Jemele Hill raises & drops issue..

Red Sox spring training - all sorts of non-events, like Julio Lugo being bananas about Boston - keeps the news on Tom Brady's person life on, as they say, the back burner. (It's actually the way-back burner, not making the top headline on the Patriot's page @ Boston.com.)

Discussing the "baby-mama drama" that Brady &, earlier, Matt Leinart have gotten themself into, Jemele Hill wonders, & then proceeds to ignore her wonderment,

So, what's going on here? Does ESPN The Magazine need to do a Where's (White) Daddy cover story? [In 1998, Sports Illustrated had a cover story about athletes having babies out of wedlock and that feature focused predominantly on black athletes.] Do white NFL quarterbacks now represent the new at-risk baby-daddy population?

What I'm wondering about is how Bill Simmons is going to spin the news. One of Simmons' (many) running joke comes at the expense of N.B.A. players. Less than a week ago, Page 2's Alpha Male wrote one of the things we "know" about the N.B.A. All-Star Game's setting is that it will inspire

2. Every ovulating groupie within a 12-hour vicinity will be making the weekend drive to Vegas to hopefully get impregnated by an NBA player -- a list that includes every hooker, stripper and jock-sniffing female between 16 and 40 from Vegas, Reno, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland, Phoenix and every city and town in the Los Angeles area. To its credit, the NBA is recommending that all players wear two condoms at once, even during the day and when they're sleeping.

(Don't try this at home : medical professionals urge you not to wear two condoms at once.)

There's not much that I want to say about The Sports Guys' comments. Simmons likes to repeat himself &, in this case, I'm not sure why this repetition is amusing or pleasurable. I'll just leave it at that. (To be clear : I'm not requesting that Leinart & Brady get their "images" pan-fried by the media as relentessly as the average N.B.A. player about whom Simmons jokes. I just kind of wish everyone had Brady's access to a teflon-image.)

By the way, on this evening's P.T.I., Michael Wilbon said that the news on Brady wouldn't hurt his "Golden Boy" image, because it's 2007 & this kinda of thing is fine. Apparently, Wilbon doesn't read Simmons' writing on N.B.A. players.

peace love gap,
Johnny Hatchett

an unconfession to Jemele Hill (ESPN)

Editor's Note: Jemele Hill is a Page 2 columnist at ESPN.com. Her first article appeared on that site on 14 November 2006.

Dear Jemele Hill,

My brother jumped the gun. Immediately after reading your first article @ ESPN.com's Page 2, he emailed you, practically bubbling over with his suspicions - though he took that bubbly feeling to be something more certain - that THE sports network had hired you to fill Jason Whitlock's massive, African-American void.

You wrote my brother back, saying, he tells me, that you were hired to write. And you are no network's tool.

He stills maintains that you are.

Less than two months have passed since Page 2 published your first article. Since then, I've argued with my brother about your role at ESPN.com, been underwhelmed by your followup piece, and, more recently, provoked by your brief manifesto on sports, race, and violence.

Now, I write to you about something else. Not the sports you cover & I follow, but to express my sadness that you - in your debut article for ESPN.com - had to account for your views because of the color of your skin. In that article, you wrote,

"You want to know what kind of black person am I? Am I one of those? Yes, I discuss race openly, honestly and, hopefully, intelligently. Do I play the race card? Depends on what else is on the card table.">

Make no mistake, my sadness is not because you do not believe enough in my "colorblindness" to avoid having to, wanting to, & needing to write about your black skin. Rather, it is that you, an African-American woman, and never your white colleagues, have to communicate the relationship between personal views and race.

Now & then, I try to fill that white void, by imagining the article Bill Simmons, the Page 2 alpha-male, might have written if white people, &, especially, white men, had to confess, like you did, to the role of our white skin in our white lives, the role of our white lives in the reproduction of our white racism, & the effect of our white eyes (leading to white brains) in our sport fandom.

But I don't know what the man would say, because we - white people, white men, white writers - are rarely asked to ante up and show our hand
when someone plays the race card.

So that's what I intend to do in this here blog, write on white, write on men, write on white men & the things they say & the things I think.

Sincerely,
my first unconfession, undone,
Johnny Hatchett