As I mentioned yesterday, I'm golfing today. It's probably the only time I'll play this year. I played in a charity scramble two months ago, and I'll probably do another one this Fall, but regular golf--struggling or riding with my shots alone--is a thing of my pre-offspring days.
Tigers beat the White Sox, incidentally. We were down 2-1 in the sixth, when my nephew called out to the patio, "Hey, the Tigers have bases loaded with nobody out." We went inside to watch. The next batter hit into a fielder's choice. Then Craig Monroe came up and hit a line shot into the left field stands. That would be the final score: 5-2. The Tigers haven't been able to beat the good teams this year. That grand slam could be the catalyst that changes things. My tickets to the September 28th game are looking pretty good.
Speaking of sports, the LA Times ran a pretty good review/essay of Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athlete. The book sounds pretty good, but I'm not sure it offers much original insight. The thesis appears to be: The black man was enslaved to whitey on the plantation, and he's still enslaved, but now it's enslavement to the white man's money. Well, sure. We're all "enslaved" to money. We need it to survive--to eat, to get shelter--and we must work to get it. We don't have a choice. That's a type of enslavement, I suppose, but it's part of our inheritance from Adam and Eve. It's not "the system." The system is just the current form of toiling with the earth, and it's not a bad way to toil, if you're a professional black athlete.
Of course, there's a problem with black youths relying solely on sports and then failing (which the vast bulk of them do), but that was their choice. I don't see anyone crying for me because I haven't gotten a popular book published yet. That was my dream, but I plugged forward and got a law degree, too. You know, just in case the incredible happened and I didn't publish a bestseller before I turned 30. That's simple prudence, and that's what we need returned to the black community: prudence. We don't need to reform the system. Just instill simple prudence in the people most manipulated by it, and the system won't push them around anymore. Of course, until the family is restored, basic virtues like prudence will continue to be rare.
