Based on recent statistics released during the Jackie Robinson celebration on "Nightline," 70 percent of the players in the National Football League are African American, 80 percent in the National Basketball Association, and 19 percent in Major League Baseball. That's fewer than 1,400 Black men on professional contract.

With the average career less than five years, why do so many Black males aspire to "the dream" of professional sports? Five years of formally researching this issue, playing football from Pop Warner to college, and interviewing thousands of people from all walks of life have led me to some conclusions. The channeling of Black males athletically is a complex situation. The real reason so many brothers are trying to make it to "the show" is validation. Sure, the money is good and so is the limelight to some, but allow me to ask some questions. In what ways does American society applaud Black male achievement? At our institutions, beginning in kindergarten all the way to the university, how is the Black male encouraged to make it in life? If you answered sports to both questions, you are being honest with yourself. By not validating the cerebral or thinking Black male, we as a society have set up the unhappy paradox of the Black athletic hero.

This is what John Hoberman discusses in his recent book, Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. As Hoberman states: "The disappearance of the Black soldier and aviator as public figures in American life after 1945 was significant, because it denied an officially sanctioned modern status to Black men who might otherwise have come to be identified with intellectual mastery and technological competence in the eyes of the nation."

In simpler terms, as Michael Eric Dyson discusses in Race Rules, Black bodies are "in" now, especially in the context of sports and media advertising. This is why many of our Black males involved in academics and athletics today know more about Barry Bonds than stocks and bonds. It also sets up a paradigm for many years of dreaming with their eyes closed, while injecting themselves with sport novocaine.