As a young, unknown junior faculty member at Washington University, Gerald Early taught introductory black studies to countless undergraduates. I enrolled in one of these courses in the mid-‘80s and recall Early facilitating a discussion about young African-American males’ fixation on playing sports. The consensus among the white students was that young blacks made a mistake in pursuing careers in sports when the odds of success were so slim.
Early disagreed. The mistake, he said, was not preparing a back-up plan by getting a decent education while working towards a career in sports. That was a good but forgettable point, and I probably would have forgotten it, had Early not gone on to say, “What am I going to tell these guys? ‘Be me’? I’m not going to tell them to ‘be me.'” He went on to discuss candidly how long it had taken him to become a humanities professor, how uncertain his future was and how little he was paid.
I have been listening to Gerald Early, closely and with admiration, ever since.
Now a highly successful author, scholar, academic and administrator – arguably the most distinguished professor of humanities at Washington University – Early is still opening eyes with unexpected, edgy insights about race and sports. This happens on every page of his new collection of essays, A Level Playing Field: African-American Athletes and the Republic of Sports (Harvard University Press).
A Level Playing Field is really two collections spliced together. The first half is a series of scholarly lectures Early gave at Harvard University, the second half a group of essays commissioned by less academic venues. He adds an introduction that presents the collection as a unified whole, though they read as stand-alone essays with overlapping subject matter. What really unifies them is Early’s piercing, unpredictable intelligence. As he did in a striking essay about Barack Obama he crafted for a volume of essays he edited last year for Daedalus, Early writes with the sublime confidence and raw candor of a man – very specifically, a black man – who has paid his dues.
Half the book meditates on Jackie Robinson, yet the jacket was designed around its single essay on professional football. This image presents Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb and conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh as a sort of two-headed hydra, a striking visual counterpart to Early’s probing essay about the 2003 incident when Limbaugh lost his new job as ESPN football commentator after making a comment about McNabb and his race. Limbaugh said McNabb was overrated because the liberal media wanted to see a black quarterback succeed – a statement that stirred no on-air rebuttals from his fellow panelists (two of them black), but sparked a controversy that soon had everyone apologizing and ESPN sending Limbaugh back home.
Like the classroom discussion I recall from 25 years ago, this was a forgettable incident that is made memorable by the fact that Gerald Early had something to say about it. Typical of his mature voice – and Early has evolved as a writer, growing more comfortable in a conversational tone, more in control of his erudition – he weighs the event from all sides, finding something surprising from every vantage point. He points out that the black co-hosts came under fire for not calling out Limbaugh on the spot, though Limbaugh had indicted the liberal white media, and so really the white commentators, if anyone, dropped the ball of rebuttal. Even Limbaugh comes off as a human being with a point of view that can be defended, at least in this case, though Early seems to disclose how he really feels about the matter, and the man, in a wicked closing line about the pundit’s dismissal: “Let the fat man swing.”
Lest anyone think they don’t need to read a book of essays that rehashes familiar incidents like that, trust me. Whether Early is writing about a recent racial flap, Jackie Robinson’s testimony about Communism before Congress or the myths of the black quarterback, he offers up a neglected or forgotten fact – and an insightful way of conceptualizing race, sports and how they intersect that will leave you rethinking things. This book stretches the mind of a sports fan the way a brilliant coach expands the game of an athlete. One example among hundreds: “High-performance athletics is perhaps the most theatrical and emotional form of ritualized honor that we have left in the world.”
A few complaints, to keep it real.
For a book written by a noted editor and published by a distinguished university press, it has a number of typos and infelicities. We are told Eagles coach Ray Rhodes was fired after “the 1998 game when the Eagles went 3 and 13” (make that “season”). We learn something else about “Eagles offensive Ted Marchibroda” (make that “offensive coordinator”). Early closes an essay on Curt Flood by observing that, thanks to his legal case, “the situation in baseball significantly changed for the better for the players” – a clunky line Early would mark as “awkward” in an undergraduate’s essay. As he would this line, which sounds translated badly from another language: “Flood’s case carried not any of this resonance.” Even good editors need good editors.
