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.

A recent study released by the Center for the Study of Sport in Society found that 66 percent of African American male high school seniors believed their first jobs would be as a professional athlete. I see the channeling process as fifty people trying to get in a Yugo at one time--you can't do it.

There is Always Hope: Education

I wish Paul Robeson (Rutgers), Arthur Ashe (UCLA), and Jerome "Brud" Holland (Cornell) were alive today so they could mentor many of our young men striving to be the best in only one thing. While the media's images of Black men often has us as brutes, buffoons, and bucks, Robeson's, Ashe's, and Holland's lives would tell our young brothers to shake off these negative images and be the best at all they do.

Their example would tell them to not pay attention and internalize the limited mass media construction that they see every day of themselves: athletes, entertainers and criminals. Their example would tell them to look around because they have examples of Black men performing well at professions other than sports, doing well for themselves and their families. There are ten times as many lawyers, doctors, professors, administrators, civil service jobs as professional athletes.

Their example would also tell them to look to their peers who have performed at both education and sport and received degrees from the same institutions that got blood, sweat, and tears from them. Jacque Vaughn, Juwan Howard, Tim Duncan, Brevin Knight, Alonzo Mourning, Grant Hill, Warrick Dunn, Wally Richardson come to mind, but there are many others.

Above all, Robeson, Ashe, and Holland would tell Black males that the ideology of not performing in the classroom because "school is not cool" is a formula that could blow up in your face at any moment in life.

As a young African American scholar, my validation came while listening to Michael Eric Dyson's keynote last year at the National Black Student Conference. He was wearing sneakers with a suit, and discussed Black identity and the importance of rap and hip hop to our culture. We need more lives to play out like Robeson (athlete, lawyer, speaker, civil rights activist), Ashe (tennis champion, author, commentator, lecturer) and Holland (athlete, professor, coach, administrator and writer). These men saw value in combining academic excellence with athletic prowess.

A road less traveled by far too many African American males today.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Cox, Matthews & Associates