Fatlock Follies: Keepin' Ya' Guessin'

As a mostly lifelong resident of the great municipality of Kansas City, and a sports zealot, Jason Whitlock has been in my mental vortex for nearly all of my adult life. If I wrote a book about my life as a sports fan (now, there's an idea!), there would be a Whitlock chapter, or at least the better part of one. And the thing would be complex to say the least. Homeslice hasn't really been on my brain much lately, but what with that newspaper thingy I subscribe to, the scary vastness of the GoreTubes, and recent events associated with both, he's definitely on the brain today.

My storied-but-unimportant history with Whitlock mostly involves being a reader of his The Kansas City Star sports page column, but also includes a short-lived segment of e-mail exchanges and AOL instant-message conversations (or attempts, anyway) with the man. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before that he ended all correspondence with the one-line e-mail message, "God bless you," which I took as, "Hey, nice talking with you, but not nice enough to ever do it again." And that's fine. I mention that only to set up this thought: I've gone from despising him/yearning to steal his job from him -- Now that I blog, I don't have to. Right, Buzz? -- to feeling like my Star subscription money was being wasted on him writing about himself in his columns (a myriad of lead 'graphs in his tenure have started with obnoxious phrases somewhat similar to: "So, I'm courtside at the Knicks game last night with anybody vaguely important around me;" or "So, I'm in the press box at the Super Bowl getting a pedicure while being served cocktails;" or "So I'm at Adam Jones' NBA All-Star Weekend pre-strip-club, invite-only party the other night;" or "I was eating some Gates barbecue the other day when"...you get the point.), to searching for an opinion on his stance on race in America, to hating his stance on race in America, to feeling like he's inflating the race issue in America, to embracing his stance, to now, which is unsure.

My theory is that he's confused, too. That is, he made a name for himself as a great sportswriter, built on that name by addressing, eloquently from time to time, core issues in America that all stem from race, and now he's a big, national name with all these tags attached to him, and he doesn't know where to go. Which is fine. We all go through stages like that. I just think he's treading dangerous waters, now; it's time for him to move on. Don't get me wrong. He can still write columns for the Star and Fox Sports News.com, or whatever, but I -- again, think I've said it before -- feel like he should take on a massive project, something that does something about some of the race issues he's devoted so many column inches to in the last decade. And that something should be public speaking. To youth. And it should start yesterday. But I've really digressed.

The point I intended to make started with yesterday's (May 2) column in the Star. The column, though I'm still not sure why it's in the sports section (Editor's Note: Feel free to hire me at any point, Star people), is a must read. He's got this article coming out in Playboy, and -- shocker -- he wrote about his article in his column. To address race. To set the cards straight before the issue hits the stands and the mailboxes. This has a bit of a different twist on it, though; he's in the right for doing it. Whitlock writes that Hugh Hefner's magazine has placed an unrelated headline on the story he has written for the issue that comes out May 9. In addition, the editors plan to "mount a significant campaign promoting its out-of-context headlines." Ultimately, he's worried that the headline will deter readers from ingesting the point -- ultra-bloated federal spending on incarceration and the contributions that jailing is making to energized gang behavior and racial tensions -- that the article tackles.

He does acknowledge that Playboy has magazines to sell, that it's somewhat of a marketing angle. If I were him, I wouldn't worry. The headlines and tags that will allegedly be associated with the piece center on Whitlock being "The Black KKK." In his column, Whitlock mentions that the article will include the subheadline, "Hip Hop is killing Black America, and it's time to do something about it." Again, he's concerned that such tags will deter concentration on what's at stake in the article itself. I disagree. Readers intelligent enough to absorb the message of the piece will see the research Whitlock claims he did for the story. Some will probably read it twice, and I predict that the majority of all of the readers will come away with the important thesis of the piece, along with a sense of curiosity that questions why a story about race, gangs and prisons gets awarded such peculiar headlines.

Hip Hop is killing Black America, and it's time to do something about it.

This, in my estimation, is exactly the venue into which Whitlock should venture. The prison business can certainly be a part of it. Perhaps it must be. The writer, nevertheless, has, as previously mentioned, marked his turf on race in America. He now has also invested some time and energy in the prison sub-category of the primary topic. Regardless of what Playboy wants to do or promote, this puts Whitlock in a great position to be a cultural leader, and add to his impressive forte of writing. But then he, in true Whitlock fashion, goes and fouls it up with this Thursday, May 1 post on Fox Sports.

The post is Whitlock's take on the "Costas Now" episode on HBO from earlier in the week, and he breaks it down fairly well. There are, however, some peculiarities about it, i.e. not capitalizing Deadspin, or any other blog name. Almost halfway through the piece, though, he slams Deadspin Editor Will Leitch for promoting his own book on his own blog. And the wheels pretty much come off after that. I've thought of/called Whitlock a lot of things over the years, but I've never really considered him to be a hypocrite. Criticizing Leitch in that fashion, however, invites the kettle, the pot, the color black, and the other necessary ingredients to a prime-time party celebrating Hippocrates. Unfortunately though, that's not the worst of it.

This is:

Some of us don't have the time, patience or inclination to help promote Leitch's book, which spends an inordinate amount of time telling prominent, successful, well-spoken African-Americans that they're not really black.

It is within that quote that Whitlock links to this NPR interview of Leitch, where Leitch's book, which is called "God Save the Fan," by the way, is the subject. The interviewer, whose name I'm too lazy to look up, calls Leitch out for his statements regarding (mostly white) people's oftentimes lack of interaction with black people. Actually, that's what Leitch is trying to say, he explains. The interviewer straight up tells Leitch he has a problem for making jokes about Indianapolis Colts Head Coach Tony Dungy not being very black. Here's where I put down my self-awarded, non-credentialed "journalistic" pen, and pick up my gnawed-on, eraserless sports fan pencil. Imagine it has a dancing Snoopy with a Royals hat on or something.

(June 3, 2008 Update: While I spent considerable time editing the content of this piece for spelling, mechanics, and accuracy, it did not occur to me that some, if not all, of the following two paragraphs were offensive. By typing the phrase "it did not occur to me," I do not wish to detach myself from blame; I merely wish to illustrate that self-editing is never as thorough as an author might think it is. The concept(s) that inspired me to write this piece stem largely from being a Kansas City resident, and subscriber to The Kansas City Star, the newspaper for which Jason Whitlock writes. For the last four to five years, Mr. Whitlock has occasionally, via his Star columns conveyed the idea that African-Americans have very few positive male role models in the public eye today. That is, the black men seen by the majority of MTV-viewing, hip-hop-listening, sports-following America do not cast the greatest of images for youths to admire in that rappers and NBA stars are somehow the majority of these figures. This is a view of Whitlock's with which I agree. I mistakenly wrote what follows assuming that our readership may be as well-read in the Whitlock department as I am, and I failed to distinguish my voice from his. To a degree, they are similar in opinion, but had I been more careful and responsible, I would've attributed thought clusters, and some paraphrasing to him, rather than allow the words to speak for the House of Georges themselves.

Dude. Seriously? Tony freaking Dungy? Here's an exercise: Put him next to Najeh Davenport, or Michael Irvin, or Dennis Rodman, or any other black athlete that, regardless of talent, has acted like a complete idiot in the past, and tell me it's impossible to view Tony Dungy as non-black, regardless of whether the basis of comparison is skin hue or behavior tendencies. I'll get serious about this in a second, but that is freaking hilarious. Anybody that fails to see the humor in that is blind.

Back to underwears and basements. There is, whether it gets the approval stamp or not, a collective pretension of what it "means" to be black in America. Check that, there are a lot more than "a"; there are many. In my estimation, this is the very core of what Whitlock has communicated to me the reader for years now. Granted, my own observations and opinions are in the mix, but that's hardly the point. What we see -- by "we" I mean average Americans that have a job, a bed to sleep in, and a television to watch -- of black America is not pretty. This is not to say that white America, or brown America, or whatever, has painted the perfect example. Nobody has. But we see what Whitlock calls hip-hop America from blacks 98 per cent of the time. We see the Allen Iversons, the Randy Mosses, the Suge Knights, the Milton Bradleys, the Snoop Doggs of the world, in the spotlight, doing stupid shit. All the time. And it is a fact that they heavily drown out the Bill Cosbys and the Barack Obamas, campaign years aside.

In the interview, Will Leitch calls Dungy "a leader of men." I agree with that. Tony Dungy, in a span of two years, accomplished more in his life than I've ever even dreamed of attempting. Honestly. That doesn't forbid me from making jokes about him. Listening to him speak, eloquently, about Christ, or whathaveyou, like it or not, leaves me with thoughts like, "Hey, that guy's really intelligent," and Leitch (I purport) with thoughts like, "Hey, that guy doesn't sound very black." Is that wrong? Does that make us racists? Contributors to a problem? Please vehemently correct me (in the comments) if I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

But back to Whitlock's post. He returns to his intelligent summarization of what went down on the television program, and discusses the bloggers-versus-journalists dichotomy, but then closes with this line:

And maybe Will Leitch can come along and tell us if we're all acting black enough.

I won't even comment on that one. Instead I'll return to his column in the Star about his forthcoming article in Playboy. Whitlock emphasizes that he took all the right steps with plenty of lead time to prevent this predicted catastrophe from taking place. And that's fine. I view it as an opportunity rather than a gotta-save-face situation. In his defense, it would appear that a lot of journalistic confidentialities could be breached with the article's publication. At least that's the take I got, and that's unfortunate. If Playboy's going to knowingly stir up some charades, they should know where to draw the line. The saddest part of the whole scenario, though, is that I don't think Whitlock knows where to draw it either.

It's time for Whitlock to put down his journalistic pen, and do so with pride, knowing that he's made a significant impact. I'm not saying he should stop writing about sports. I'm the first to admit that, on Monday mornings during football season, I read his Star column about the previous day's Chiefs game before I read Adam Teicher's or anyone else's story. I even read him before Posnanski on those days. That's saying something: he's still a great sports writer. My suggestion is that it's time for Whitlock to pick up is to-date-unsharpened cultural-leader pencil. The one with the in-tact eraser, the dead puppies, and the Michael Vicks.

(Update: Just when I think I've "scooped" something...Damn you, Big Lead!)