I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [32]
This issue is certainly not limited to Augusta National, or even to race. I am personally uncomfortable playing golf anywhere that doesn’t admit minorities or women as members.
People have to deal with this stuff even though it’s difficult, and not just try to sweep it under the rug. And it doesn’t get resolved in a hurry. Prejudice and racism scar people for life. But we as a society never really discuss that stuff at length because it isn’t comfortable. The black goaltender who plays for the Carolina Hurricanes, the backup goaltender, is a guy named Kevin Weekes. He played great for Carolina early in the playoffs coming off the bench, and he helped the Hurricanes get to the Stanley Cup finals. That sorry-ass franchise never had been close to the finals before. And even though this guy was mostly the backup (to Arturs Irbe), the team couldn’t have gotten to the finals without Weekes coming in to play the way he did several different times during the playoffs. Anyway, somebody threw a banana at him and hit him in the head during the playoffs. Yes, it was reported, but it was touched on just for a minute on SportsCenter. I’m sure—or at least I hope—it got some major attention down around Raleigh because it was local or regional news in North Carolina. But nationally, there was hardly anything on it. Wasn’t that worth a longer discussion, that a black goalie gets hit in the head by a banana in 2002? You know the symbolism is, “Here’s this black guy in a predominately white sport and he’s being called a monkey.” Don’t get me wrong now, I’m glad ESPN reported it, but don’t tell me that in 2002 a black man playing goalie for a professional hockey team and gets hit by some bigot throwing a banana isn’t worth more than just a mention. You don’t just give five seconds to a story like that and go straight to a damn baseball score. That shit deserves some examination and some comment, doesn’t it?
I’m thinking, “Man, there’s some shit still going on out here in the world,” but people aren’t saying anything about it. Do they not think about it, or just not say anything about it? Bad stuff just happens and it goes unreported or there’s barely a mention of it before we go back to business as usual. The Weekes story reminded me of the Bobby Jones story going into the Masters. ESPN did a SportsCentury profile on Bobby Jones, and I know magazine articles and entire books have been written on the life of Bobby Jones because he’s a historic figure in golf. You can’t write the history of golf without telling the story of Bobby Jones. The SportsCentury piece was talking about him being the greatest golfer ever . . . then just like that you hear, “Oh, and he wouldn’t have anything to do with black people.” Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but after a couple of more comments by people saying the same thing, that was pretty much the extent of the treatment of Bobby Jones as a racist? Most times when you see or read stories on Bobby Jones there isn’t even that much on what a bigot he was. Usually, it’s like somebody shrugs and says, “Well, it’s not that big a deal because he was a product of his time.” What kind of shit is that when things just get explained away by the phrase “product of his time”? Is that supposed to convince us that it was cool, because a lot of other white people did it, too?
A lot of stuff that happened in the South and stuff that still happens today makes me angry as hell. But those times in the South were more complex than that. Some people didn’t just