold medalist swimmer Cullen Jones, who was questioned by police for walking his favorite dog near the posh neighborhood where he lived.

“I’m driving here on I-95, if I get pulled over by the police I’ll get upset, I’ll get upset because I might get fined. But I wouldn’t be afraid to die,” Feinstein said. “And for most Negroes, if they’re pulled over, especially at night, especially if they’re a man, especially if they’re driving a nice car, the fear goes beyond that. the idea that you will get it. a ticket.

“Everybody I talked to — everyone — had at least one DWB story.”

The book’s title partially refers to the Carlos/Smith protests of 1968, when two men raised their fists in a “Black Power” salute to protest the treatment of African Americans at a It was not long after the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, publicly declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Smith and Carlos were initially expelled from the Olympics; Now there’s a statue honoring their claim on the San Jose State campus, where the two men attended college.

beautiful pictures

Does that mean all existing problems have been resolved after that? Obviously not. The second part of the title refers to the protest of 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the anthem before games of the 2016 NFL season. He initially chose to sit on the bench during the anthem in front of an anthem. exhibition match, then encouraged to kneel by a former Marine, Nate Boyer, who argued that would be “more respectful”.

The following fall, Kaepernick left the league and it turned out that he never got another NFL job. President Donald Trump announced in a speech about “protests” in Alabama that teams should fire any “son of a bitch” who continues to kneel for the song.

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“I’m doing a quarter book in 2017, so I’m at the NFL stadium every Sunday,” Feinstein told SN. “Black people will kneel, white people will boo. White people will complain that they have ruined their football fun. No one interfered with the game in any way, and the game started on time.

“In Baltimore, a week after Trump’s announcement, the players – all the players – knelt before the national anthem, and then stood up during the song. And they still get booed.

“On the one hand, we can see all the tangible ways we’ve made progress, but still in 2018, Lamar Jackson has been told he’s a broad receptacle.”

At least someone credits Jackson, a Louisville Heisman Trophy winner. It happens to be Newsome, one of the few Black executives to have risen to hold such prominent roles in the NFL’s front offices.

“There is still a long way to go,” Feinstein said. “I hope – that will happen after we’re gone – people will eventually look back on this the way people now look at slavery.”





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