Re: Russell's common ground with Antoine

[mustang@gis.net (Michael A. DiZio)]

Comparing Bill Russell's travails with Antoine Walker's is a reach of
Evansian proportions. Bill Russell came of age in a racially unenlightened
time, in a city with a reputation for intolerance, in a game which did not
have the public profile it has now. Black athletes were not the heroes
whose faces were everywhere selling everything and postered on every
suburban white kids bedroom.They certainly were not expected to have the
brains, nobility, and fearless outspokenness of a man like William Felton
Russell. Russell was a pioneer, whose personality pushed hard against the
narrow boundaries of the lily white sports media and the white heroes they
covered on the last to have black player Red Sox and the Bruins. His
struggle was a lot more profound then trying to wheedle an extra buck out
of management. Antoine is a pampered product of a system looking for the
next cross-over salesman like Michael Jordan, a system that is used to
coronating and popularizing black heroes (and like Dennis Rodman)
antiheroes with equal fervor. Antoine never had to stay in a different
hotel than his white team mates (he doesn't have many) or have the people
who rob his house defecate in his bed to show their racial contempt.
Antoine's enemies are those that align themselves with management to turn
public sentiment against paying him , they are not the enormous social
forces of overt and under the surface racism that permeated the
consciousness of Boston and most of the country during a time when the
ultimate acceptance of blacks in sport and society was still in doubt. I do
agree completely though, that Second Wind is a great book, much more than
the typical jock memoirs, the story of the evolution of a man and an era,
an era to which todays athletes owe a great deal.

                                          Michael A.DiZio