Got to Give the People What They Want

by Jalen Rose

  In terms of quality of play, the league is better than ever. Guys are bigger, they’re faster, and they’re stronger. In football, that makes the game more dangerous. In basketball, it makes it more exciting, and more unbelievable when you see what these guys can do. I always shake my head when people start trying to make all these intergenerational comparisons—is LeBron better than Oscar Robertson, or is Chris Paul better than Bob Cousy. It is simply a different game played today. The questions about who’s better are the wrong questions to ask.

  Today, guys are expected to be able to do everything. Magic Johnson was one of the most versatile players ever, right? He was a point guard, but also started at center in the 1980 NBA Finals. Well, in 1982–83, Magic Johnson didn’t make one three-pointer the whole season. Altogether, his team made ten all season. Ten. There are guys in the league who regularly hit ten a week now on their own. That’s how much the game has changed. Also, when I came up, the runners and floaters that I threw up were considered to be wild, wacky, low-percentage shots. Well, today, with more athletic defenders, you have to be able to hit those. Look at guys like D-Wade, Derrick Rose, and Tony Parker, who find ways to hit all kinds of shots. Players today have better nutrition plans and training methods with hyperbaric chambers and full-body ice machines. In the NBA’s dirty little secret, they also have access to human growth hormone and steroids that lurk around the league as well. That makes them better, no doubt, and, unlike baseball, the public doesn’t seem to care, at least for the time being.

  There’s another sign of success: the ever-skyrocketing value of franchises. What we’re talking about is a business, right? If the franchises are selling, that means the marketplace sees something in the game. Over the last few years, teams that have never won a championship are selling for two and three times what they were bought for not so long before. That’s because a lot of these teams can flourish and be the most popular teams in their cities without necessarily winning titles. If more than a dozen of the NBA franchises made it to the second round of the playoffs, their fans would want to have a parade for them. I’m not saying the management or the owners don’t want to win a title. I’m just saying that a winning season with a playoff victory would be viewed as a huge, and very profitable, success. That’s a good place for a league to be in. Plus it’s also very possible for a lot of teams to make it into the conference semis, since eight teams—almost a third of the league—do.

  In other words, the system works.

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  FOOTBALL AND baseball—America’s other two “big sports”—are also phenomenally successful right now from a business standpoint. But they have problems now, and on the horizon, that they’re going to have to deal with. With football, it’s the danger issue. As I said, better and stronger athletes in football mean harder hits and more dangerous plays. A lot of people worry about a guy dying right on the field. Personally, as a former childhood player, and a huge fan (Go, Lions!), I love the violent aspect of the game, and I know the players love it, too. But you can’t ignore the costs. Now that the public is more and more aware of those costs, the league is starting to legislate the violence out of the game, which for a lot of fans is its most appealing part. In basketball, the better and stronger the athletes are, the more amazing the plays are going to be.

  Baseball is still successful. Even if its national TV ratings aren’t as high as the NFL’s or the NBA’s, attendance and local TV contracts make all those franchises billions of dollars. But the sport has got its issues—first and foremost, steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. Most fans have an issue with the drugs because they put the stats out of whack, and that impacts the record book, which is like the Holy Bible of baseball. Actually, a bigger issue is that young kids in a high school are taking the drugs to perform, not doing it safely, and killing themselves. That’s a problem, and it’s a tragedy. I understand why the pros do it, I really do. But they have to find a way to keep it out of the high school game. Concerning drugs in basketball, yeah, I see their presence in the college and pro games. Get back to me when we start seeing evidence of it impacting the health of kids.

  Baseball’s still fiddling with their playoff system, trying to make it fair, and always pissing someone off. They’re still figuring out instant replay. Also, what’s with the managers wearing uniforms? Old dudes with the tight pants—they’ve got to cut that out. But seriously, baseball has another long-term problem the NBA doesn’t: race. Baseball was where Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron became American heroes. Now fewer than 10 percent of major league players are African American, and that number’s sinking. No, I’m not claiming that blacks are better athletes than whites. But I do think that blacks and whites approach sports (and entertainment) completely differently. For white kids living in the cul-de-sacs, sports are a hobby. For black kids in the hood, it’s the only way out.

  Race is a central part of any discussion about the future of sports, because for a long time, sports have been the central way that our country experiences race. Athletes like LeBron James and Kevin Durant are some of the first black people that white kids in the suburbs get to know, and they are huge role models for young black kids everywhere. Basketball is really the only completely truly integrated sport. You’ll see black and white players at every position—Chris Paul and Steve Nash at point guard, Durant and Kevin Love at forward, DeAndre Jordan and Marc Gasol at center, and the list goes on. At least half the coaches in the league are black, and a lot of executives, too. In football, it’s starting to change with guys like Russell Wilson and Colin Kaepernick, but quarterback is still mostly a position for white stars. And around the rest of the field, your white guys are likely to be playing certain positions; black guys, others. Plus there aren’t many minority coaches, even though there are plenty of qualified candidates.

  Coming from where I’m coming from, race cuts through every angle of how I view sports. Golf is one of the few sports I’m not too interested in. If white people don’t want me to join their clubs, then I don’t want to play their game. Hockey’s started to get a few more black players, including Seth Jones, Popeye Jones’s son. But if hockey had as many black players as basketball does, fighting would have been outlawed twenty years ago. People are okay watching some white boys from Minnesota and Canada get in a tussle. But if black guys were throwing punches, the league and the fans wouldn’t take it. I look at the American sports landscape, and I see that the predominantly black sports—football and basketball—are the sports that have age limits, all but require players to go to college, and have the most restrictive salary caps and limits on contract years.

  The Donald Sterling fiasco during the 2014 playoffs demonstrated how integral race is in the NBA. The outrage over his comments completely overshadowed one of the most competitive first rounds ever for a weekend, before Adam Silver stepped in and basically threw Sterling out of the league. This incident made me recall how I thought the Clippers were going to draft me originally. That was before the lawsuits and stories came out about Sterling’s being a slumlord and a racist, but I will say this: If I had been playing for the team when that started, I would have spoken up. As a league, I think we failed a bit in letting that guy stay around for so long. But when the issue exploded, you have to give Adam Silver credit for acting swiftly and strongly.

  There’s still progress to be made in basketball, though, as the controversy with the Atlanta Hawks a few months after the Sterling crisis made clear, with GM Danny Ferry exposed for saying disparaging words about Luol Deng in an internal meeting, and owner Bruce Levenson acknowledging that he himself had sent a racist e-mail. (Though, again, kudos to Commissioner Silver for again stepping in with a serious investigation, and soon after, the Hawks went up for sale.) Ultimately, around the NBA and the basketball media, if you dig deeply enough, you can identify a lot of subtle issues. Like when people complain about the AAU game hurting the development of players while praising international players as being more advanced. That kind of commen
t has a racial overtone to it. It’s also ridiculous. Who’s getting drafted first? The American players. Who’s winning the international tournaments? The American players. End of conversation.

  Race matters a lot to me because the color of my skin was a huge factor in how people viewed me from my first moments in the public eye at Michigan. If the Fab Five were white, everything would have been different.

  Today, plenty of people in the media still don’t know how to handle race. The same stereotypes and generalities are made. Andrew Luck is the “smart, resourceful” quarterback, while Russell Wilson is an “athletic marvel.” LeBron James is the “best athlete in the NBA,” while Larry Bird is a “basketball genius.” It’s frustrating when you know, as a fellow athlete, how talented and athletic Andrew Luck and Kevin Love are, and how smart Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James are.

  It’s why I’m gonna keep talking. Maybe someday they’ll start listening.

  12. Always Imperfect, Always Trying to Be Better, and How to Save the Ones Everyone Else Forgot About

  If you get off the Lodge Freeway right before 8 Mile Road and make a turn onto Trojan Avenue, you can’t miss it. It sits on the edge of Comstock Park, in what looks like a quiet neighborhood, even if nice, quiet neighborhoods aren’t supposed to exist in Detroit anymore. From the outside, it looks like a lot of other schools. But inside those walls, what’s going on is not happening almost anywhere else in the city.

  The Jalen Rose Leadership Academy (JRLA) was opened in the fall of 2011. It’s a tuition-free charter school, which means it’s public (free, no admission tests—students are admitted through a lottery) but gets to determine its own curriculum, its own way of operating, and its own way of succeeding. It can raise outside money for additional funds, and get real commitments and financing from people willing to invest in the students and in the ideas espoused in the curriculum and the school philosophy. Charter schools have been growing across the country in troubled cities for a few decades now (something like 75 percent of schools in New Orleans are charters), and they make a lot of sense for a place like Detroit, where resources are a real problem and regular public schools therefore fall woefully short. People forget that when a city gets into trouble, the people impacted the most are children. As a city goes down, its schools go down with them. That leaves no hope at all for innocent victims who have little hope to begin with.

  When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time frustrated about what I didn’t have: no father, no money, no big house. Driving around Detroit today, all I can think of is what I did have: a fighting chance. A fighting chance, thanks to my mom and my uncles and then, later, my coaches and teachers, who didn’t let me squander a golden opportunity to make it out, and make it big. On one of those drives I decided that once my playing days were over, my mission was going to be to help give that fighting chance to other kids through JRLA.

  The school opened in 2011 with only 120 ninth graders. The next year, with those kids moving to tenth grade, a new crop of ninth graders came in. By the fall of 2014, we had four grades in the school, with our inaugural graduation—a landmark event—coming in the spring of 2015. Our goal is simple and non-negotiable: get 85 percent of our students to graduate, the same 85 percent of them to go to college, and the same 85 percent to graduate from college. And by the way, the average ninth grader comes into our school reading and doing math at a fifth-grade level.

  JRLA is in the middle of northwest Detroit, in the same zip code that I grew up in. These days, almost any family that has a prayer of making it to the suburbs moves out of the city. They’ll send their kids to live with relatives outside Detroit’s borders. Our kids are the ones who couldn’t make it out. Our kids are on that list of those that have been forgotten.

  That’s where the school comes in. We’re giving these kids a fighting chance. They say it takes a village to raise a child—think of the school as the village. Or if you like a basketball analogy, think of me coaching a number sixteen seed in the tournament. We’re supposed to have no chance to win.

  But the most successful underdogs have something huge in common.

  We all love it when everybody doubts us.

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  ONE OF the best things that ever happened to pro sports was when the players started getting paid. Really paid. For decades and decades, the individuals actually responsible for generating all the money around sports were paid far less than their value. Then free agency arrived—first in baseball and then in other sports, and suddenly the market began to talk. Combine that with the revolution in sports marketing and advertising, and you had Hall of Fame players like Magic and Michael turning themselves into Hall of Fame moguls. (Oh, Larry has got plenty of coin, too. Believe me. He just prefers a simpler life.)

  Before this era, a lot of black sports stars were doing amazing things to bring attention to important issues, guys like Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe, John Carlos, and Tommie Smith. One of my favorite pictures was taken when Ali refused to go into the military, and he held a press conference in Cleveland. Russell, Jim Brown, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then still Lew Alcindor) are sitting next to the Champ, with a whole bunch of other guys standing around behind them. The thing I appreciate about that picture is that those guys had to be socially and politically conscious, as the country was dealing with the realities of segregation. In the ’60s, there were still Jim Crow laws, drinking out of different fountains, and all that. They stood up to say, “No! We’re not three-fifths of a man. No! We’re not second-class citizens. Yes, it’s okay for us to have jobs and learn the English language.” In a crazy time of upheaval and change, those guys didn’t hesitate to put themselves right in the middle of everything.

  So you’d think that once the successors to these stars became not just popular but rich, they’d find ways to have even more impact, right? Wrong. With the exception of Magic and AIDS, name one black superstar athlete of that generation or later who’s made it a top priority to do something with his platform and bring real attention (and money) to a cause that means something to him. I can’t think of any. The social and political conversation has gone away because the money is there, new opportunities are there, and so the sense of what the first superstars left behind is not at the top of their mind. Ultimately it comes down to the dollars. Let’s face it, if you’re an elite basketball player and you choose to be socially and politically active, it could harm your brand. As Michael Jordan said, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” I have no doubt that Michael—then and now—was proudly black, and had a mind to support minorities and the kinds of things that Democrats and liberals tend to support, but he knew that the Republicans were paying his bills, too.

  Twenty years after Jordan, where are we now? Better off in some ways, and worse off in a lot of others. Guys today set up foundations and charities, and they give away a ton of money. But the truth is that way too few guys actually have their heart in it. They might write a check, but they don’t pay attention to where it actually goes and where it could have the most impact. (Which means it might be going to some sham foundation, or some place that doesn’t really know what it’s doing.) The players show up at charity events because they have to, and they leave as soon as they can. If they’re getting their minutes and their money, they don’t pay attention to anyone else—not the fifteenth man on the bench, and certainly not those who are impacted when the government shuts down or there’s a natural disaster.

  We’ve got to be better than that—a lot better. So many players come from places that need help. Yes, change starts with money. If an athlete finds a cause, he’s going to pour money into it. But also if he cares, he’s going to bring attention to the issue, he’s going to get others involved, and that’s going to bring more money in, and round and round we go.

  So how do we get there? We can’t force athletes to give money away or to adopt a cause. We need to go back a step and do something even simpler: we need to find a way to get players to pay attention more. They have to l
ook up and listen to what’s going on around them, what’s happening to their family members, what’s happening to their friends back in the hood.

  The NBA does a good job trying to get players involved, and that’s been the case ever since the very first days of “NBA Cares.” I think there’s always room for growth, though. One idea I’ve had for a while is that fine money should be distributed to the charities of the player’s choice. Right now, fine money gets put in a big pot that gets split between the league and the players union, and then distributed to a bunch of different charities and causes. That’s a start, but I think it would be even better if the player, not the league, gets to choose where it’s going. And there’s a catch. The player would have to present the check to the organization in a public ceremony, and spend a day at that organization helping out. In the long run, maybe the player finds reasons to get involved, and brings some good publicity to those causes.

  Small idea, but it’s worth a shot.

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  I REMEMBER everything about growing up in Detroit. Eating big hamburgers at Yogi’s. Ribs at Major’s. Steve’s Soul Food. Dot & Etta’s Shrimp Hut. Days on the giant slide at Belle Isle, or the roller coaster at Edgewater Park. Taking the Bob-lo boat with all your friends. Nights out at the Dancery and Maxie’s. Concerts at the State Theatre and Cobo Hall. Going to movies at the old Mercury Theatre and Norwest Theatre—I saw Purple Rain when it came out at the Norwest. Dreaming about trying to get on The Scene, our local answer to Soul Train. Buying records at the Hip Hop Shop. Getting gear at Strictly Sports. Then there was the high-end stuff—shopping at the Renaissance Center, with the Summit restaurant on top, slowly rotating around while people ate their dinners. The list goes on—the memories go on. When I grew up, Detroit was still thriving—and remembering that renews my faith in what the city can be.