My passion for athletics started when I was a child learning how to ride my first bike, throwing from the pitcher’s mound for the first time and hearing my father’s excitement while watching Monday night football. Sports bring people together. Sports unite people who are different in every imaginable way yet share one passion: basketball, football, motorsports, track, volleyball, golf, and so many other sports. They are an equalizer of sorts, one of the rare places in life where performance triumphs over sex, religion, association, race and culture.
Stereotypes are very real to the people who think according to them, even though they may arise from limited or biased information. Due to stereotypes, some would assume that professional basketball players are black, gifted soccer players are Brazilian, great gymnasts come from Russia and the strongest swimmers reside in Australia. Although we may find some truth in these statements, it may only be part of the equation.
In the streets of the United States, for example, young African Americans can easily see what they need to do to achieve athletic success. They are clearly defined: practice, work hard, compete by the rules and the results will speak for themselves. By contrast, in a corporate environment, the rules may be unknown or ambiguous, the competition may be objectionable and the results immeasurable without personal bias. African American males succeeding in athletics has nothing to do with a predisposition or genetic makeup and more to do with what African American males see as achievable. The very fact that they believe they can become a pro athlete is the reason many to make it to that level.
Some say blacks lack intellect. Add that mindset with a substandard educational system and you will find lack of success in business and academics. The results are low percentages of African American males in the corporate world and beyond.
Now let’s take a look at an NFL playbook, which is usually over 1,500 pages easy. Ask a football player to learn this entire playbook in a four to six week training camp. After learning the playbook, the athlete will have to make on the spot decisions in only 2-3 seconds or less. From my experience playing football, I learned that sometimes a bad decision at the wrong time could mean your job, which in turn would cost at the very minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet athletes make split second decisions under a tremendous amount of pressure — based on playbooks they learned in just four to six weeks. Tell me that’s not intelligence!
A poor predisposition toward academics is not the basis for such a small percentage of African Americans in corporate America. The cause is simply too few examples and equal opportunity in the corporate infrastructure. Just like Brazilian futbol players, Russian tennis phenoms and the like, their athletic success has more to do with what they think is attainable. With good odds, they believe they have the opportunity to succeed if they put their heart, body and soul into a chosen field.
The route to success is thinking that if I put my mind to it, I can accomplish it.
It is not the school system failing urban youth or lack of intelligence in young African Americans, but the options available to these young people once attain the required skills. Uh oh… no, I’m not talking about any kind of agenda to keep African Americans out of corporate America, but rather, I am talking about having a systematic approach that would extend opportunities within corporate America.
We all have used the phrase, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” So if there are low numbers of women in upper level management positions and small percentages of ethic minorities in the corporate world, doesn’t it make sense that there are most likelylow percentages of opportunities for them there? Most people hire not only who is qualified, but who they relate to, who they like and who they are more likely to trust.
This is the reason success in corporate America is so complicated and hard to understand. When you look at the ethnic makeup, lack of women in high level positions, smaller numbers of Hispanics and blacks at all levels, success becomes more complicated for these groups. Not unattainable, but complicated.
I am a big supporter of individual sports that do away with or minimize the need for referees or outside influences, such as swimming, golf, tennis, track and field, motocross and bicycling. With news coming out about biased NBA referees and the like, it is evident that referees can affect a game and/or make a player ineffective. In team sports such as baseball, basketball and football, a coach, agent or scout must determine that you can play and provide an opportunity on the field. This, too, can become a very biased and ambiguous process that at times won’t make sense. In individual sports skill, work ethic, peak performance training, persistence and dedication are always rewarded because failure only happens when you choose to quit.
This is the reason I love sports — or specifically, golf, because with all things being equal, performance is always rewarded.