Your Black World: Sarah Palin’s Extreme Sports - By Dave Zirin

Sarah Palin's Extreme Sports

By: Dave Zirin

Ever since Andrew Johnson welcomed the New York Mutuals to the White House in 1867, presidential politics has exploited professional sports. It's a foolproof way for politicians to show voters they enjoy competition, fair play and are salt-of-the-turf Americans.

Sports signifies different things to different voters. Football (JFK) and baseball (George H.W. Bush) are good. Windsurfing (John Kerry) and hunting "varmints" (Mitt Romney)--not always so good. And no candidate should ever bowl in a necktie, unless he can seriously roll.

Barack Obama's game is basketball. He shot three-point baskets with the troops in Iraq and his high school b-ball videos have become a YouTube sensation.

During the campaign Obama has appeared on sports radio, including a cameo last week on ESPN's Mike and Mike in the Morning. He earned cheers from co-host Mike Golic by saying, tongue-in-cheek, "I would have my attorney general investigate the possibility of instituting a college football playoff system through executive order. I'm tired of this nonsense at the end of every college football season."

A month earlier, John McCain made his own ESPN appearance. He's also known to work the crowds at NASCAR events. But no one in this election uses sports like Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. At times on the campaign trail, sports is her primary form of communication with voters outside of her narrow, Christian fundamentalist base. Communication is critical for Palin, since she mangles the English language so consistently that she's become the subject of ridicule. Talking sports--whether as a mom on the sidelines of her kids' hockey games or a as an outdoorswoman who loves to hunt and fish--gives her the opportunity to seem genuine, friendly and accessible.

Palin's politics may be beyond the fringe, but her sporting interests are effortlessly mainstream. In this sense, she resembles the current occupant of the White House. George W. Bush built his public persona as the owner of the Texas Rangers. When asked for an example of a political mistake, he would speak with a smirk about trading Sammy Sosa. The press and the public let him get away with this blather and the country has been worse off because of it. Palin has the most extensive sports resumé for a politician since former Representative Steve Largent. But unlike Largent, an NFL Hall of Fame wide receiver, Palin's sporting bona fides are more style than substance.

Palin was introduced to the country as "Sarah Barracuda," the former high school point guard who led her team to a state championship, a fact McCain actually uses as an argument to tout her experience.

She is, as Fred Thompson said at the RNC, "The only candidate who can field dress a moose." She worked as a sports reporter for KTUU, Anchorage's NBC affiliate, and once dreamed of being a reporter for ESPN (although according to the campaign, her daughter's name, Bristol, is not in fact a tribute to ESPN's Bristol, Connecticut, headquarters.) She told Katie Couric that her favorite movies were the sports flicks Rudy and Hoosiers, although she claims she only loved the endings. She likes to shoot caribou from a plane, a fact that made Chris Rock wonder why she walks free, while Michael Vick is in jail.

Sarah Palin has made every effort to embody all that is rugged and real. It turns out she is a breathtaking fraud.

Palin speaks about being Joe Six-Pack when in reality she's Jane Champagne, with a net worth over $1 million. As the Washington Times reported, "A check of financial records...shows the Palins live anything but a common life when compared with their fellow residents of their hometown of Wasilla. Their combined income of nearly a quarter-million dollars last year was five times the median household income for Wasilla's 7,000 residents. They own a single-engine plane, two boats, two personal watercraft and a half-million-dollar, custom-built home on a lake that is worth three times the average of other homes in town."

Palin spoke at last Thursday's debate with a collection of folksy "you betchas," but, as conservative Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan pointed out, "Just compare this recording of Palin in Alaska in 2006 to what you heard last night. Ask yourself where the folksiness is. See how many " times she says 'doggone' in 2006. Or 'betcha.' Or 'Joe Six-Pack.'

Palin uses sports the same way she uses her looks and language, which have turned the blog corner at National Review into something like thePenthouse Forum. The simple truth that Palin is Bush with lip-gloss, the only difference being that she was a better athlete than the former Yale cheerleader. She is still the same person who was the head of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter at her high school. FCA is a group whose stated mission is to "use the powerful medium of athletics to impact the world for Jesus Christ." Substitute "politics" for "athletics," and we have Palin. But it isn't just about spreading the word of God.

It's about the right-wing edge of the fundamentalist movement that uses sports to mask a political agenda of creationism, bigotry, environmental catastrophe and deregulation. And if that leads to the "end-times," then so it was written. If sports teaches us anything, it's that you can disguise a lousy competitor for one round, one quarter or one inning, but the truth has a way of making itself known. There is a reason Sarah Palin hasn't done a press conference. In every conceivable way, she belongs in the minors: strictly Bush league.

Reposted From Edge Of Sports

The latest moves by the CIAA are bad ones

By L.A. Batchelor
sports.yourblackworld.com
labatchelor@blackathlete.com

NC-With the recent departure of Winston Salem State University, NC Central and maybe more HBCU'S in the historic CIAA, the strong rumor and talk is that the Conference is looking to replace departing schools with "NON-HBCU" College and Universities. Yes, (CIAA), a Conference that's existed for nearly 100 years and was the only choice for many African Americans and people of color before the turbulent Civil right era, looks like they will permit a few College and Universities into the fold despite the title of "Historically Black". According to Commissioner Leon Kerry, Chowan University will join the CIAA for football next year only in the fall, making it the first predominately white institution to join a historically black conference. Kerry is also in talks with UNC-Pembroke, the most diverse public university in the nation according to U.S. News & World Report, about joining the conference. Yes the CIAA may have to re-label there Conference as an "HB&WCU'" rather than the traditional "HBCU" Now I know Lincoln University of PA, a historically black independent school, will join the Conference in 2009 and the CIAA board has approved an unnamed Southern school for membership. The addition of Lincoln University is a good move because they were an original CIAA member and because how much black independent schools struggle without the financial assistance of a Conference or Association but one white school to me is one too many.

Why this move to bring in Chowan and UNC Pembroke? Commissioner Kerry says it's about diversity and fitting in. "We can help them and they can help us,'' Kerry says of Chowan and UNC-Pembroke. "With a Chowan or Pembroke, we talk about getting out of the diversity market and getting into mainstream; they can help us get into mainstream.

For diversity? To entice them by adding a few mainstream Colleges with predominantly white students for economical purposes? The reasons for this move in my opinion if the result turns out to be white schools replacing black schools is a bad one.

One of the great attractions and aspect of the CIAA and others like them is the purity and historical place it holds with African Americans when it comes to higher education. Attending such schools like Virginia Union, Johnson C. Smith, Shaw University, Fayetteville State and others is the fact that young African Americans can learn about there people, there culture and get a true meaning, understanding and education of African Americans who struggled and succeeded in the past.

Yes I believe in growth, progress, diversity and inclusion, but not at the expense of tradition, history, pride, preservation, blackness, self identity and solidarity especially at a time when few African Americans can take ownership. Not ownership in a product, store or business because the number of African Americans in that category diminishes further, but owner ship in black pride, power and organization.......I.E. the CIAA.

Change can be a good thing and welcomed in certain situations but this is not one of them. You don't make changes to philosophy and tradition for the sake of change and the pressure from the outside. You fix your deficiencies and structure on the inside. I'm confident the CIAA welcomes all young people of all races to attend there colleges and universities to achieve there goals through higher learning and compete in the sport of there choice athletically because that's what attending any college or university is all about, but inviting primarily white oriented colleges and universities as INSTITUTIONS to benefit from all the prestige and economics that traditional black college and universities are privileged have worked so hard for a century to obtain through blood, sweat, tears and even there lives I think is shameful and disrespectful to many generations of African Americans both past and present and to me does a disservice to what the term "HBCU" really stands for.

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