I hope Bomani doesn't lose his job!
- Thread starter bubba2k5
- Start date
^^^
http://awfulannouncing.com/espn/bom...orres-new-show-has-a-name-and-debut-date.html
More than a year and a half after it was first rumored and nearly a year to the date after it was officially announced, the upcoming ESPN show with Bomani Jones and Pablo Torre has a name and a start date.
ESPN announced Tuesday that the show will be called “High Noon (9 a.m. Pacific)” — yes, that’s the full name — and will debut Monday, June 4.
The show will air live from New York between 12 and 1 p.m. ET on ESPN.
High Noon (9 a.m. Pacific) has been a long time coming. We first heard that ESPN was weighing a Bomani-Pablo show back in October 2016, and after months of rumors, the network officially announced it in May 2017. It was originally supposed to debut in January, but construction delays at ESPN’s new New York studio pushed back the date. By the time the show actually starts, it will have been more than a year since it was first announced.
ESPN still hasn’t revealed much about High Noon, but based on interviews Torre and Jones have done, it sounds as if the show will feature longer-form discussion about subjects that interest the hosts. Appearing on The Tony Kornheiser Show last week, Torre said High Noon will be different from shows like PTI that bounce from topic to topic every few minutes.
“We are making a fundamental bet on the idea that there are a couple things that are underrated or at least useful in an age when attention spans have sort of been recognized as so short,” Torre said. “Television has been optimized, thanks to Erik [Rydholm], thanks to the internet, into a serving economy. It’s tight, it’s quick, we anticipate you’re going to tune out. And right now we’re betting that maybe we don’t have to do that. That there’s an audience in this world of great fragmentation for someone who may want what we have to ramble about for 22 minutes.”
“Now, all of that is to say, that sounds like a terrible strategy if that doesn’t work,” he said, “but if it does, we’ll be visionaries.”
“Now, all of that is to say, that sounds like a terrible strategy if that doesn’t work,” he said, “but if it does, we’ll be visionaries.”
Torre is right that the stakes are high. With ESPN’s morning show Get Up struggling in its early weeks (in terms of both ratings and reviews), the network could really use a win. In the 12 p.m. ET time slot, High Noon doesn’t have to appeal to everyone, but it does have to find a core audience that will tune in regularly enough to make all this build-up worth the trouble.
There’s reason for optimism though. Jones and Torre have an intriguing concept, an imminent start date and a name that makes viewers feel as though they’re getting away with something. That’s a pretty good start.
https://www.gq.com/story/bomani-jones-new-espn-show-profile
Bomani Jones Has a Funny Joke for You
BY
EVE L. EWING
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
BEN SKLAR
May 15, 2018
How did an economics major with a small radio show became one of the country's sharpest and most influential voices on sports, race, and everything in between? With Jones’s new show about to premiere on ESPN, Eve L. Ewing spent some time with one of sports media's most vital, if unlikely, stars to understand how he got here.
Bomani Babatunde Jones was born in Atlanta to an economist mother and a political scientist father. Bomani means “warrior,” and his first two names are a reflection of his father’s radical pan-Africanist politics. Even as a child he was precocious, with a flair for language. Recently he unearthed a notebook from his childhood—he estimates he couldn't have been more than five at the time—in which he had been tasked by a teacher with writing out the life story of Martin Luther King Jr. “I don't remember what I said at all at the beginning, but I do remember the last line,” Jones recalls.
“It was ‘And then the capitalists shot him.’”
When I meet the ESPN host at Amy Ruth’s in Harlem in November, he is waiting for me in front of the restaurant with his hands shoved in the pockets of a Tribe Called Quest hoodie, attempting to look inconspicuous and, at six-foot-four, failing. We grab a seat in the corner so that his back is to the rest of the room, and I tell him that the last time I was here, I saw the rapper A$AP Rocky, who made a restaurant employee delete a photo he stealthily took on his phone. This leads to a conversation about how Jones feels about potentially being recognized in public, and he explains to me his theory that there are two types of people on television. First, there are the people on the local news with perfect teeth and hair just so, living in the glow of a dream come true. These are the people who, as children, saw the local nightly news anchor and thought to themselves, that could be me.
Then there’s the other kind, the people who just sort of end up on TV, whether through luck or happenstance or some combination of the two. An aberration, if anything. As if to erase any doubt, Jones adds, “I’m the second kind.”
This year, ESPN is about to get a whole lot more of the second kind—a TV show Bomani Jones will co-host with Pablo Torre called High Noon (9 a.m. Pacific), which premieres June 4. Even if you don’t watch ESPN regularly, you might recognize Jones as the guy who went on Mike and Mike one morning, unzipped a hoodie, and immediately made white people across America flip out. (Sample headline: “Bomani Jones Wore a ‘Caucasians’ Shirt on ESPN and White People Flipped Out.”) Jones was wearing a T-shirt that featured an instantly recognizable sendup of the Indians’ absurd Chief Wahoo mascot. His hair is blond instead of black; a dollar sign hangs over his head rather than a single feather; and instead of the Cleveland logo, it says “Caucasians” in the Indians script. The ridiculous sideways look and the garish—even gruesome—grin are the same.
Jones claims he didn’t mean to be provocative, and that his intentions were perfectly innocent. Accidental or not, the Caucasians shirt recast a spotlight on a man who was already one of the country’s smartest and most outspoken commentators when it comes to difficult discussions about race and the athletic-industrial complex—a man often derided by right-wing bloggers as a “race huckster.”
In the context of ESPN, being loud and certain isn’t exactly an uncommon contribution unto itself. But compared to, say, Pardon the Interruption (a show I fondly refer to as I Truly Wish They Would Stop Yelling for Just Like Two Seconds This Is Really Stressing Me Out) or the walking, talking YouTube comments section that is Stephen A. Smith, Jones offers something different: a nuanced look at sports, backed up by rigorous evidence and a refreshing willingness to admit mistakes. As the Caucasians shirt made clear, the fact that Jones riles up the “stick to sports” segment of ESPN’s viewership isn’t a coincidence. Many viewers still think that these opinions have no place on a sports network, especially when they come from a black man. And especially one who, at most points in American history, would have been labeled an uppity Negro when he’s just trying to have a good ol’ time.
The arena of professional sports is a place where the black body, which white America has been trained for centuries to fear and loathe, is cast as a symbol of power and agency—even as the real human beings behind that symbolism are stripped of those things in real life. Bomani Jones likes working in sports media for this reason: ESPN gives him a platform to talk about race and racism with a lot of people, people who would probably never otherwise listen to him. On an optimistic day, we might even see his presence on the network as a sign toward some kind of progress or possibility.
When he’s talking about the NCAA or the Dallas Cowboys, Jones is really having a conversation about white supremacy, about white America’s struggle to reconcile its love of sports institutions with its hatred of black people. The controversy over the NFL protests, like most sports controversies involving black athletes making demands that white spectators deem unreasonable, boils down to a basic discordant tension inherent in the culture. Sports are seen as an important force in our efforts at societal cohesion; they’re supposed to be aspirational, supposed to make you feel good, like we’re all in it together.
When you add the presence of black athletes who insist on reminding Americans of the country’s sins—well, that’s just uncomfortable. I asked Bomani…
Do you feel like it's possible to have an American sports institution that is not racist or is it fundamentally just going to always be that way?
“Well let's extend it. How many American institutions—period—are not racist, right? We can take it to sports, certainly, but just generally, how many of them are not racist? It's hard to separate sports from the nation... Part of our difficulty in reconciling gender and sports is the way the sports have been used to promote masculinity as much as anything else. And notions of teamwork, the goal, the achievements and everything else.”
Unity, “we're all together...”
“Right! Sports are here to reinforce what we believe to be the goodness in us. Can a sporting institution truly sell itself with the notion that black people are representative of the goodness within it?… Can blackness be the representation of what is good?”
Or of heroism.
“Right. Or of being in charge. Being the brains behind the operation, of all of these things…I feel like all the stuff about race and sports is absolutely mirrored by race everywhere else. The only thing that's different between this and most major institutions is that talent is the rarest commodity. In sports and music to a lesser degree. But sports? It's really the one place that black people have an advantage at what is the hardest thing to do. And that makes everything really tricky because then you need them. And then what do you do if you need them?”
The thorniness of the relationship between black athletes and the institutions that employ them—of need, of value, of power, of capitalist exchange, of bodies being laid on the line for the right price—is what’s generally missing from popular analyses, the ones that see their visibility as sufficient evidence that black people have Made It, and should therefore shut up. And that includes the visibility of people like Jones, who understands his own role as a commodity in the sports entertainment economy but resists the idea that it represents some sort of altruism on the part of a white media system. For that reason, the politics of representation—the idea that simply being present, being in the room, is somehow radical or transformative—seems insufficient.
“I don't know how much credit I want to give to people for being willing to take talented people and make money off of them,” says Jones. He takes a sip of coffee.
The city of Zaria in Nigeria is situated near a number of automobile manufacturing plants that, just a few short decades ago, used to produce Peugeots and Volkswagen Beetles. In any given parking lot there was a sea of identical cars. All beige, all small and round.
On a phone call, Bomani Jones’ mother, Barbara Ann Posey Jones, told me a story from his childhood. On a walk one day, three-year-old Bomani pointed to a car in a parking lot, seemingly indistinguishable from the others. He recognized it as one of their neighbors. “That’s Mr. Latif’s car,” he said. She asked him how he knew. He pointed to the license plate number, and his mother laughed. “I didn't even know what our license tag number was,” she said.
“We had all these photos of all the kids in dashikis,” Jones remembers. His childhood home had “the motherland painted on the wall.” After Zaria, Jones’ family relocated to Atlanta. While his academic parents encouraged critical thinking and dissent as a child, it took Jones a while for him to come into his own racial politics. Amidst the optimistic multicultural fervor of the nineties, Jones’s experiences at school were “overwhelmingly positive” and he had a lot of white friends.
“I've been in these trailer houses,” he told me over chicken and waffles. “I've been down these dirt roads. I've partied with these folks. They ain’t livin’ that much different than other people are.” Jones and the white kids bonded over speaker boxes, The Chronic, and Doggystyle, and posted up in parking lots against F-150s blasting the same hip-hop that was entrancing young people on corners and in malls across the country.
In his formative years, this all lent Jones an overarching sense of optimism, one that sometimes left him at odds with his activist father, who was once kicked out of his university for participating in sit-ins and was unimpressed by white kids who loved Snoop. The younger Jones was frustrated with his father’s cynicism. Our generation, he thought, is gonna fix this thing.
Following in his mother’s footsteps, after college he earned a master’s degree in politics, economics, and business from Claremont Graduate University, and a master’s in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In college, Jones was interested in everything and switched majors accordingly, moving from chemistry to almost-history to economics to almost-English before finally landing back in the econ department. Everything felt easy, everything came naturally, and it was all a matter of where he felt like grounding his time and curiosity.
Just before Jones’ 25th birthday, Hurricane Katrina happened. Like the rest of the country, he was glued to the television, watching black families being shot at and abandoned on the roofs of their homes, or crowded into the Super Dome. Jones was horrified. “I had gotten this totally wrong.” Any narrative he might have believed about the root of American injustice being grounded in anything other than deep, fundamental racism evaporated. “It was the most stark thing in the world to just kind of see what really happens when the people are black. And how suddenly it's like, all the notions of ‘really it's about class, and exposure, and people just haven't been around each other,’ da-da-da,” he says. He was especially shocked by the way the media talked about the victims, criminalizing them or blaming them for their own despair.
“Katrina came around and it was just like no, this is fucking mental,” he said. “This is deeper than I ever could have imagined and more depraved than I ever thought it could possibly be.”
In the span of five years, his best friend passed away, he moved across the country twice, enrolled in graduate school, left graduate school, and somewhere along the way decided that he might like to try to be a writer. Eventually he landed in Raleigh, North Carolina, with a job hosting a radio show, The Morning Jones, which covered everything—sports, music, pop culture. The job suited him. It allowed him to talk for a long time, uninterrupted, to a diverse array of listeners.
“That show spoke to a wide variety of people,” says Aden Darity, a close friend from Jones’s North Carolina days. “And I think that can be attributed to the fact that his on-air persona is your smart homie. He’s smart, but he isn’t talking down to you unless you need it. It’s characteristic of all of us who were hanging out then. We were educated, but we communicated with colloquialisms and slang, and we rode around terrorizing people by playing 8Ball & MJG at maximum volume.”
To black listeners, there is nothing especially contradictory about someone who, as Darity points out, “quotes Big KRIT and also has an econ degree. But for a large section of white people, that’s not something that they had even considered."
Jones’ comfort with navigating white spaces worked in tandem with his own awakening toward racism in America to make him an ideal radio host: someone unafraid of provocation, but who was also patient when engaging people with different politics. He used the radio show to create his own little strange, hodgepodge community. He cultivated a set of regular callers, informal friends of the show—people like Mike Giddens, better known as “DJ Mike Hitman,” a DJ from Chicago’s West Side, who would poke fun at conventional radio norms by, say, sharing his phone number with callers on air, telling them to hit him up if they’re ever in town. Jones brought the fullness of himself to the show—his humor, his varied interests, his questions about the world, his fundamental beliefs. For many of Jones’s white listeners in those days, this was a transformative image of what blackness could be; not a flattened personality, but three-dimensional and human, with space for complication.
To black listeners, there is nothing especially contradictory about someone who, as Darity points out, “quotes Big KRIT and also has an econ degree. But for a large section of white people, that’s not something that they had even considered.” Jones was smart, he was funny, and he made people feel like they were part of a community. And so it was only a matter of time before he would become one of those second types of people—the kind that accidentally end up on TV.
Last October, after a win against the Detroit Lions, sportswriter Jourdan Rodrigue asked Panthers quarterback Cam Newton a question. “Devin Funchess has seemed to really embrace the physicality of his routes,” she said. “Getting those extra yards. Does that give you a little bit of an enjoyment to see him kind of truck-sticking people out there?”
A smirk appeared on Newton’s face before the question was over. “It’s funny… to hear a female talk about routes. Like…” He looked down at the podium and then made that weird grimace-grinning emoji face, baring all his teeth. The awkward pause after the “like” was just long enough to make you hope that he might somehow, some way, salvage this comment, and then it flatlined. “It’s funny,” he repeated blandly. After the incident Dannon dropped him as a sponsor (nobody likes sexist yogurt) and Newton apologized for what he called his “sarcasm trying to give someone a compliment.”
Enter Bomani Jones, who used the incident as an instructional point. He’s an economist at heart, writing proofs in his head, and he argues like one. “[Newton] laughed at a woman who was questioning the team, asking him about route running,” said Jones on The Right Time. “And he says he thinks it’s funny, the idea of a woman asking about running routes.” He then pointed out the logical fallacy that revealed its inherent sexism: many male sportswriters, including Jones himself, don’t have the technical knowledge to talk about routes. Thus, there was no way to interpret the comment as anything other than a sexist slight, despite Newton’s insistence to the contrary.
Or take the NFL protests: “If the issue is the anthem, why are you booing guys who are kneeling before the anthem? If you never paid attention [to the anthem] before, why are you doing these things? Why is the league dressing this stuff up in this way? Why do all of these things happen? What are the differences?”
Jones is constantly testing a series of if this, then that propositions, writing proofs in his head, trying to find the most elegant answer at the bottom of a series of self-contradictory explanations. “I view things pretty coldly and rationally,” says Jones. “Everything I hear is a cost-benefit analysis to a degree.”
There was one college course that changed everything for him. It was a theoretical math course, and it was designed to help incoming students let go of their high school notions of math: “plug and chug,” memorizing and executing steps without really understanding the concepts beneath them. He became fascinated with the art of simplicity, and the elegance and efficacy of reducing things to their simplest form.
“A lot of this stuff, once we get to talking about it… before you get started on everything else, you gotta get the nonsense out the way. When you whittle the noise away, and you are able to figure out what doesn’t hold up, that’s the big thing. And once you figure out what doesn’t hold up, you wind up with some pretty basic stuff at the bottom.” As he moves through the world, he’s testing hypotheses, checking them for hypocrisy, thinking like a code-breaker. He searches for the cracks in the logic.
I guess when I talk about him this way, it would make it easy for you to believe that Jones is some sort of cold robot, a Data-esque figure whose commitment to rationality makes him unconcerned with the messiness of human hearts and fuzzy feelings. But it doesn’t quite work that way. It means that where many of us are perfectly content to see either the forest or the trees, Jones is wandering the woods like a botanist, trying to figure out the bark and the roots and the patterns of the falling leaves. It’s not that Jones thinks he knows everything. But he is relentless in trying to figure out what he deems to be true. And he is patient with other people trying to do the same.
“To a degree it informs a sense of empathy, in that everybody’s got a different utility function,” he says. “But we all come up with this in different ways. Like my daddy always says, everybody doing the best they can, by and large. And so they might make things that look like errors along the way in doing it, but everybody in one way or another is trying to figure out this function that has no form. They just tryna get the best answers they can.”
Soon after critics lambasted Newton for his sexism, others came forward to remind the world that Rodrigue had tweeted some things that her editor called “regrettable,” about how her father was “super racist” on a drive through Navajo land, and was “the best” at telling “racist jokes the whole ride home.” Jokes like that—haha, you’re a woman working in sports! haha, you’re Native!—rely on some body being out of line. Being out of your place. And sometimes it seems like the secret to living in America, if you have one of those troublesome, perpetually out-of-line bodies, is to flip the joke on its head. Jay-Z says something along those lines in Decoded: “You realize, one day, it's not about you. It's the perceptions people had long before you even walked onto the scene. The joke’s on them because they're really just fighting phantoms of their own creation. Once you realize that, things get interesting.”
“I think there are people who believe that I wake up every day looking for the angle of race,” Jones tells me. “I don't feel like explaining people's misery every day. I'm in this for fun. I'm in this as much as anything, for the jokes.”
In a 2015 interview, Jones was asked by the New York Times if he ever worried that his outspoken nature would ever get him in trouble with ESPN. “I don’t think anybody at ESPN is going to get in trouble for saying something that is factually undeniable,” he said at the time.
"I thought the shirt was funny. never thought of it as being really astoundingly controversial."
I asked Jones if he still believed that to be true today, in a conversation that took place two weeks after ESPN had suspended Jemele Hill for what they called two violations of their social media guidelines—first, when she stated that Donald Trump “is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy,” and then when she said that fans who disagreed with Jerry Jones about the national anthem protests should “boycott his advertisers.”
Jones worded his response carefully, looking past me for a moment at the mirror behind my head. “I think where things have changed from what I said [in 2015] to what I'm looking now at, is I never imagined that something factually true could prove to be as inflammatory as things that are factually true have proven to be.” As for his own ability to strike a balance between speaking his mind and keeping his job, Jones is unfazed. “Perhaps it’s because I have the arrogance to believe that I can figure this out.” He acknowledges that the response to Hill is “absolutely colored by the fact that she is a woman…and a black woman, at that.”
Jones’s cohost Pablo Torre has also commented publicly about sexism, toxic masculinity, and homophobia in sports, and the ways that gender discrimination interact with racism. Last May, Breitbart wrote about Jones and Torre’s forthcoming collaboration with the headline “No Social Justice Warrior Left Behind.” But Torre, himself one of a very few Asian-American personalities in the world of high-profile sports media, doesn’t believe that these conversations are going away any time soon. “It became very clear that sports is so much more than sports,” says Torre. “And if that were not the case then the president wouldn't be seeking to use sports as this political cudgel.”
Torre sees Jones as a singular voice amidst the noise when it comes to debates about race, and in the world of sports broadcasting more generally. “It’s very obvious that there’s no one else like him.” Torre describes his first experience on Around the Horn and meeting Bomani. “I'll be honest, I approached our first episodes of Around the Horn like, that was the dude that I was intimidated by. That was the guy whose intellect and personality and unpredictability, all of those things made me want to step my game up even that much more.”
Once Torre got to know Jones better, he realized how kind Bomani Jones could be. Jones offered advice and chill time, and at one point baked Torre a batch of chocolate chip cookies. (For the record, Torre says they were delicious.) “This dude is not only completely unpredictable in terms of where he's going to go next in conversation, but he is so much warmer and nicer than I think people give him credit for.”
Still, some aspects of Jones’s way of doing things still left him in awe. “I consider myself a bright dude,” says Torre, who graduated from Harvard magna cum laude. “But his brain is just unique. How it works, what it is able to do simultaneously is staggering and unlike any other that I know.”
The first time Torre visited him in the studio to join him live on the radio, he had a chance to watch Jones in action after previously having called in remotely. The first thing that struck him was that Jones did a three-hour radio show, essentially a series of monologues, with no notes. But he saw that Jones was scribbling something on paper as he spoke into the microphone.
Upon looking closely, Torre realized what it was: Jones was completing a crossword puzzle, while live on air.
He had worn the “Caucasians” shirt in public before, and even posted about it on Twitter. “I thought the shirt was funny,” says Jones. It’s why he “never thought of it as being really astoundingly controversial.”
He decided to wear the unzipped hoodie that morning because he thinks he looks skinny on television and wanted to layer up. After the first segment, no one said anything. When the show went to commercial, someone informed him that everyone on Twitter was talking about the shirt. Soon, someone else swooped in to request that Jones zip the hoodie up. Their argument in the moment, as Jones saw it, was “perfectly fair.”
“It was, ‘It is distracting from everything you say. Nobody is thinking about what you guys are talking about.’ Boom, fair point, that's a television production issue. Gotcha. But I tell them, ‘I don't know if this is the best play because it's going to look like you're censoring me and then it's going to look worse for you.’ But I don't have to agree with you, I just need the point to make sense. And the point made sense.”
Jones zipped up the hoodie, finished the show, and flew to Atlanta, where he was scheduled to see a concert. On the plane, a woman sitting next to him was reading an email chain. “Bomani Jones” was the subject line, but she was so engrossed in it that she didn’t notice him sitting next to her. He said nothing.
When he arrived in Atlanta and walked through the airport, people hailed him as he passed—yo man, nice shirt! In the next 24 hours, the website producing the shirts would crash after its owner got thousands of new orders.
But aside from being a funny story about a provocateur inadvertently thumbing his nose at a white media establishment, Jones sees the story as signifying something more notable—something about hypocrisy, and about whose dissenting voices matter when push comes to shove.
“I knew that I had the intellectual and moral high ground here. If you have a problem with this, then you cannot run any of this other stuff,” he adds, referring to the Cleveland Indians logo. “Simple as that.”
If this, then that. The shirt was a litmus test, a proof of concept. It laid bare the uncomfortable rules about where the balance of power lies in media representation and who gets to be the butt of a joke. And that, of course, is why it made people so angry. Here again was Bomani Jones, distilling things down to their simplest form, parsing the argument for cracks and inconsistencies. “There was no argument that anybody could make that I was doing something wrong because the rules of the game had already been established. Except the rules of the game are, ‘white people get to make fun of Native Americans; nobody gets to make fun of white people.’”
Here’s the funny part, though. A few months later, Jones was watching the Mike and Mike guys covering the World Series. Mike Golic, who hails from Cleveland, was wearing an Indians jersey with the grinning Chief Wahoo.
That’s the joke. Get it?
Eve L. Ewing is a writer and sociologist from Chicago. Her book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side is out this October.
Styled by Danielle Wright, FreeByrd
Bomani Jones Has a Funny Joke for You
BY
EVE L. EWING
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
BEN SKLAR
May 15, 2018
How did an economics major with a small radio show became one of the country's sharpest and most influential voices on sports, race, and everything in between? With Jones’s new show about to premiere on ESPN, Eve L. Ewing spent some time with one of sports media's most vital, if unlikely, stars to understand how he got here.
Bomani Babatunde Jones was born in Atlanta to an economist mother and a political scientist father. Bomani means “warrior,” and his first two names are a reflection of his father’s radical pan-Africanist politics. Even as a child he was precocious, with a flair for language. Recently he unearthed a notebook from his childhood—he estimates he couldn't have been more than five at the time—in which he had been tasked by a teacher with writing out the life story of Martin Luther King Jr. “I don't remember what I said at all at the beginning, but I do remember the last line,” Jones recalls.
“It was ‘And then the capitalists shot him.’”
When I meet the ESPN host at Amy Ruth’s in Harlem in November, he is waiting for me in front of the restaurant with his hands shoved in the pockets of a Tribe Called Quest hoodie, attempting to look inconspicuous and, at six-foot-four, failing. We grab a seat in the corner so that his back is to the rest of the room, and I tell him that the last time I was here, I saw the rapper A$AP Rocky, who made a restaurant employee delete a photo he stealthily took on his phone. This leads to a conversation about how Jones feels about potentially being recognized in public, and he explains to me his theory that there are two types of people on television. First, there are the people on the local news with perfect teeth and hair just so, living in the glow of a dream come true. These are the people who, as children, saw the local nightly news anchor and thought to themselves, that could be me.
Then there’s the other kind, the people who just sort of end up on TV, whether through luck or happenstance or some combination of the two. An aberration, if anything. As if to erase any doubt, Jones adds, “I’m the second kind.”
This year, ESPN is about to get a whole lot more of the second kind—a TV show Bomani Jones will co-host with Pablo Torre called High Noon (9 a.m. Pacific), which premieres June 4. Even if you don’t watch ESPN regularly, you might recognize Jones as the guy who went on Mike and Mike one morning, unzipped a hoodie, and immediately made white people across America flip out. (Sample headline: “Bomani Jones Wore a ‘Caucasians’ Shirt on ESPN and White People Flipped Out.”) Jones was wearing a T-shirt that featured an instantly recognizable sendup of the Indians’ absurd Chief Wahoo mascot. His hair is blond instead of black; a dollar sign hangs over his head rather than a single feather; and instead of the Cleveland logo, it says “Caucasians” in the Indians script. The ridiculous sideways look and the garish—even gruesome—grin are the same.
Jones claims he didn’t mean to be provocative, and that his intentions were perfectly innocent. Accidental or not, the Caucasians shirt recast a spotlight on a man who was already one of the country’s smartest and most outspoken commentators when it comes to difficult discussions about race and the athletic-industrial complex—a man often derided by right-wing bloggers as a “race huckster.”
In the context of ESPN, being loud and certain isn’t exactly an uncommon contribution unto itself. But compared to, say, Pardon the Interruption (a show I fondly refer to as I Truly Wish They Would Stop Yelling for Just Like Two Seconds This Is Really Stressing Me Out) or the walking, talking YouTube comments section that is Stephen A. Smith, Jones offers something different: a nuanced look at sports, backed up by rigorous evidence and a refreshing willingness to admit mistakes. As the Caucasians shirt made clear, the fact that Jones riles up the “stick to sports” segment of ESPN’s viewership isn’t a coincidence. Many viewers still think that these opinions have no place on a sports network, especially when they come from a black man. And especially one who, at most points in American history, would have been labeled an uppity Negro when he’s just trying to have a good ol’ time.
The arena of professional sports is a place where the black body, which white America has been trained for centuries to fear and loathe, is cast as a symbol of power and agency—even as the real human beings behind that symbolism are stripped of those things in real life. Bomani Jones likes working in sports media for this reason: ESPN gives him a platform to talk about race and racism with a lot of people, people who would probably never otherwise listen to him. On an optimistic day, we might even see his presence on the network as a sign toward some kind of progress or possibility.
When he’s talking about the NCAA or the Dallas Cowboys, Jones is really having a conversation about white supremacy, about white America’s struggle to reconcile its love of sports institutions with its hatred of black people. The controversy over the NFL protests, like most sports controversies involving black athletes making demands that white spectators deem unreasonable, boils down to a basic discordant tension inherent in the culture. Sports are seen as an important force in our efforts at societal cohesion; they’re supposed to be aspirational, supposed to make you feel good, like we’re all in it together.
When you add the presence of black athletes who insist on reminding Americans of the country’s sins—well, that’s just uncomfortable. I asked Bomani…
Do you feel like it's possible to have an American sports institution that is not racist or is it fundamentally just going to always be that way?
“Well let's extend it. How many American institutions—period—are not racist, right? We can take it to sports, certainly, but just generally, how many of them are not racist? It's hard to separate sports from the nation... Part of our difficulty in reconciling gender and sports is the way the sports have been used to promote masculinity as much as anything else. And notions of teamwork, the goal, the achievements and everything else.”
Unity, “we're all together...”
“Right! Sports are here to reinforce what we believe to be the goodness in us. Can a sporting institution truly sell itself with the notion that black people are representative of the goodness within it?… Can blackness be the representation of what is good?”
Or of heroism.
“Right. Or of being in charge. Being the brains behind the operation, of all of these things…I feel like all the stuff about race and sports is absolutely mirrored by race everywhere else. The only thing that's different between this and most major institutions is that talent is the rarest commodity. In sports and music to a lesser degree. But sports? It's really the one place that black people have an advantage at what is the hardest thing to do. And that makes everything really tricky because then you need them. And then what do you do if you need them?”
The thorniness of the relationship between black athletes and the institutions that employ them—of need, of value, of power, of capitalist exchange, of bodies being laid on the line for the right price—is what’s generally missing from popular analyses, the ones that see their visibility as sufficient evidence that black people have Made It, and should therefore shut up. And that includes the visibility of people like Jones, who understands his own role as a commodity in the sports entertainment economy but resists the idea that it represents some sort of altruism on the part of a white media system. For that reason, the politics of representation—the idea that simply being present, being in the room, is somehow radical or transformative—seems insufficient.
“I don't know how much credit I want to give to people for being willing to take talented people and make money off of them,” says Jones. He takes a sip of coffee.
The city of Zaria in Nigeria is situated near a number of automobile manufacturing plants that, just a few short decades ago, used to produce Peugeots and Volkswagen Beetles. In any given parking lot there was a sea of identical cars. All beige, all small and round.
On a phone call, Bomani Jones’ mother, Barbara Ann Posey Jones, told me a story from his childhood. On a walk one day, three-year-old Bomani pointed to a car in a parking lot, seemingly indistinguishable from the others. He recognized it as one of their neighbors. “That’s Mr. Latif’s car,” he said. She asked him how he knew. He pointed to the license plate number, and his mother laughed. “I didn't even know what our license tag number was,” she said.
“We had all these photos of all the kids in dashikis,” Jones remembers. His childhood home had “the motherland painted on the wall.” After Zaria, Jones’ family relocated to Atlanta. While his academic parents encouraged critical thinking and dissent as a child, it took Jones a while for him to come into his own racial politics. Amidst the optimistic multicultural fervor of the nineties, Jones’s experiences at school were “overwhelmingly positive” and he had a lot of white friends.
“I've been in these trailer houses,” he told me over chicken and waffles. “I've been down these dirt roads. I've partied with these folks. They ain’t livin’ that much different than other people are.” Jones and the white kids bonded over speaker boxes, The Chronic, and Doggystyle, and posted up in parking lots against F-150s blasting the same hip-hop that was entrancing young people on corners and in malls across the country.
In his formative years, this all lent Jones an overarching sense of optimism, one that sometimes left him at odds with his activist father, who was once kicked out of his university for participating in sit-ins and was unimpressed by white kids who loved Snoop. The younger Jones was frustrated with his father’s cynicism. Our generation, he thought, is gonna fix this thing.
Following in his mother’s footsteps, after college he earned a master’s degree in politics, economics, and business from Claremont Graduate University, and a master’s in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In college, Jones was interested in everything and switched majors accordingly, moving from chemistry to almost-history to economics to almost-English before finally landing back in the econ department. Everything felt easy, everything came naturally, and it was all a matter of where he felt like grounding his time and curiosity.
Just before Jones’ 25th birthday, Hurricane Katrina happened. Like the rest of the country, he was glued to the television, watching black families being shot at and abandoned on the roofs of their homes, or crowded into the Super Dome. Jones was horrified. “I had gotten this totally wrong.” Any narrative he might have believed about the root of American injustice being grounded in anything other than deep, fundamental racism evaporated. “It was the most stark thing in the world to just kind of see what really happens when the people are black. And how suddenly it's like, all the notions of ‘really it's about class, and exposure, and people just haven't been around each other,’ da-da-da,” he says. He was especially shocked by the way the media talked about the victims, criminalizing them or blaming them for their own despair.
“Katrina came around and it was just like no, this is fucking mental,” he said. “This is deeper than I ever could have imagined and more depraved than I ever thought it could possibly be.”
In the span of five years, his best friend passed away, he moved across the country twice, enrolled in graduate school, left graduate school, and somewhere along the way decided that he might like to try to be a writer. Eventually he landed in Raleigh, North Carolina, with a job hosting a radio show, The Morning Jones, which covered everything—sports, music, pop culture. The job suited him. It allowed him to talk for a long time, uninterrupted, to a diverse array of listeners.
“That show spoke to a wide variety of people,” says Aden Darity, a close friend from Jones’s North Carolina days. “And I think that can be attributed to the fact that his on-air persona is your smart homie. He’s smart, but he isn’t talking down to you unless you need it. It’s characteristic of all of us who were hanging out then. We were educated, but we communicated with colloquialisms and slang, and we rode around terrorizing people by playing 8Ball & MJG at maximum volume.”
To black listeners, there is nothing especially contradictory about someone who, as Darity points out, “quotes Big KRIT and also has an econ degree. But for a large section of white people, that’s not something that they had even considered."
Jones’ comfort with navigating white spaces worked in tandem with his own awakening toward racism in America to make him an ideal radio host: someone unafraid of provocation, but who was also patient when engaging people with different politics. He used the radio show to create his own little strange, hodgepodge community. He cultivated a set of regular callers, informal friends of the show—people like Mike Giddens, better known as “DJ Mike Hitman,” a DJ from Chicago’s West Side, who would poke fun at conventional radio norms by, say, sharing his phone number with callers on air, telling them to hit him up if they’re ever in town. Jones brought the fullness of himself to the show—his humor, his varied interests, his questions about the world, his fundamental beliefs. For many of Jones’s white listeners in those days, this was a transformative image of what blackness could be; not a flattened personality, but three-dimensional and human, with space for complication.
To black listeners, there is nothing especially contradictory about someone who, as Darity points out, “quotes Big KRIT and also has an econ degree. But for a large section of white people, that’s not something that they had even considered.” Jones was smart, he was funny, and he made people feel like they were part of a community. And so it was only a matter of time before he would become one of those second types of people—the kind that accidentally end up on TV.
Last October, after a win against the Detroit Lions, sportswriter Jourdan Rodrigue asked Panthers quarterback Cam Newton a question. “Devin Funchess has seemed to really embrace the physicality of his routes,” she said. “Getting those extra yards. Does that give you a little bit of an enjoyment to see him kind of truck-sticking people out there?”
A smirk appeared on Newton’s face before the question was over. “It’s funny… to hear a female talk about routes. Like…” He looked down at the podium and then made that weird grimace-grinning emoji face, baring all his teeth. The awkward pause after the “like” was just long enough to make you hope that he might somehow, some way, salvage this comment, and then it flatlined. “It’s funny,” he repeated blandly. After the incident Dannon dropped him as a sponsor (nobody likes sexist yogurt) and Newton apologized for what he called his “sarcasm trying to give someone a compliment.”
Enter Bomani Jones, who used the incident as an instructional point. He’s an economist at heart, writing proofs in his head, and he argues like one. “[Newton] laughed at a woman who was questioning the team, asking him about route running,” said Jones on The Right Time. “And he says he thinks it’s funny, the idea of a woman asking about running routes.” He then pointed out the logical fallacy that revealed its inherent sexism: many male sportswriters, including Jones himself, don’t have the technical knowledge to talk about routes. Thus, there was no way to interpret the comment as anything other than a sexist slight, despite Newton’s insistence to the contrary.
Or take the NFL protests: “If the issue is the anthem, why are you booing guys who are kneeling before the anthem? If you never paid attention [to the anthem] before, why are you doing these things? Why is the league dressing this stuff up in this way? Why do all of these things happen? What are the differences?”
Jones is constantly testing a series of if this, then that propositions, writing proofs in his head, trying to find the most elegant answer at the bottom of a series of self-contradictory explanations. “I view things pretty coldly and rationally,” says Jones. “Everything I hear is a cost-benefit analysis to a degree.”
There was one college course that changed everything for him. It was a theoretical math course, and it was designed to help incoming students let go of their high school notions of math: “plug and chug,” memorizing and executing steps without really understanding the concepts beneath them. He became fascinated with the art of simplicity, and the elegance and efficacy of reducing things to their simplest form.
“A lot of this stuff, once we get to talking about it… before you get started on everything else, you gotta get the nonsense out the way. When you whittle the noise away, and you are able to figure out what doesn’t hold up, that’s the big thing. And once you figure out what doesn’t hold up, you wind up with some pretty basic stuff at the bottom.” As he moves through the world, he’s testing hypotheses, checking them for hypocrisy, thinking like a code-breaker. He searches for the cracks in the logic.
I guess when I talk about him this way, it would make it easy for you to believe that Jones is some sort of cold robot, a Data-esque figure whose commitment to rationality makes him unconcerned with the messiness of human hearts and fuzzy feelings. But it doesn’t quite work that way. It means that where many of us are perfectly content to see either the forest or the trees, Jones is wandering the woods like a botanist, trying to figure out the bark and the roots and the patterns of the falling leaves. It’s not that Jones thinks he knows everything. But he is relentless in trying to figure out what he deems to be true. And he is patient with other people trying to do the same.
“To a degree it informs a sense of empathy, in that everybody’s got a different utility function,” he says. “But we all come up with this in different ways. Like my daddy always says, everybody doing the best they can, by and large. And so they might make things that look like errors along the way in doing it, but everybody in one way or another is trying to figure out this function that has no form. They just tryna get the best answers they can.”
Soon after critics lambasted Newton for his sexism, others came forward to remind the world that Rodrigue had tweeted some things that her editor called “regrettable,” about how her father was “super racist” on a drive through Navajo land, and was “the best” at telling “racist jokes the whole ride home.” Jokes like that—haha, you’re a woman working in sports! haha, you’re Native!—rely on some body being out of line. Being out of your place. And sometimes it seems like the secret to living in America, if you have one of those troublesome, perpetually out-of-line bodies, is to flip the joke on its head. Jay-Z says something along those lines in Decoded: “You realize, one day, it's not about you. It's the perceptions people had long before you even walked onto the scene. The joke’s on them because they're really just fighting phantoms of their own creation. Once you realize that, things get interesting.”
“I think there are people who believe that I wake up every day looking for the angle of race,” Jones tells me. “I don't feel like explaining people's misery every day. I'm in this for fun. I'm in this as much as anything, for the jokes.”
In a 2015 interview, Jones was asked by the New York Times if he ever worried that his outspoken nature would ever get him in trouble with ESPN. “I don’t think anybody at ESPN is going to get in trouble for saying something that is factually undeniable,” he said at the time.
"I thought the shirt was funny. never thought of it as being really astoundingly controversial."
I asked Jones if he still believed that to be true today, in a conversation that took place two weeks after ESPN had suspended Jemele Hill for what they called two violations of their social media guidelines—first, when she stated that Donald Trump “is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy,” and then when she said that fans who disagreed with Jerry Jones about the national anthem protests should “boycott his advertisers.”
Jones worded his response carefully, looking past me for a moment at the mirror behind my head. “I think where things have changed from what I said [in 2015] to what I'm looking now at, is I never imagined that something factually true could prove to be as inflammatory as things that are factually true have proven to be.” As for his own ability to strike a balance between speaking his mind and keeping his job, Jones is unfazed. “Perhaps it’s because I have the arrogance to believe that I can figure this out.” He acknowledges that the response to Hill is “absolutely colored by the fact that she is a woman…and a black woman, at that.”
Jones’s cohost Pablo Torre has also commented publicly about sexism, toxic masculinity, and homophobia in sports, and the ways that gender discrimination interact with racism. Last May, Breitbart wrote about Jones and Torre’s forthcoming collaboration with the headline “No Social Justice Warrior Left Behind.” But Torre, himself one of a very few Asian-American personalities in the world of high-profile sports media, doesn’t believe that these conversations are going away any time soon. “It became very clear that sports is so much more than sports,” says Torre. “And if that were not the case then the president wouldn't be seeking to use sports as this political cudgel.”
Torre sees Jones as a singular voice amidst the noise when it comes to debates about race, and in the world of sports broadcasting more generally. “It’s very obvious that there’s no one else like him.” Torre describes his first experience on Around the Horn and meeting Bomani. “I'll be honest, I approached our first episodes of Around the Horn like, that was the dude that I was intimidated by. That was the guy whose intellect and personality and unpredictability, all of those things made me want to step my game up even that much more.”
Once Torre got to know Jones better, he realized how kind Bomani Jones could be. Jones offered advice and chill time, and at one point baked Torre a batch of chocolate chip cookies. (For the record, Torre says they were delicious.) “This dude is not only completely unpredictable in terms of where he's going to go next in conversation, but he is so much warmer and nicer than I think people give him credit for.”
Still, some aspects of Jones’s way of doing things still left him in awe. “I consider myself a bright dude,” says Torre, who graduated from Harvard magna cum laude. “But his brain is just unique. How it works, what it is able to do simultaneously is staggering and unlike any other that I know.”
The first time Torre visited him in the studio to join him live on the radio, he had a chance to watch Jones in action after previously having called in remotely. The first thing that struck him was that Jones did a three-hour radio show, essentially a series of monologues, with no notes. But he saw that Jones was scribbling something on paper as he spoke into the microphone.
Upon looking closely, Torre realized what it was: Jones was completing a crossword puzzle, while live on air.
He had worn the “Caucasians” shirt in public before, and even posted about it on Twitter. “I thought the shirt was funny,” says Jones. It’s why he “never thought of it as being really astoundingly controversial.”
He decided to wear the unzipped hoodie that morning because he thinks he looks skinny on television and wanted to layer up. After the first segment, no one said anything. When the show went to commercial, someone informed him that everyone on Twitter was talking about the shirt. Soon, someone else swooped in to request that Jones zip the hoodie up. Their argument in the moment, as Jones saw it, was “perfectly fair.”
“It was, ‘It is distracting from everything you say. Nobody is thinking about what you guys are talking about.’ Boom, fair point, that's a television production issue. Gotcha. But I tell them, ‘I don't know if this is the best play because it's going to look like you're censoring me and then it's going to look worse for you.’ But I don't have to agree with you, I just need the point to make sense. And the point made sense.”
Jones zipped up the hoodie, finished the show, and flew to Atlanta, where he was scheduled to see a concert. On the plane, a woman sitting next to him was reading an email chain. “Bomani Jones” was the subject line, but she was so engrossed in it that she didn’t notice him sitting next to her. He said nothing.
When he arrived in Atlanta and walked through the airport, people hailed him as he passed—yo man, nice shirt! In the next 24 hours, the website producing the shirts would crash after its owner got thousands of new orders.
But aside from being a funny story about a provocateur inadvertently thumbing his nose at a white media establishment, Jones sees the story as signifying something more notable—something about hypocrisy, and about whose dissenting voices matter when push comes to shove.
“I knew that I had the intellectual and moral high ground here. If you have a problem with this, then you cannot run any of this other stuff,” he adds, referring to the Cleveland Indians logo. “Simple as that.”
If this, then that. The shirt was a litmus test, a proof of concept. It laid bare the uncomfortable rules about where the balance of power lies in media representation and who gets to be the butt of a joke. And that, of course, is why it made people so angry. Here again was Bomani Jones, distilling things down to their simplest form, parsing the argument for cracks and inconsistencies. “There was no argument that anybody could make that I was doing something wrong because the rules of the game had already been established. Except the rules of the game are, ‘white people get to make fun of Native Americans; nobody gets to make fun of white people.’”
Here’s the funny part, though. A few months later, Jones was watching the Mike and Mike guys covering the World Series. Mike Golic, who hails from Cleveland, was wearing an Indians jersey with the grinning Chief Wahoo.
That’s the joke. Get it?
Eve L. Ewing is a writer and sociologist from Chicago. Her book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side is out this October.
Styled by Danielle Wright, FreeByrd
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/bomani-jones-on-the-nba-analytics-and-race
Isaac Chotiner
June 17, 2019
“There are always people who see me as just the guy who talks about race,” Bomani Jones said, of his experience in sports media.
Photograph by Ben Sklar
Over the past decade, the ESPN host Bomani Jones has become an increasingly visible and popular commentator on sports—and on the commentary surrounding them. Jones, who is thirty-eight, received two master’s degrees in economics, from Claremont Graduate University and the University of North Carolina, and then began writing about popular culture and athletics. He joined ESPN in 2010, and today hosts the radio show “The Right Time with Bomani Jones” and co-hosts the TV show “High Noon,” which is known for broadening sports discussions to social issues that extend beyond the court or the field.
Last week on “High Noon,” Jones and his co-host, Pablo Torre, had a discussion about the increasing use of analytics in sports, particularly basketball, and its effect on the game, hiring practices, and racial dynamics in the N.B.A. The segment was a response, in part, to an interview I had conducted about these topics with the former N.B.A. and college-hoops star Jalen Rose, who is also a host at ESPN. Rose worried that advanced statistics were being overused in the N.B.A., in a way that diminished the status of former players and had an element of racial bias. Jones, similarly, said that N.B.A. front offices were trying to tell former players that “your knowledge is not good enough because it has to be something that is quantifiable.” He also noted that, despite his economics training, the famed M.I.T. Sloan Sports Analytics Conference had asked him to be on a panel about activism.
I spoke by phone with Jones on Thursday evening, before Game 6 of the N.B.A. Finals. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his experiences in sports media, whether advanced statistics are making sports more efficient and less fun, and racism around high-level math.
What, exactly, happened with the Sloan conference invitation? Can you expand on that?
I had figured that, given some of the diversity issues surrounding this analytics debate, and, whether it’s true or not, the reputation that I have for being fairly bright, at some point I would be a person who would wind up getting a call about going to Sloan. And so [the co-chair] Daryl Morey reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in coming to the conference, and I certainly was. They asked me if I wanted to be on this panel on activism. This was two years ago. I admit, I was a little bit offended by that.
On one hand, I did understand why someone would call me to talk about that topic. But, on the other hand, I really thought that they would be calling me about this other stuff. Not that I was really excited about the idea of hanging out with basketball nerds, but it stood to reason that would be a reason that you would call me. And they did not. And so I let them know that I would like to be on something else. They did put me on different panel. I had a death in the family; I was not able to make it there. But I just couldn’t figure out logically how you decided that you were going to call some of these other people to be on these panels but you wouldn’t call me to be on this. Like, let’s forget about the fact that I got the degrees, right? And, not that I demanded an explanation for it, but no one ever explained that to me. [Morey did not respond to a request for comment.]
Is this something that you have generally felt, either from people in the media or from people who consume your work?
There are always people who see me as just the guy who talks about race. Within the industry, nobody’s really said anything like that to my face. But I do notice that people are very specific about my expertise on talking about matters of race. I don’t think that is an insult by definition, because I do think I’m pretty good at it and I think I serve a particular value in that role.
But, yeah, there’s always some people who just think I’m the race guy.
That fits into something larger that we’ve seen in the last couple years, which is that there are some ways of commenting on sports that are inherently seen as political, such as kneeling. And they are political. But there are other ways of commenting about sports that I also think are political, which we just kind of accept—or the commentators who comment about sports just accept—as the status quo.
You nailed what I was going to say in response, which is, the status quo is political. It’s just not seen as such, right? So the issue really isn’t so much the idea that you are being political as much as it is that you’re being disruptive, or subversive. Like televising the national anthem is political. Just sitting down during the national anthem is seen as a political act.
But standing with your hand over your heart—
Right, right. How could those not be political acts, if acting in defiance of them is, by definition, a political act? People use the term “politics” as an escape route. It’s just an excuse to get out of whatever discussion it is. I don’t even know what politics means in most of those contexts, because the things that are actually political, I don’t really think I spend a lot of time talking about them. But I think that there are matters of intellectual sincerity and human decency that I am going to talk about. No one ever accuses you of talking about politics if they like what you say. How about that?
I want to take a step back to talk about analytics and race. It seems to me that they are two somewhat separate issues, and I am curious if you think of them as somewhat separate. The first is what the increasing reliance on analytics will mean for a sport, or for the people who work in a sport. And the second is whether the analytics are telling us something valuable about whether your team, or my team, or someone else’s team, can actually win at the sport.
I think that what you say is correct. Now, I do think that the analytics serve a great value, if for no other reason than the statistics that we most commonly use cannot serve nearly as much value as people think they do. What they are, however, is simple. And they are easy for people to understand.
We are a society that is generally afraid of math, and we’re particularly afraid of math at high levels. If you’ve ever had to try to teach anybody anything related to math and that person thought they weren’t good at it, they just shut down on it. If someone isn’t good at English, they don’t stop speaking English. And so, as a result, I do feel like there are people—some of them are former players, some of them are just observers of the game—who reject some of these statistics when, in reality, most of the stuff we’re talking about isn’t really that complex. Like, at least in terms of what the public gets with analytics. A lot of that stuff is just changing the denominator, using rates instead of using raw numbers.
And so I’m with you there. Like Jalen, I’m, like, Hey, it is a tool, it is something that can be used, but you can’t just strictly live in the numbers when you make these decisions because, in the end, basketball is a people business. And, see, that’s where the race part comes up. A lot of the reason why people of color get hired is because these teams feel like you need somebody of color to be able to talk to these dudes who are also of color, right? And it manifests itself in some really interesting ways.
For example, Red McCombs famously got in trouble for saying that he thought that Charlie Strong, when he was the head coach at Texas, was maybe a defensive coördinator, but he did not see him as being a head coach. Well, Red McCombs owned the San Antonio Spurs, and he absolutely had John Lucas [a former N.B.A. player, who is African-American] as the head coach there. And there are quotes, you find them on the Internet, where he basically was, like, “You need somebody that can talk to these players.”
This is before we even get to the idea of people thinking black folks can’t do math. And women, I should be clear, they’ll be fighting the same biases. Once they decide they don’t need to worry about these folks as people, then they’re also going to decide that they don’t need to hire the people that they hired in the first place because of their ability to relate to people. And so where this gets tricky is the concept of analytics, or the concept of using quantitative data, is a race-neutral sort of thing, but the way that stuff has typically and historically been applied is rarely, if ever, race-neutral.
You got into a debate with Michael Wilbon several years ago, because he said, “advanced analytics and black folks hardly ever mix.”
The idea that somehow black people can’t use these numbers, that’s the thing that I would fight against more than anything else. We certainly can. And I’d also make the point that there’s been a great push really over the last, I guess, thirty years or so to increase black participation in stuff that involves high-level math. I went to school on a scholarship with the Navy that was tasked with trying to increase the numbers of black Ph.D.s in math and science. And I’ve seen the numbers, man.
And that’s the problem that these sports leagues are going to inherit. They’re going to inherit all the things that society has done that has affected these participation rates. Where I look at the league, and I’m, like, Hey, I wonder what you guys are ultimately going to do. They’ll go set up a camp somewhere in Africa or somewhere in China in order to go find basketball players. You don’t have to go that far in order to find people of color who can more readily participate in the change of paradigm of what a front office is.
What the league and other people need to understand is it doesn’t matter if it’s your fault. You did not create this problem. So what? I didn’t create it, either. Now what?
People will always want to use the fact that it is a systemic problem to say, “Well, what can I do?”
Yeah. And that’s a lazy play that happens, and it’s a justification for why you just decided to go and call and hire your friend. And, to be honest, most people call and hire their friends. Because, look, it’s not as though when former players were a little bit more in the pool they were hiring them left and right, either. It’s not like we’ve had fifty per cent of the general managers in the league be black before. This is a thing that’s been happening in the league. It seems to be continuing to happen in the league, because before it was that you needed to have that certain level of experience in order to get there. And now they’re telling them, “Oh, that experience we told you you need to have? It don’t matter.” What?
Do you think there should be more former players involved in the league, or do you think that it’s sort of irrelevant whether there are more former players involved if there are people of diverse backgrounds to a sufficient degree involved?
I think that it would be wise for the league to have an available pathway for players who go from being on the court to being in the front office in ways that are meaningful. And I think that part of why that is important is it is not good for the league to have a chasm between ownership and players. You don’t want the front office to be seen as the guys with the brains and the athletes simply seen as the guys who perform on the court, because I think the best way that this league is going to show that it respects the minds of its players is if those players’ minds still have value after they are done playing.
And I think that it is important for specifically former players to have places in front offices, if for no other reason than they have a wealth of experience that the people otherwise in the front office simply haven’t been in positions to gain. They have something that these other guys can’t get in school. And so to dismiss that was to dismiss the entire idea of the player as an intellectual being. And that’s what I think the N.B.A. needs to be very careful about, is making sure that, when players are on the court, that they can look at the front office and see something that indicates the respect for their brains.
It does seem to me, as a viewer, that a lot of ex-players, and we’re talking about white players, certainly, as much as black players, just seem like they’re a little bit out of it. When I hear Kevin McHale, God bless him, say things about the N.B.A., I just wonder what generation he is living in. Outdated conventional wisdom is a huge part of sports commentary and sports analysis. And it’s frustrating as a fan.
Yeah, and I agree with that also. I bristle at the widespread dismissal of the idea that this increased data is helpful. It bothers me because I feel like those people are not giving it a try. If I were to explain to somebody: turnovers matter, but turnover rate tells you a little bit more about what we’re looking for. It’s all there. It’s all helpful. And it’s not a deviation from the things that people already do. And so when a lot of former athletes push back on this, I don’t think they’re pushing back on the idea of the numbers as much as they’re pushing back on the idea that somebody who does not play this game “knows more than they do.”
And I think a part of that is a defensiveness from the former athletes, but I also think part of that is a pushback against some of the resentment that they think they feel from these people who are telling them, “We know more than you do” or “You just need to go out there and play basketball.” That is where I think we wind up with a split that seems like it could be pretty easily taken care of with some level of conversation—except I don’t know what it is that we would need to do to get the people at large to fully respect the intelligence of former athletes.
Older generations have been saying that younger generations are not tough enough for forever. And I think a lot of the new analytics stuff, specifically about shooting threes rather than posting up big men, plays into those very human debates or annoyances that every generation has.
It’s interesting when you mention that, because something happened in the N.B.A. that I don’t think gets discussed enough, which is the change to the illegal-defense rules [which made defending big men easier]. So now the notion of what the center was is kind of obsolete, because that just doesn’t provide enough bang for the buck. But, if you’re a person who grew up watching great centers, there’s a very particular style of play that comes from having a great center, and if you like the footwork, you like the hook shot, if you like those things, they’re gone. Basketball as you knew it is gone. And I don’t blame people if they don’t enjoy just watching people stand around and shoot a bunch of three-pointers. I’m not sold that this revolution of knowledge has made basketball more fun. Just like the [infield] shift. It’s a great idea in baseball. You can’t tell me it’s made baseball more fun to watch. [In the infield shift, defenders on the pitching team move to one side of the field to prevent hits.]
Sometimes something could be true, but also it might not be for the best. I totally get it when people say that if Giannis [Antetokounmpo] wants to be the best player ever, he has to develop a three-point shot. That could very well be true, but in some ways it’s kind of sad.
Yeah, well, I look at a guy like Russell Westbrook, and there have been ups and downs in Russ’s career. You could make the argument that, say, the [earlier] version of Russell Westbrook was kind of inefficient. But, man, that Westbrook was so much fun to watch. And so one thing about our increased reliance on the numbers is we kind of miss out on the fun. So, Carmelo Anthony, for a lot of people, his legacy is going to go down that he was this guy that took too many mid-range shots and did not play in line with the efficiency of what basketball was. Maybe. But, man, do you remember watching ’Melo?
It’s one thing about how a team is run, and a team should be run to try to win. There’s no question about that. But, as a fan, as an observer, don’t you want this to be fun? Don’t you want this to be enjoyable? And I would get on Pablo [Torre] all the time about him rooting for the Sixers because of the general manager. But for me that is kind of a deeper thing that’s, like, wow, you’re watching a basketball game and what you’re relating to is the guy in the suit? Who does that? But a lot of people do that now.
Pablo may be beyond saving. We may have to face up to that.
He’s long gone on this one, right? But to me that is interesting to look at because, yeah, we’ve all got who we think are the best and who we want to win. But I do not like the idea that we’re going to reduce the way that we watch basketball to something cold and just strictly about ideas of efficiency. There is nothing that we do in our lives for fun where the No. 1 variable that we point to is efficiency.
After Trump’s election, a lot of sports commentators were being told to “stick to sports,” and there was a lot of resentment about talking "politics” on the air. And there was some sense that ESPN wanted to become less political. Where do you think the conversation about talking about larger issues within sports is now, and how has it changed, or not changed, from a couple years ago?
Kaepernick took us into a place that we really hadn’t been in as it related to sports. Because the only way to talk about Kaepernick was to talk about him in what people would call political terms. Otherwise, why were we here in the first place? But there was no way that ESPN, or any other sporting outlet, once they got that story, was not going to report it. So, if something like that happened in 2019, or 2020, I don’t have any evidence to indicate that the way we would go about it would necessarily be any different.
The question people need to ask themselves is why Kaepernick is the one that set them off. What was the discussion around Penn State and Joe Paterno if not a political discussion in the way that people use the term “politics”? Ray Rice, that is another one. Now, what I don’t know at this point is what kind of flash-point thing would have to happen to generate that same level of discussion.
What I think wound up happening for people was that Trump’s election is a momentous event in the history of the United States. And for a lot of people, on both sides of it, this thing was huge. And it was something that, when you came to work the day after the election, that’s what everybody on my radio show that day was talking about. I stayed away from anything explicitly political. I remember the main point that I said was, “Hey, man. They don’t want me to talk about politics here, but this is what’s happened, and you just got to decide if this is the country that you want to live in.”
It’s pretty benign. It’s pretty nonpartisan, or whatever it is. But, yo, we live in this world. We talk about this stuff. And, especially if you’re doing radio, people view you as being part of their lives. And this is what the topic of discussion was in their lives. If you had something that was similar to 9/11, and it happened today, you think we’re not going to talk about it at work tomorrow? You think we’re about to stick with sports? Now, if the day comes and this stuff matters within the news cycle and somebody says, “Hey, you can’t talk about it,” now we’ve got to have a much different discussion than the one we’re having now.
Meaning what?
Meaning that, if you cannot talk about what the actual story is, then why do we talk about stories? I want to be clear about this. I don’t blame my employer or anybody else if I come in and we’re, like, “Hey, that was a great game at the N.B.A. finals last night. Anyway, let’s talk about the impeachment debate.” Nope, that’s not what we’re here for. No, no, no. That’s not the same. They’re totally right about that if it happens as such. But if there were some major scene that took place regarding a political figure and it happened at a sporting event and it affected the sporting event, then, yeah, we’re going to talk about those things.
Isaac Chotiner
June 17, 2019
“There are always people who see me as just the guy who talks about race,” Bomani Jones said, of his experience in sports media.
Photograph by Ben Sklar
Over the past decade, the ESPN host Bomani Jones has become an increasingly visible and popular commentator on sports—and on the commentary surrounding them. Jones, who is thirty-eight, received two master’s degrees in economics, from Claremont Graduate University and the University of North Carolina, and then began writing about popular culture and athletics. He joined ESPN in 2010, and today hosts the radio show “The Right Time with Bomani Jones” and co-hosts the TV show “High Noon,” which is known for broadening sports discussions to social issues that extend beyond the court or the field.
Last week on “High Noon,” Jones and his co-host, Pablo Torre, had a discussion about the increasing use of analytics in sports, particularly basketball, and its effect on the game, hiring practices, and racial dynamics in the N.B.A. The segment was a response, in part, to an interview I had conducted about these topics with the former N.B.A. and college-hoops star Jalen Rose, who is also a host at ESPN. Rose worried that advanced statistics were being overused in the N.B.A., in a way that diminished the status of former players and had an element of racial bias. Jones, similarly, said that N.B.A. front offices were trying to tell former players that “your knowledge is not good enough because it has to be something that is quantifiable.” He also noted that, despite his economics training, the famed M.I.T. Sloan Sports Analytics Conference had asked him to be on a panel about activism.
I spoke by phone with Jones on Thursday evening, before Game 6 of the N.B.A. Finals. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his experiences in sports media, whether advanced statistics are making sports more efficient and less fun, and racism around high-level math.
What, exactly, happened with the Sloan conference invitation? Can you expand on that?
I had figured that, given some of the diversity issues surrounding this analytics debate, and, whether it’s true or not, the reputation that I have for being fairly bright, at some point I would be a person who would wind up getting a call about going to Sloan. And so [the co-chair] Daryl Morey reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in coming to the conference, and I certainly was. They asked me if I wanted to be on this panel on activism. This was two years ago. I admit, I was a little bit offended by that.
On one hand, I did understand why someone would call me to talk about that topic. But, on the other hand, I really thought that they would be calling me about this other stuff. Not that I was really excited about the idea of hanging out with basketball nerds, but it stood to reason that would be a reason that you would call me. And they did not. And so I let them know that I would like to be on something else. They did put me on different panel. I had a death in the family; I was not able to make it there. But I just couldn’t figure out logically how you decided that you were going to call some of these other people to be on these panels but you wouldn’t call me to be on this. Like, let’s forget about the fact that I got the degrees, right? And, not that I demanded an explanation for it, but no one ever explained that to me. [Morey did not respond to a request for comment.]
Is this something that you have generally felt, either from people in the media or from people who consume your work?
There are always people who see me as just the guy who talks about race. Within the industry, nobody’s really said anything like that to my face. But I do notice that people are very specific about my expertise on talking about matters of race. I don’t think that is an insult by definition, because I do think I’m pretty good at it and I think I serve a particular value in that role.
But, yeah, there’s always some people who just think I’m the race guy.
That fits into something larger that we’ve seen in the last couple years, which is that there are some ways of commenting on sports that are inherently seen as political, such as kneeling. And they are political. But there are other ways of commenting about sports that I also think are political, which we just kind of accept—or the commentators who comment about sports just accept—as the status quo.
You nailed what I was going to say in response, which is, the status quo is political. It’s just not seen as such, right? So the issue really isn’t so much the idea that you are being political as much as it is that you’re being disruptive, or subversive. Like televising the national anthem is political. Just sitting down during the national anthem is seen as a political act.
But standing with your hand over your heart—
Right, right. How could those not be political acts, if acting in defiance of them is, by definition, a political act? People use the term “politics” as an escape route. It’s just an excuse to get out of whatever discussion it is. I don’t even know what politics means in most of those contexts, because the things that are actually political, I don’t really think I spend a lot of time talking about them. But I think that there are matters of intellectual sincerity and human decency that I am going to talk about. No one ever accuses you of talking about politics if they like what you say. How about that?
I want to take a step back to talk about analytics and race. It seems to me that they are two somewhat separate issues, and I am curious if you think of them as somewhat separate. The first is what the increasing reliance on analytics will mean for a sport, or for the people who work in a sport. And the second is whether the analytics are telling us something valuable about whether your team, or my team, or someone else’s team, can actually win at the sport.
I think that what you say is correct. Now, I do think that the analytics serve a great value, if for no other reason than the statistics that we most commonly use cannot serve nearly as much value as people think they do. What they are, however, is simple. And they are easy for people to understand.
We are a society that is generally afraid of math, and we’re particularly afraid of math at high levels. If you’ve ever had to try to teach anybody anything related to math and that person thought they weren’t good at it, they just shut down on it. If someone isn’t good at English, they don’t stop speaking English. And so, as a result, I do feel like there are people—some of them are former players, some of them are just observers of the game—who reject some of these statistics when, in reality, most of the stuff we’re talking about isn’t really that complex. Like, at least in terms of what the public gets with analytics. A lot of that stuff is just changing the denominator, using rates instead of using raw numbers.
And so I’m with you there. Like Jalen, I’m, like, Hey, it is a tool, it is something that can be used, but you can’t just strictly live in the numbers when you make these decisions because, in the end, basketball is a people business. And, see, that’s where the race part comes up. A lot of the reason why people of color get hired is because these teams feel like you need somebody of color to be able to talk to these dudes who are also of color, right? And it manifests itself in some really interesting ways.
For example, Red McCombs famously got in trouble for saying that he thought that Charlie Strong, when he was the head coach at Texas, was maybe a defensive coördinator, but he did not see him as being a head coach. Well, Red McCombs owned the San Antonio Spurs, and he absolutely had John Lucas [a former N.B.A. player, who is African-American] as the head coach there. And there are quotes, you find them on the Internet, where he basically was, like, “You need somebody that can talk to these players.”
This is before we even get to the idea of people thinking black folks can’t do math. And women, I should be clear, they’ll be fighting the same biases. Once they decide they don’t need to worry about these folks as people, then they’re also going to decide that they don’t need to hire the people that they hired in the first place because of their ability to relate to people. And so where this gets tricky is the concept of analytics, or the concept of using quantitative data, is a race-neutral sort of thing, but the way that stuff has typically and historically been applied is rarely, if ever, race-neutral.
You got into a debate with Michael Wilbon several years ago, because he said, “advanced analytics and black folks hardly ever mix.”
The idea that somehow black people can’t use these numbers, that’s the thing that I would fight against more than anything else. We certainly can. And I’d also make the point that there’s been a great push really over the last, I guess, thirty years or so to increase black participation in stuff that involves high-level math. I went to school on a scholarship with the Navy that was tasked with trying to increase the numbers of black Ph.D.s in math and science. And I’ve seen the numbers, man.
And that’s the problem that these sports leagues are going to inherit. They’re going to inherit all the things that society has done that has affected these participation rates. Where I look at the league, and I’m, like, Hey, I wonder what you guys are ultimately going to do. They’ll go set up a camp somewhere in Africa or somewhere in China in order to go find basketball players. You don’t have to go that far in order to find people of color who can more readily participate in the change of paradigm of what a front office is.
What the league and other people need to understand is it doesn’t matter if it’s your fault. You did not create this problem. So what? I didn’t create it, either. Now what?
People will always want to use the fact that it is a systemic problem to say, “Well, what can I do?”
Yeah. And that’s a lazy play that happens, and it’s a justification for why you just decided to go and call and hire your friend. And, to be honest, most people call and hire their friends. Because, look, it’s not as though when former players were a little bit more in the pool they were hiring them left and right, either. It’s not like we’ve had fifty per cent of the general managers in the league be black before. This is a thing that’s been happening in the league. It seems to be continuing to happen in the league, because before it was that you needed to have that certain level of experience in order to get there. And now they’re telling them, “Oh, that experience we told you you need to have? It don’t matter.” What?
Do you think there should be more former players involved in the league, or do you think that it’s sort of irrelevant whether there are more former players involved if there are people of diverse backgrounds to a sufficient degree involved?
I think that it would be wise for the league to have an available pathway for players who go from being on the court to being in the front office in ways that are meaningful. And I think that part of why that is important is it is not good for the league to have a chasm between ownership and players. You don’t want the front office to be seen as the guys with the brains and the athletes simply seen as the guys who perform on the court, because I think the best way that this league is going to show that it respects the minds of its players is if those players’ minds still have value after they are done playing.
And I think that it is important for specifically former players to have places in front offices, if for no other reason than they have a wealth of experience that the people otherwise in the front office simply haven’t been in positions to gain. They have something that these other guys can’t get in school. And so to dismiss that was to dismiss the entire idea of the player as an intellectual being. And that’s what I think the N.B.A. needs to be very careful about, is making sure that, when players are on the court, that they can look at the front office and see something that indicates the respect for their brains.
It does seem to me, as a viewer, that a lot of ex-players, and we’re talking about white players, certainly, as much as black players, just seem like they’re a little bit out of it. When I hear Kevin McHale, God bless him, say things about the N.B.A., I just wonder what generation he is living in. Outdated conventional wisdom is a huge part of sports commentary and sports analysis. And it’s frustrating as a fan.
Yeah, and I agree with that also. I bristle at the widespread dismissal of the idea that this increased data is helpful. It bothers me because I feel like those people are not giving it a try. If I were to explain to somebody: turnovers matter, but turnover rate tells you a little bit more about what we’re looking for. It’s all there. It’s all helpful. And it’s not a deviation from the things that people already do. And so when a lot of former athletes push back on this, I don’t think they’re pushing back on the idea of the numbers as much as they’re pushing back on the idea that somebody who does not play this game “knows more than they do.”
And I think a part of that is a defensiveness from the former athletes, but I also think part of that is a pushback against some of the resentment that they think they feel from these people who are telling them, “We know more than you do” or “You just need to go out there and play basketball.” That is where I think we wind up with a split that seems like it could be pretty easily taken care of with some level of conversation—except I don’t know what it is that we would need to do to get the people at large to fully respect the intelligence of former athletes.
Older generations have been saying that younger generations are not tough enough for forever. And I think a lot of the new analytics stuff, specifically about shooting threes rather than posting up big men, plays into those very human debates or annoyances that every generation has.
It’s interesting when you mention that, because something happened in the N.B.A. that I don’t think gets discussed enough, which is the change to the illegal-defense rules [which made defending big men easier]. So now the notion of what the center was is kind of obsolete, because that just doesn’t provide enough bang for the buck. But, if you’re a person who grew up watching great centers, there’s a very particular style of play that comes from having a great center, and if you like the footwork, you like the hook shot, if you like those things, they’re gone. Basketball as you knew it is gone. And I don’t blame people if they don’t enjoy just watching people stand around and shoot a bunch of three-pointers. I’m not sold that this revolution of knowledge has made basketball more fun. Just like the [infield] shift. It’s a great idea in baseball. You can’t tell me it’s made baseball more fun to watch. [In the infield shift, defenders on the pitching team move to one side of the field to prevent hits.]
Sometimes something could be true, but also it might not be for the best. I totally get it when people say that if Giannis [Antetokounmpo] wants to be the best player ever, he has to develop a three-point shot. That could very well be true, but in some ways it’s kind of sad.
Yeah, well, I look at a guy like Russell Westbrook, and there have been ups and downs in Russ’s career. You could make the argument that, say, the [earlier] version of Russell Westbrook was kind of inefficient. But, man, that Westbrook was so much fun to watch. And so one thing about our increased reliance on the numbers is we kind of miss out on the fun. So, Carmelo Anthony, for a lot of people, his legacy is going to go down that he was this guy that took too many mid-range shots and did not play in line with the efficiency of what basketball was. Maybe. But, man, do you remember watching ’Melo?
It’s one thing about how a team is run, and a team should be run to try to win. There’s no question about that. But, as a fan, as an observer, don’t you want this to be fun? Don’t you want this to be enjoyable? And I would get on Pablo [Torre] all the time about him rooting for the Sixers because of the general manager. But for me that is kind of a deeper thing that’s, like, wow, you’re watching a basketball game and what you’re relating to is the guy in the suit? Who does that? But a lot of people do that now.
Pablo may be beyond saving. We may have to face up to that.
He’s long gone on this one, right? But to me that is interesting to look at because, yeah, we’ve all got who we think are the best and who we want to win. But I do not like the idea that we’re going to reduce the way that we watch basketball to something cold and just strictly about ideas of efficiency. There is nothing that we do in our lives for fun where the No. 1 variable that we point to is efficiency.
After Trump’s election, a lot of sports commentators were being told to “stick to sports,” and there was a lot of resentment about talking "politics” on the air. And there was some sense that ESPN wanted to become less political. Where do you think the conversation about talking about larger issues within sports is now, and how has it changed, or not changed, from a couple years ago?
Kaepernick took us into a place that we really hadn’t been in as it related to sports. Because the only way to talk about Kaepernick was to talk about him in what people would call political terms. Otherwise, why were we here in the first place? But there was no way that ESPN, or any other sporting outlet, once they got that story, was not going to report it. So, if something like that happened in 2019, or 2020, I don’t have any evidence to indicate that the way we would go about it would necessarily be any different.
The question people need to ask themselves is why Kaepernick is the one that set them off. What was the discussion around Penn State and Joe Paterno if not a political discussion in the way that people use the term “politics”? Ray Rice, that is another one. Now, what I don’t know at this point is what kind of flash-point thing would have to happen to generate that same level of discussion.
What I think wound up happening for people was that Trump’s election is a momentous event in the history of the United States. And for a lot of people, on both sides of it, this thing was huge. And it was something that, when you came to work the day after the election, that’s what everybody on my radio show that day was talking about. I stayed away from anything explicitly political. I remember the main point that I said was, “Hey, man. They don’t want me to talk about politics here, but this is what’s happened, and you just got to decide if this is the country that you want to live in.”
It’s pretty benign. It’s pretty nonpartisan, or whatever it is. But, yo, we live in this world. We talk about this stuff. And, especially if you’re doing radio, people view you as being part of their lives. And this is what the topic of discussion was in their lives. If you had something that was similar to 9/11, and it happened today, you think we’re not going to talk about it at work tomorrow? You think we’re about to stick with sports? Now, if the day comes and this stuff matters within the news cycle and somebody says, “Hey, you can’t talk about it,” now we’ve got to have a much different discussion than the one we’re having now.
Meaning what?
Meaning that, if you cannot talk about what the actual story is, then why do we talk about stories? I want to be clear about this. I don’t blame my employer or anybody else if I come in and we’re, like, “Hey, that was a great game at the N.B.A. finals last night. Anyway, let’s talk about the impeachment debate.” Nope, that’s not what we’re here for. No, no, no. That’s not the same. They’re totally right about that if it happens as such. But if there were some major scene that took place regarding a political figure and it happened at a sporting event and it affected the sporting event, then, yeah, we’re going to talk about those things.
https://www.vanquishthefoe.com/2019/9/4/20848773/espn-bomani-jones-byu-football-mormon-church-lds
ESPN’s Bomani Jones: “BYU Football is the most visual public representation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”
1
“Wherever they show up people are going to buy tickets to watch them play football. It’s a great way to carry the brand of your message.”
By Jake Welch@BYUAllBlue Sep 4, 2019, 6:48am PDTShare this on Facebook (opens in new window)
Photo by Sean Mathis/Getty Images for SXSW
Even with a 0-1 start, BYU Football finds it’s way into the national conversation, this time thanks to ESPN’s Bomani Jones.
During his daily podcast, The Right Time with Bomani Jones, the network personality talked about Liberty University’s desire to have a Top 25 football program. Jones said that he understood why Liberty would want to connect their faith-based school to a quality football program because of how successful BYU has been in carrying to the torch for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“BYU Football is the most visual public representation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints...In terms of a public representation of (the church), that is non-controversial, it’s the football team.”
It’s no secret sharing the message of the Church is a primary objective of BYU’s football program, but it’s interesting to see those outside the BYU media-sphere to comment on that mission and their success in doing so. Jones continued his thoughts on BYU, discussing how university’s widespread fanbase (and faith base) will help put fans in the stands across the country.
“And it becomes a thing for them where if you have all these members of the church around the country, yo if BYU shows in your town there’s a good chance you’re gonna be sold out. Because your city has a Church of Jesus Christ...Yo Gabe (producer) did you know that (they) have a church in Harlem? It’s been there for 15 years! On Lenox! It’s a couple blocks north of the intersection of Malcom X Blvd and Martin Luther King Drive! A couple blocks north, Mormons! They out there, in their short sleeve shirts trying to talk to you about stuff. They there! My point being wherever they show up people are going to buy tickets to watch them play football. It’s a great way to carry the brand of your message.”
Jones isn’t treading any new territory here for BYU fans but it confirms that people understand what the church is trying to accomplish. There has been a lot of discussion in regards to BYU’s commitment to competing at the highest level of college football (specifically from a monetary standpoint) and will surely continue as the top programs continue to separate themselves from the middle of the pack.
You can listen to the full podcast below, with the BYU discussion starting around the 22:30 mark.
ESPN’s Bomani Jones: “BYU Football is the most visual public representation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”
1
“Wherever they show up people are going to buy tickets to watch them play football. It’s a great way to carry the brand of your message.”
By Jake Welch@BYUAllBlue Sep 4, 2019, 6:48am PDTShare this on Facebook (opens in new window)
Even with a 0-1 start, BYU Football finds it’s way into the national conversation, this time thanks to ESPN’s Bomani Jones.
During his daily podcast, The Right Time with Bomani Jones, the network personality talked about Liberty University’s desire to have a Top 25 football program. Jones said that he understood why Liberty would want to connect their faith-based school to a quality football program because of how successful BYU has been in carrying to the torch for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“BYU Football is the most visual public representation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints...In terms of a public representation of (the church), that is non-controversial, it’s the football team.”
It’s no secret sharing the message of the Church is a primary objective of BYU’s football program, but it’s interesting to see those outside the BYU media-sphere to comment on that mission and their success in doing so. Jones continued his thoughts on BYU, discussing how university’s widespread fanbase (and faith base) will help put fans in the stands across the country.
“And it becomes a thing for them where if you have all these members of the church around the country, yo if BYU shows in your town there’s a good chance you’re gonna be sold out. Because your city has a Church of Jesus Christ...Yo Gabe (producer) did you know that (they) have a church in Harlem? It’s been there for 15 years! On Lenox! It’s a couple blocks north of the intersection of Malcom X Blvd and Martin Luther King Drive! A couple blocks north, Mormons! They out there, in their short sleeve shirts trying to talk to you about stuff. They there! My point being wherever they show up people are going to buy tickets to watch them play football. It’s a great way to carry the brand of your message.”
Jones isn’t treading any new territory here for BYU fans but it confirms that people understand what the church is trying to accomplish. There has been a lot of discussion in regards to BYU’s commitment to competing at the highest level of college football (specifically from a monetary standpoint) and will surely continue as the top programs continue to separate themselves from the middle of the pack.
You can listen to the full podcast below, with the BYU discussion starting around the 22:30 mark.
It’s a Monday afternoon in New York City, and ESPN’s High Noon is about to tape at the worldwide leader’s swanky Seaport District Studios. Into the studio walks one of the two men whose names appear on the marquee.
Bomani Jones strides confidently, says hello to the small group (of which I am one) on hand to watch, and the production crew. He takes his seat on the set and scrolls through his phone nonchalantly as he awaits his co-host.
Pablo Torre emerges a few moments later, with a noticeable pep in his step and enthusiastically says hello and gets right to his seat. A few minutes later he tells us, “feel free to laugh if anything is funny.”
Jones quipped, “he means laugh at his jokes.”
That’s the dynamic of these two friends, that for over a year (the show debuted June 4th 2018) have led one of the most talked about ESPN studio shows in recent memory.
When the show debuted, it was a tense time for the company. The “stick to sports” mantra was trumpeted by ESPN’s harshest critics. You know, those right-wing bloggers that said the company had become too consumed with “politics.”
SC6, the re-imagined SportsCenter starring Jemele Hill and Michael Smith, had ended earlier that year (March 2018) amid a belief by some that too much air time was spent on protesting NFL players and not enough on the actual games on the field.
A studio show with Jones and Torre as the headliners was just what those critics needed to continue their misguided outrage.
Before the show aired it was being labeled.
Will it be the “smart” show? The “woke show”? Or the “non-sports sports show”?
In an interview with The Ringer, High Noon’s coordinating producer Matt Kelliher joked the show should be called Bomani and Pablo Talk Down to You.
To be fair, Jones and Torre are smart. But not because they have degrees from prestigious schools.
There is a level of intuitiveness and understanding both men possess that make them who they are, which in turn makes High Noon what it is.
Put plainly, they get it.
They are able to convey information and opinions about sports in a style that is their own, but in a way that any audience can receive it.
That’s the most important component to making good television, and make no mistake, that’s what Jones and Torre want to do first and foremost.
“It doesn’t matter if you can talk about sports in ways other people can’t, if the people that are listening can’t hear it. You know?” Jones told BET. “Relaying this stuff to the audience is of far greater importance than whatever idea of difference you have about yourself.”
Following the taping of the show we retreat to one of the offices inside the ESPN building and talk about their experiences as television show hosts: What it means to have minority representation in media. And what the future of the media business could end up being, if we’re not careful.
- You’ve said before that the win for you was just getting a TV show. But now that you’ve done that and it’s been going on for more than a year. Is the show going in a direction you thought it was going to go? What are your aspirations vis à vis we are different and we want to put something different out there?
Jones: “Well for me going forward, you just try to make the best show that you can. Is it going the way we thought it would? Probably not. In large part because we started off doing a one hour show at noon and it moved on to being a half hour taped show at 4 o’clock. There’s a lot of differences you are going to have in terms of how a show is built and structured and the audience it has to serve and all of those things. So we definitely have to go about it differently than we initially had planned.
But the game at this point is to make the show better. At every point you are just trying to make this into as good of a show as it can be. And I don’t know if there will ever be a point, in terms of how I’m wired, where I’m like ‘yeah that’s good enough.’ That’s probably not going to be it.”
Torre: “Yeah, I agree with the whole we are constantly trying to be better and evolve. But I will say, something that I’ve hoped for and has been delivered is the reality that we are saying things and having conversations that I don’t hear on television period. Let alone on sports television. I’m deeply proud of that dynamic that we have where we tackle subjects that I just don’t hear otherwise.”
It is their perspectives on issues around race and the societal impact of sports that both men handle with aplomb that sets them apart from others. There is a way they think and react to the game within the game, and what is at the core of many sports stories.
There is obviously a perspective they share as members of an “other” or racialized minority. But for Jones and Torre it’s more than that. Their brains seem predisposed or conditioned to parse through clutter and noise and get to the elements that allow for an elevated discussion.
“It’s both of our brains colliding as you saw today, and producing stuff that tends to be at it’s best, when it’s spontaneous and really energized,” Torre said. “That’s been the great gift for me, is that we get to do that. So it’s not having theTVt on mute and saying ‘look what they’re doing, look at what they look like.’ It’s, these guys are saying stuff that other people aren’t saying.”
Still, two men of color leading a show on linear television is not common and something they are aware of.
It’s been more than a year doing High Noon. What has that meant to you guys, in terms of being minorities having your own show and how it has been received?
Jones: “I don’t know if I’ve really thought of it so much in that particular context. I suppose there are certain representation issues, and this is a show that looks a little different than most shows you’re going to see on television. But the biggest reason we got this show, at least I’d like to think so, is we’re pretty good at what we’re doing. So that for me has always been the primary thing. Is that for a long grind of trying to figure this out, to even be in a position to do this at all. There are but so many slots for anybody to do this, regardless of other circumstances.There aren’t many people with two feet that have something like this.”
Torre: “I will say for me it’s all kind of novel. This is my first, five day a week co-hosting job and I get told a lot, and I feel it a lot that it means something for me to be an Asian dude. To be an Asian anything because that doesn’t really exist in many of these five day a week slots. So I have been enjoying what that is because that is something I have not felt acutely until now. When you realize ‘oh shit yeah’, that’s kind of different.”
You said it’s more important that we have a show more so than the minority led element. But, there aren’t many people that look like us and have their own show with their names on the marquee. Sports that are mostly dominated by people of color, have an overwhelming majority of White people who are the authors of their history. Is it important to have people who look like the athletes talking about it?
Jones: “Oh yeah. One thing about this industry, is that there are plenty of Black men who are in it. Overwhelmingly they are former players, so basically what you wind up with is those guys come on because they have an experience that is very particular. But then it becomes we can just find some White dude to talk about this other stuff. That’s what seems to be conveyed in that message.
But it is necessary, generally, to have a broad range of insights on these matters because all of us in our personal experiences will give us insight that allow us to see things differently than perhaps the next person can. So, there’s going to be a lot of topics where in part because of my background, I’ll have insight on.
But another reason why I’ve got the insight on those things is because I put in a lot of work to know and understand what those things are. So, it is not simply to me about the value of having somebody that looks like me or has the experiences there it’s having the insight that is particular to the experiences of those people. It just so happens that you are more likely to have that, if you’re a member of that group, because in all likelihood that is what has moved you to pay more attention to the matters that are there.”
Torre: “It’s also crucial to have credibility in the world of sports. Bomani has a long resumé that goes beyond sports. But he also knows sports history as much as any human being that I have ever met. He was a columnist on ESPN’s Page 2, in the era of David Halberstam and Ralph Wiley. I come from Sports Illustrated where I learned magazines and was a reporter. For us, it’s as much about having the credibility and the resumé and then synthesizing that through the particular perspectives that we have, and that’s why you land on a show that actually is doing stuff that may feel kind of new and different.”
- In discussing the importance of representation in sports media, Jones look back at what has historically been the paradigm within sports talk radio.
“It becomes important to have Black people in these spaces because what we don’t want is what the history of sports talk radio has basically been, which is White dudes complaining about Black dudes on the radio, right? If you listen to who the hosts are, and it trickles down to who the callers are and it becomes this circular thing, and this same set of people are hammering this other group of people. That brings out the worst very often in the people that are doing it. It is very important to have people who have more in common with the athletes there because otherwise this could turn into something we don’t want it to be.”
There is an allure to sports that is hard to resist. For most people, the chances of playing professional sports is infinitesimal. If you are a person of color the chances of becoming a member of the sports media, while not as small, aren’t that great either.
The push by heads of media platforms to produce more and more quantitative based sports content is on the rise. You see it in the way, football, basketball and baseball are covered. Not having a quantitative background could be a huge barrier for people of color.
Black and Latino students are less likely to pass Algebra I and less likely to attend schools that offer advanced math classes than their White and Asian peers according to data.
If math isn’t going so well for you in middle school and high school, what are the chances you decide to pursue an undergraduate degree in a math related field?
“The problem that is at play there is not one that the [media] industry is equipped to fix. The industry can help in some ways. But the industry can’t change the fact that education in this country by and large has discouraged non-White males, with the obvious glaring exception of Asians. Everybody else is being discouraged from engaging in mathematical type of stuff,” said Jones.
“I do worry about a wall of access being denied because of the quantitative stuff. But the quantitative stuff is symptom. The disease...if it ain’t that, it’s going to be something else.”
“But there’s a wrinkle to the quantitative stuff,” Torre retorted. “So one irony I think, and one correction. I don’t think anyone is encouraging Asians to get into math outside of their own families.”
“Yes, just nobody’s keeping them out!” Jones remarked.
The cameras have long been turned off and we’ve been talking for almost 30 minutes. That’s the kind of authentic banter both men would engage in if they were having brunch on a Sunday, or while watching a game, or on the set of their show.
“As much as I agree with the broad strokes. Something that is true about the quantitative analytics thing, is that it enables certain people who also never had access to this stuff. That’s the other side of the coin,” Torre said. “There is a disease here. But I think it’s also important to note there is complexity within said disease, in terms of the trickle down to all the people who may or may not be getting jobs in general.”
Jones and Torre took different paths to arrive at the same destination. No one path better or easier to navigate than the other. But they know what they’ve done is largely not replicable.
However, acquiring the knowledge and having the diligence to go beyond the surface can give you the opportunity to make it in this business.
“Learn how to write and report as a basic skill set,” said Torre. “Develop taste. Know what you like and why you like it. Know what the person you like is doing, so that you can break it down structurally.”
“Knowing what you’re talking about matters more than anything else,” Jones said. “They’re tuning in to find out about sports. If they think you’re opinions about sports are compelling, you got a chance to stick around. If you don’t know the sports, you have no chance.”
Bomani Jones on the moment he knew "Highly Questionable" was different - Stream the Video - Watch ESPN
ESPN's Bomani Jones recalls a hilarious interview with Jerry Stackhouse done during his early days on "Highly Questionable" that showed him they could do things differently on that show on Watch ESPN, first streamed on Tuesday, August 27, 2019.
Check out his weekly The Evening Jones. But don't ask him a stupid question. 
Check out his weekly The Evening Jones. But don't ask him a stupid question.
Don't ever miss it
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Where were the questions before Justin Rohrwasser was signed by the Patriots?
The kicker could be telling the truth, but there’s only one way to find out. And that’s not by taking his word for it.
Justin Rohrwasser (right) of Marshall kicks a 28-yard field goal in the third quarter against South Florida in the Gasparilla Bowl at Raymond James Stadium on Dec. 20, 2018, in Tampa, Florida. Julio Aguilar/Getty Images
BY BOMANI JONES @BOMANI_JONES
April 28, 2020
The sleuths of the internet noticed a tattoo on the forearm of Justin Rohrwasser, the New England Patriots’ fifth-round pick in the 2020 NFL draft. What started as chuckles about the novelty of an inked-up place-kicker led to the revelation that Rohrwasser chose to indelibly put the logo of the Three Percenters, a far-right militia group, on his body. On draft day, Rohrwasser told reporters he thought the tattoo was a show of military support and he has since learned better.
When did he learn better? That day.
Rohrwasser told Steve Burton of WBZ-TV in Boston that he got the tattoo when he was 18, and the mark created no problems while he was at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. Toward the end of the interview, his voice shook as he expressed remorse for getting a tattoo he thought supported the armed forces. He also said he will have the tattoo removed.
For the sake of argument, let’s say Rohrwasser was telling the truth. Rather than getting a tattoo of a bald eagle or Uncle Sam, he accidentally and ironically chose a symbol that represents a group that actually opposes the actions of the federal government and, somehow, not one person who noticed the tattoo told him its true meaning. He put on his body something he could barely explain.
Even if all that’s true, it’s damning to multiple parties that it took until Monday for anyone to directly ask Rohrwasser follow-up questions. His explanation on April 25 invited more scrutiny than it provided clarity, but no one with the job of asking him questions posed any in response to his initial answer.
Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on someone to ask Patriots coach Bill Belichick any of the following questions: Do the Patriots, like some other teams in pro sports, vet the tattoos of the players they consider selecting? If so, was Rohrwasser one of those players? If not, were you made aware of his tattoo of the symbol of a militia? Had you known this, if you didn’t know, would the Patriots have selected him? Now that you know — and the public knows — do you plan to sign him? Or will owner Bob Kraft cut ties with him as he did Christian Peter, who was drafted in 1996 by the Pats despite multiple violent incidents involving women, but wasn’t signed after women’s groups objected to his selection?
And, if someone wanted to go a little further, he or she could ask why, if Rohrwasser’s tattoo wasn’t disqualifying, a team with a hole on the depth chart at quarterback 1 hasn’t called Colin Kaepernick.
These questions would be responsible, delicate and fair. They are also necessary.
So why are they so hard to ask?
For decades, NFL teams have been famous for thoroughly vetting potential draftees and monitoring current players. Combine interviews often sound like interrogations, as team executives poke and prod players, asking uncomfortable — and often unnecessary — questions because they leave no stone unturned. Players’ affiliations, familial and otherwise, are closely scrutinized. In 2008, the NFL went so far as to hire experts to monitor whether players were using gang signs in games.
There’s a chance, had anyone asked someone in law enforcement about the Three Percenters, there would have been a long conversation. The group was formed in 2008, ostensibly out of a fear that Barack Obama’s election would lead to government overreach. Though its national council said the group does not associate with racism, there was security provided at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. While many law enforcement officers are Three Percenters, police departments in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, have disciplined officers for affiliation with the militia.
If a cop would have to answer for getting the Three Percenters logo tattooed on himself, it’s awfully generous to let Rohrwasser brush it away with an answer that didn’t add up.
That tattoo seems to say a lot more than someone’s tweets and likes. One could argue tweets are flippant, but that would be a harder sell if one had to get needled to send them. Accidentally or otherwise, Rohrwasser made a permanent statement of allegiance to a problematic organization, and that statement was apparently made past the threshold of adulthood. It could not be treated casually.
Rohrwasser is chalking this up to ignorance, an excuse one can’t grant as easily to Belichick. So how did Belichick, or anyone else, miss this one? Is Rohrwasser not the kind of guy they think they need to look into as such, both because he’s white and … well, he’s a kicker?
Or is it because, in a country where the president saw “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville, it’s been collectively decided that groups like the Three Percenters should be protected?
When armed Three Percenters showed up at armed forces recruiting centers across America in 2015 — ostensibly to protect unarmed recruiters after a shooting at a center in Tennessee — the Army told recruiters to treat them as a threat, but also to be “polite” and “professional” if engaged in conversation. This is sage advice for outgunned recruiters, but the thought of armed civilians being treated with honey instead of vinegar or gunpowder is impossible to relate to.
Perhaps that explains why those tattoos were treated as unimportant, maybe even how Rohrwasser could have the tattoo for years and never get a double take. Or maybe it’s just because groups like the Three Percenters don’t offend enough white people.
For all the ways the media got it wrong with Kaepernick, they at least treated his protest like it was important. There was no shortage of questions headed his way (though he’s answered none since 2016). But he was making the most daring public statement an athlete can make, the one so many explicitly avoid — black people, in this country, are the victims of racism and deserve better. Kaepernick’s pro-black words and aesthetics were polarizing and offensive to much of the public. “Wokeness” and support for Kaepernick didn’t fuel that story. The anger directed toward Kaepernick was that flame’s oxygen. The story thrived nationally because it struck a chord with white people, just like pretty much every other big story.
If the backlash had to do with respect for the law, Rohrwasser’s tattoo would be a hotter topic. Despite there reportedly being hundreds of law enforcement officers who are Three Percenters, they are no more respectful of the police than Kaepernick. Kaepernick’s protests center on stopping police officers from doing illegal things and getting away with them. The Three Percenters demand that their members not enforce laws out of step with their agenda (this applies to police officers and servicemen).
Writers know a controversial topic when they see one. Ignoring this one might be saying the quiet part quietly, but loud enough to hear — an express willingness to take up arms against the United States government, and refusing to enforce laws one has sworn to uphold, is less controversial than asking those whose job is to protect black people to not kill them without good reason.
Treating Rohrwasser delicately and sparing Belichick completely is saying none of this is a big deal. It doesn’t matter that, had no one noticed a picture on the internet, Rohrwasser would have been a walking advertisement for a militia whenever he was on camera. It doesn’t matter that legendary NFL investigators somehow missed something so glaring. It doesn’t matter that this would fly in the face of the idea that a kicker isn’t worth controversy.
And it doesn’t matter that someone hasn’t been able to play in three seasons because he, supposedly, disrespected America, but Rohrwasser can shrug off what looks like an affiliation with an anti-government group.
When something like this comes up, the questions can’t just be to check something off a to-do list. The reason to ask the first question is the reason to ask more, to gain clarity on something that much of the public found jarring. If Kaepernick’s T-shirt with Fidel Castro on it was worth a few questions, so is Rohrwasser’s tattoo.
But guys like Rohrwasser rarely have to answer for themselves. And when they do, they get patted on the back like Burton, a black reporter, did by telling his audience he didn’t think Rohrwasser was a racist and telling viewers to “give the kid a chance.”
Men like Belichick don’t have to answer for anyone else. Sports media rarely has to answer for its inconsistency and negligence on these topics. Rohrwasser gets a tattoo to make a statement, and the people who notice are treated as the problem.
Hey, this really could be the misunderstanding Rohrwasser said it is, but there’s only one way to find out. And that’s not by taking his word for it, the easiest act that too many have been willing to do
The kicker could be telling the truth, but there’s only one way to find out. And that’s not by taking his word for it.
Justin Rohrwasser (right) of Marshall kicks a 28-yard field goal in the third quarter against South Florida in the Gasparilla Bowl at Raymond James Stadium on Dec. 20, 2018, in Tampa, Florida. Julio Aguilar/Getty Images
BY BOMANI JONES @BOMANI_JONES
April 28, 2020
The sleuths of the internet noticed a tattoo on the forearm of Justin Rohrwasser, the New England Patriots’ fifth-round pick in the 2020 NFL draft. What started as chuckles about the novelty of an inked-up place-kicker led to the revelation that Rohrwasser chose to indelibly put the logo of the Three Percenters, a far-right militia group, on his body. On draft day, Rohrwasser told reporters he thought the tattoo was a show of military support and he has since learned better.
When did he learn better? That day.
Rohrwasser told Steve Burton of WBZ-TV in Boston that he got the tattoo when he was 18, and the mark created no problems while he was at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. Toward the end of the interview, his voice shook as he expressed remorse for getting a tattoo he thought supported the armed forces. He also said he will have the tattoo removed.
For the sake of argument, let’s say Rohrwasser was telling the truth. Rather than getting a tattoo of a bald eagle or Uncle Sam, he accidentally and ironically chose a symbol that represents a group that actually opposes the actions of the federal government and, somehow, not one person who noticed the tattoo told him its true meaning. He put on his body something he could barely explain.
Even if all that’s true, it’s damning to multiple parties that it took until Monday for anyone to directly ask Rohrwasser follow-up questions. His explanation on April 25 invited more scrutiny than it provided clarity, but no one with the job of asking him questions posed any in response to his initial answer.
Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on someone to ask Patriots coach Bill Belichick any of the following questions: Do the Patriots, like some other teams in pro sports, vet the tattoos of the players they consider selecting? If so, was Rohrwasser one of those players? If not, were you made aware of his tattoo of the symbol of a militia? Had you known this, if you didn’t know, would the Patriots have selected him? Now that you know — and the public knows — do you plan to sign him? Or will owner Bob Kraft cut ties with him as he did Christian Peter, who was drafted in 1996 by the Pats despite multiple violent incidents involving women, but wasn’t signed after women’s groups objected to his selection?
And, if someone wanted to go a little further, he or she could ask why, if Rohrwasser’s tattoo wasn’t disqualifying, a team with a hole on the depth chart at quarterback 1 hasn’t called Colin Kaepernick.
These questions would be responsible, delicate and fair. They are also necessary.
So why are they so hard to ask?
For decades, NFL teams have been famous for thoroughly vetting potential draftees and monitoring current players. Combine interviews often sound like interrogations, as team executives poke and prod players, asking uncomfortable — and often unnecessary — questions because they leave no stone unturned. Players’ affiliations, familial and otherwise, are closely scrutinized. In 2008, the NFL went so far as to hire experts to monitor whether players were using gang signs in games.
There’s a chance, had anyone asked someone in law enforcement about the Three Percenters, there would have been a long conversation. The group was formed in 2008, ostensibly out of a fear that Barack Obama’s election would lead to government overreach. Though its national council said the group does not associate with racism, there was security provided at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. While many law enforcement officers are Three Percenters, police departments in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, have disciplined officers for affiliation with the militia.
If a cop would have to answer for getting the Three Percenters logo tattooed on himself, it’s awfully generous to let Rohrwasser brush it away with an answer that didn’t add up.
That tattoo seems to say a lot more than someone’s tweets and likes. One could argue tweets are flippant, but that would be a harder sell if one had to get needled to send them. Accidentally or otherwise, Rohrwasser made a permanent statement of allegiance to a problematic organization, and that statement was apparently made past the threshold of adulthood. It could not be treated casually.
Rohrwasser is chalking this up to ignorance, an excuse one can’t grant as easily to Belichick. So how did Belichick, or anyone else, miss this one? Is Rohrwasser not the kind of guy they think they need to look into as such, both because he’s white and … well, he’s a kicker?
Or is it because, in a country where the president saw “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville, it’s been collectively decided that groups like the Three Percenters should be protected?
When armed Three Percenters showed up at armed forces recruiting centers across America in 2015 — ostensibly to protect unarmed recruiters after a shooting at a center in Tennessee — the Army told recruiters to treat them as a threat, but also to be “polite” and “professional” if engaged in conversation. This is sage advice for outgunned recruiters, but the thought of armed civilians being treated with honey instead of vinegar or gunpowder is impossible to relate to.
Perhaps that explains why those tattoos were treated as unimportant, maybe even how Rohrwasser could have the tattoo for years and never get a double take. Or maybe it’s just because groups like the Three Percenters don’t offend enough white people.
For all the ways the media got it wrong with Kaepernick, they at least treated his protest like it was important. There was no shortage of questions headed his way (though he’s answered none since 2016). But he was making the most daring public statement an athlete can make, the one so many explicitly avoid — black people, in this country, are the victims of racism and deserve better. Kaepernick’s pro-black words and aesthetics were polarizing and offensive to much of the public. “Wokeness” and support for Kaepernick didn’t fuel that story. The anger directed toward Kaepernick was that flame’s oxygen. The story thrived nationally because it struck a chord with white people, just like pretty much every other big story.
If the backlash had to do with respect for the law, Rohrwasser’s tattoo would be a hotter topic. Despite there reportedly being hundreds of law enforcement officers who are Three Percenters, they are no more respectful of the police than Kaepernick. Kaepernick’s protests center on stopping police officers from doing illegal things and getting away with them. The Three Percenters demand that their members not enforce laws out of step with their agenda (this applies to police officers and servicemen).
Writers know a controversial topic when they see one. Ignoring this one might be saying the quiet part quietly, but loud enough to hear — an express willingness to take up arms against the United States government, and refusing to enforce laws one has sworn to uphold, is less controversial than asking those whose job is to protect black people to not kill them without good reason.
Treating Rohrwasser delicately and sparing Belichick completely is saying none of this is a big deal. It doesn’t matter that, had no one noticed a picture on the internet, Rohrwasser would have been a walking advertisement for a militia whenever he was on camera. It doesn’t matter that legendary NFL investigators somehow missed something so glaring. It doesn’t matter that this would fly in the face of the idea that a kicker isn’t worth controversy.
And it doesn’t matter that someone hasn’t been able to play in three seasons because he, supposedly, disrespected America, but Rohrwasser can shrug off what looks like an affiliation with an anti-government group.
When something like this comes up, the questions can’t just be to check something off a to-do list. The reason to ask the first question is the reason to ask more, to gain clarity on something that much of the public found jarring. If Kaepernick’s T-shirt with Fidel Castro on it was worth a few questions, so is Rohrwasser’s tattoo.
But guys like Rohrwasser rarely have to answer for themselves. And when they do, they get patted on the back like Burton, a black reporter, did by telling his audience he didn’t think Rohrwasser was a racist and telling viewers to “give the kid a chance.”
Men like Belichick don’t have to answer for anyone else. Sports media rarely has to answer for its inconsistency and negligence on these topics. Rohrwasser gets a tattoo to make a statement, and the people who notice are treated as the problem.
Hey, this really could be the misunderstanding Rohrwasser said it is, but there’s only one way to find out. And that’s not by taking his word for it, the easiest act that too many have been willing to do
Last edited:
Descargar MP3 de Bomani Jones Shreds Michael Jordan To Pieces On Espn. MIMP3
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