And the agony of defeat.

(In a statement that is no way related to anything, it strikes me that I have been a little tightly wound lately. This is in no way related to being angry about a certain baseball team failing to get it together for even ONE GAME in a certain American League Championship Series. Or, you know, feeling pressured about finally finishing a project I have been working on for nigh on ten years now. Tendency to fly off the handle in no way related to either of those things. Yes.)

Anyhoo, this post is about sports. But it's also about a book! William C. Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. This book, within the terms it sets out for itself, seems unassailable. There is something profoundly awry in a system where many black men (and women) work for the profit and at the behest of a few white men (and no women), even if those men are themselves well-renumerated for their efforts. It is all the more profoundly awry when viewed through the long lens of America's slave-holding history. (See also, Brown University.) So far, so good. In fact, maybe I should stop the post right there, because it seems that the far more common reaction to this book is: how can there be a problem when the salary check says $40 million? This is kind of like the time my co-worker told me that Hollywood couldn't be racist because Oprah went to the Oscars. (Not to be confused with the time my other co-worker told me to avoid Chinatown because the women there were all carrying puppies and kittens in plastic bags home for dinner. What a pleasant workplace!)

Still, I have to say that Rhoden's parameters left me frustrated sometimes. Yes, all of American sports is a big topic, and yes, all of the twentieth-century and then some is a long time. But given the big talk of the title, how can the book cover the Negro Leagues in detail and yet decline to investigate baseball's current conditions? The dynamics of racial identity on display when you put together, say, African-American Gary Sheffield, Panamanian Mariano Rivera, biracial "sweetheart" Derek Jeter, and biracial "villan" Alex Rodriguez (now there's a quartet that's not getting as much press as it oughta!) is simply more complicated than Bud Selig versus Barry Bonds. If baseball is a sport that black and Latin men play and white men watch, why is that so? There's more at work, I think, than the loss of the Negro Leagues here. Also, I often wished Rhoden take a larger view. Surely the problems with the NCAA and its policies are legion (see also, Reggie Bush), and it doesn't appear that Michael Lewis is planning to cover them. Yet where is the perspective from outside that system? What alternatives might there be to the general linking of a college education with a national athletic organization--that might work for both HBCs and the land-grant universities?

Maybe my strongest question for the book was one directed at Rhoden himself. He's a self-concious author surely, and one concerned with the perception of athletes as unfit representatives of the race (see, for example, Michael Jordan), but he soft-pedals the biggest question of them all: why should we keep trying to make this broken car go? Why should we, as inviduals and as a society, keep letting a system that has devastated so many lives (see Maurice Clarett and other cases too numerous to mention) go on? Why should we wait until next year? I guess I don't have any good answers for that either. I root for the A's for many reasons, but none that are part of my essential self. It's fun, and funny, to play the aggrieved or elated sports fan, and so I do and I will, and it's also fun to watch a well-played game, and to discuss it afterwards, again, and again, and again. I get mad when they lose, and feel entitled to stomp about, because, after all, it's not the fate of the nation here. But, and I suppose Rhoden would agree, maybe it is.