Education, not pro sports, is almost always the key to a black child’s future

In this father’s loving eyes, there was more to dream for my black son’s future. How about engineering or law or physics?

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Sun-Times Media

My boy was about 6 when he had his professional sports epiphany, which I promptly deflated like a Tom Brady football. “Daddy, I wanna play football when I grow up…”

“Nope… You can’t play football,” I told my son. “You’re not going to be someone’s practice dummy on their way to the NFL.”

OPINION

Harsh? Maybe. But in this father’s loving eyes, there was more to dream for my black son’s future than just football and basketball — and also his good brain to protect. How about engineering or law or physics?

In the next breath, he asked, “Can I play basketball?”

“Yes, son, you can play basketball. You can also run track and cross-country,” I answered, echoing advice I had heard once about taking up a sport you can do for the rest of your life.

I grew up playing basketball and football as a kid on Chicago’s West Side. Like so many other boys, I dreamed of someday making it to the NBA, even if it was for me and my athletic skill set just a pipe dream.

I admit to having sinned with basketball. To having spent long hours on a concrete court — in the rain, cold, sleet or sunbaked heat — hoisting up shots from nearly sunup to well after sundown.

I’m a sports fan. A member of the NFL Sunday-loving dude clan who live for the game and relish every hard-hitting scintillating moment. I’m a former basketball junkie with a still undying love for the game.

And yet, I am admittedly also a hypocrite.

For my deep love of sports isn’t something I ever wanted to necessarily pass on to my kid, especially at the risk of him potentially being smitten by the professional sports bug that consumes far too many black boys. That has become our cultural obsession placed upon a pedestal.

An optical illusion, it causes far too many black boys to spend an inordinate amount of time honing their athletic skills versus sharpening their intellect and their academic or artistic abilities.

Education is the key, not athletics.

Quite frankly, in some ways, I have grown sick of football and basketball. I have come to see professional sports — or at least the idea of making it to the pros — as part of the mass delusion that leads far too many African-American youths, especially from poor neighborhoods, down the path of chasing a dream that for the vast majority of them will prove to be just a mirage.

Indeed across the African-American landscape, the pipe dream is alive and well from where I stand on the sidelines sobered by truth.

The truth that while becoming a professional athlete is not an impossible dream for some of our sons — and daughters — it is for most of them an improbable one. Simply supply and demand — not enough positions.

The truth that there exist beyond the realm of sport endless opportunities and possibilities for careers, success and life. And a college sports scholarship can help pave the way to a good education.

The truth that most black children will not run or dribble or rap and dance their way to success. Not that anything is wrong with anyone of these.

The danger lies in having a one-dimensional perspective. It lies in reducing our children’s possibilities to a pipe dream and in not seizing our role as parents to put books first, not balls.

It lies in realizing that the statistical chances for most of the untold thousands upon thousands of boys who lace up a pair of sneakers turning pro in basketball or football are slim to none.

And 11 years later, we’re betting on physics, not football. 

Email: Author@johnwfountain.com

Send letters to: letters@suntimes.com.

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