O.J. Mayo #4: Recruiting Wars Ain’t Nothin’ But a Modern-Day Slavery Thang
May 29, 2008
As I pulled into the small media parking area looking for a space I saw something that made me feel uneasy. I was at this small east coast university to finish a story on the burgeoning rivalry between two small college basketball programs looking to separate themselves from the other schools in their conference and join the carousel of “big-time” college hoops programs in perception and notoriety.
The two universities found themselves fighting for the same recruits they felt were necessary to allow them to compete with bigger schools. This particular season’s recruiting battle centered around four players. The school for which I was a beat reporter signed one of those recruits while their rival signed the other three which automatically made them heavy favorites to win not only their conference and conference tournament but perhaps a game or two in the NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament.
I got out of my car and walked toward the sight that perturbed me so when I pulled into the lot. There in a row were five late-model sports cars of different makes.
Each had a vanity license plate with the last name of the player and their uniform number. I knew that three of the players’ parents had the money to afford such a luxury. But I also knew the story that two of the recruits came from the same neighborhood in New York and were impoverished. There was no way they could afford those vehicles.
After entering the arena and finding my spot on press row I immediately went to a section of seats inhabited by boosters. They sat behind the home team’s bench a few rows up toward midcourt. Students had filled the arena and we were about 30 minutes from the teams coming out for warmups. Sitting among this group of men who donated money to the athletic department and the basketball program specifically was enlightening. They were amicable, knew the game well, and understood their part in the program’s present and future success.
We were winding up our talks when the players came out for their pregame warmup. The crowd was raucous, already cheering wildly for their team. The jewel of the recruiting class was a 6′6″ shooting guard and every time he touched the ball the crowd went crazy. The player was aware of the crowd and played to them, turning to the student section and waving for them to in crease the noise level. Just before the team’s layup line broke he was passed the ball. He took a couple of quick dribbles and stepped wide of the three point line and swooped in toward the rim. Everyone was momentarily quiet. All eyes including mine and the boosters were turned to the guard. He rose, spun in the air - a 360-degree pirouette - and seemed to pause just for a split second. Then with a powerful suddenness he violently slammed the ball through the rim and released a primal scream in the process.
The arena exploded. Most everyone was on their feet cheering wildly. Even the opposing team stopped to watch the display. At that moment the booster to my right on the end of the line of money men tapped me on my shoulder and said:
“You see that! You see him. That one’s my boy!”
He was beaming and proud, chest puffed out as he jabbed his finger into his chest for emphasis.
I was suddenly sick with what I just heard, realized and what it portended.
The home team easily won that night and solidified their grip on the conference lead. When I finally left the arena after postgame interviews I walked by the cars and took down all the vanity plate names and numbers, and the make and model of each.
Sunday morning I did some digging and quickly found out the profession of each booster. On Monday I contacted some sources and found out that, indeed, the players whose parents had the money supplied their sons with their cars. and the cars were purchased in the players’ home towns.
The two players from the same impoverished neighborhood had their cars bought for them, too - by their mothers. I knew neither mother could afford such a purchase for their sons.
But then I found out that the autos were purchased from the same dealership in the town of the university. And the owner of the dealership was the booster who tapped me on my shoulder and said with all the pride of a man who had purchased a Kentucky Derby-winning thoroughbred:
“That’s my boy.”
I never wrote the story as it should have been written. When I floated the idea by my editor of turning what would have extended the story on two teams and their rivalry into the dirty underbelly of recruiting sought-after basketball players, he flatly said no. He said it would have required too many man hours on my part and additionally he did not want to jeopardize the newspaper’s relationships with local college athletic programs.
He was right - but he wasn’t right. It wasn’t my place to fight for the story. I was too young to persuade him to change his mind. And we were a weekly newspaper, not a daily. And if I dedicated myself to this story full time there were four per week for who knows how many weeks that would be turned over to stringers, stretching the sports section’s budget.
However, not being able to pursue that story hurt me for some time. But the booster’s last words will always haunt me:
“That’s my boy.”
—————-
Young boys with a talent for basketball live in every corner of the United States. Most of those boys who will find their way to the nation’s best college basketball programs are black. They are spotted at an early age by men whose live to spot “talent” at as early an age as possible. When they do see the next “One,” the next Big Thing, they begin to work their Svengali-like dark magick on these boys. And make no mistake, they are boys.
They are.
Children.
They sidle up to children as young as 12. Tell them how their handles remind them of a young Allen Iverson, how their jumper is smooth as Ray Allen’s; how they leap like a young Vince Carter.
You would think that compliments such as these would make a boy grin from ear to ear. And surely some do. Unfortunately, many of these children come from environments that do not allow for smiles. Smiles are a sign of weakness. That’s the, “I gotcha” face, that smile means you can be “got.” For children on the street a smile can mean you’re slippin’, you’re sleepin’ - while the one who made you smile is steadily creepin.
This is street life and everybody’s looking for a way to use the next boy or man or girl or woman. Ain’t nothin’ nice on the block. Just like Prodigy of Mobb Deep said a long time ago in one of those songs mistaken for odes to incarceration and death; one of those alleged Black KKK songs that is really a sped-up in time Renaissance Harlem - now set in Queensbridge - tale of the reality of despairing lives where death after 21 is a good life lived:
“I might crack a smile, but ain’t a damn thing funny.”
So if the young boy smiles the magick man knows he’s got one who might just be beyond his years in awareness of “the game,” whatever game that might be. And in the magick man’s case, that game is called in no uncertain term, “Bodies for Money.”
That’s right, Bodies for Money.
Modern-day slavery.
Oh sure, at the end of the boat ride there might be millions awaiting the young boy turned older boy turned young man. But on the voyage to might is a long line of magick men with increasingly potent and devastating powers. And while you’re under their spells, receiving what amounts to trinkets - a wad of cash here, a suite for a weekend there, a party where every woman you’ve never seen before knows your name - every single one of them will have their pockets lined with money that’s supposed to be yours.
The child is ultimately told by the first magick man - “middleman” or “runner” - that the only way he is going to get where he wants is through this “system.” He will show the child a few of his professional contacts - players - and maybe hit one or two of them up for a text chat, allowing the child to see what power he has.
Once the child shows he understands the process and accepts the fact that this man holds the key to a safe middle passage, the child is his. From this moment to the natural end of the player’s journey, education almost always takes a back seat to what might happen, but is put to the players as what will happen. Beyond the child’s natural proclivity to dream, believing wholeheartedly that he is on the road to personal riches, he takes an open stance of disdain toward the education process.
This is the initial manifestation of the modern-day slavery warehousing of young athletes.
When it is time for high school choices the magick men of today do not steer children to schools but to AAU teams where other middlemen await; the fewer people in any traditional system like that of the school system, the less the chance for the slavery game to be exposed.
Like any slave owner the masters invest in many young bodies hoping to strike gold with at least one. The others are cast aside in to the scrap heap. And because tracks must be covered to hide these heinous acts, AAU teams that have no checks and balances, no oversight, no true hierarchy, are perfect first thinning areas where ties are cut to players who do not exhibit the potential to excel beyond this level of basketball.
But is you are an AAU star you will ultimately be steered to a “player-friendly” high school. There are hundreds of them, enough to accommodate every hoop dreamer who has the potential to play Division I basketball - and plenty of upper-echelon prep and public schools to house those big bucks with “NBA” written all over them.
At this point the magick men at the top of the food chain, college coaches and agents, take a heightened interest in tracking the progress pf their investments. The middlemen ensure the continued comfort of the big buck and make sure that the proper palms are greased with cash and other amenities.
What we see today with O.J. Mayo, Rodney Guillory, and the snitching on these two and more by fringe slave agent Louis Johnson is a prime example of a middleman gone awry. It was tasked by someone, whether that someone was Calvin Andrews who works for “Teflon” Bill Duffy of Bill Duffy and Associates (BDA) or another master magician agent to find the right person to befriend Mayo and manipulate his actions until he arrived in the NBA.
That person was apparently Guillory. Why Rodney Guillory was picked to sidle up to Mayo, is unknown. This particular middlemen was a too known quantity by the Big Box slave warehouse, the NCAA, because of his being outed as former University of Southern California guard Jeff Trapagnier’s field master, It was Guillory who first showed up at USC head coach Tim Floyd’s office to tell him that Mayo would be soon in touch with the coach to inform him that he would be attending USC and playing for the Trojans. It was Guillory who laid the groundwork with Floyd for the manner in which Mayo would be treated while at the university.
This was clearly a planned obfuscation tactic.
However, no one knew that Guillory had violated the one rule of not only the modern-day slave trade but of all graft operations: for the machine to work without a hitch, all palms must be properly greased.
What Guillory also either failed to realize or forgot is that by the time Mayo contacted Floyd to commit to USC, the appearance that young O. J. Mayo was the puppet master pulling all the strings and these “poor men” Guillory and Floyd, were at this mercenary’s mercy was in place and set in stone. In fact, Mayo’s image as a bad kid was set up much earlier. He was long known as a malcontent, the young man who Michael Wilbon on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption called a “punk” before ever meeting or speaking with Mayo. He was known as a play for pay kid who would go to the lengths of playing basketball in Kentucky just to be seen by pro scouts instead of playing in his home state of West Virginia. Actually mayo was only 12 years old and the state of West Virginia’s high school athletic governing body would not allow a 12-year old to play on a varsity team, so Mayo went to Kentucky.
But the mainstream press failed to report these facts and helped greatly to impugn the character of yet another black athlete.
Only this time it was a 12-year old boy.
That Guillory failed in his job as field master to a prized slave is nothing new. The manner in which he failed, though, is unique. And because of that Louis Johnson provided us with a glimpse into the modern-day slave machine at hand. These people got to a 14-year old; they get to 12-year olds.
The slickest of magick men slave masters get to children young to keep from having to enter into almost-open block auction bidding on these tender black bodies. These men send their field masters out to view fresh young meat in sickness-infested pens called ———- ghettos. There, the field masters, just like those before them for the past 400 years pluck the heartiest of the young, the ones projected to be prized big bucks.
Like any good businessmen, they buy low and sell very high. And it does not matter to them one whit that they are peddling in flesh. They do this and use an ever-compliant, ever-racist media, whether mainstream or today’s Internet alternative, sell hope to the rest of the chattel in the ghetto pens and at the same time keep the prized big bucks in check.
This way the chattel is kept in a constant state of hopelessness, a constant state of fear. They are hopeless because they know the chances of escaping the pen without a slave master pen to a check is next to nil. They also know that escaping at all is like playing the lottery. They live in fear because a pen might go decades without one of its own escaping into the rest of the world and succeeding. They live in fear because they know that no one ever truly escapes a slave state; even a slave with money can be brought to his knees in the time it takes to read a 20-inch article, or the time it takes a policeman to run the plates on a Mercedes-Benz.
Modern-day slavery is the state of U.S. basketball today. And all the jingoistic flag-waving and black men draped in those flags that we will see later this summer cannot obviate this fact. The reasons for the continuation of the Western world’s oldest moneymaker, the buying and selling of human flesh, are many and they run as deep as Western culture will permit.
All that can be done now is to continue to shake the tree and watch the slave masters fall and shed light on the nature of their business.
And hope that those who are on the periphery but aid in perpetuating the system begin come to understand how no good can come from these acts. Unless, of course, the self-centeredness of the entertainment value of the games overrides your sense of humanity.
You see, right now, March Madness and the NBA Finals are winning.
And all the tender but jaded, young black bodies in the pens nicely called ghettos are losing ——– badly.
Previous O.J. Mayo Reports
O. J. Mayo: A First Report on the Money Trailing Behind the Collegiate Star
O. J. Mayo Report 2: Investigation, the ESPN Way
O. J. Mayo #3: U.S. Culture and the One-and-Done Rule
Comments
21 Responses to “O.J. Mayo #4: Recruiting Wars Ain’t Nothin’ But a Modern-Day Slavery Thang”
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dwil-
Nice insight into one part of the sports portion of new age slavery. Many don’t realize the part that AAU basketball plays into this. And the thing is, most of these young guys think they are playing the system when in truth they are the ones getting played. A couple of years ago, there was a blow up between Gary Williams and Jim Calhoun about a recruit. Williams wouldn’t deal with the recruit’s AAU coach, so the guy ended up going to UConn instead. It was later found out that the AAU coach also ran a club team that played UConn for a guaranteed sum and got waxed. Some of AAU coaches unjustly get bad reputations due to the tactics of a few bad apples. It is well known that some AAU teams are feeders for certain universities. There are strong ties that no one will deeply into to see why the coach steers a young player that way.
The bad part about it, often, the overseer, and sometimes the master looks like the young player. Not all of the kids who get involved are from poor backgrounds. You offer most kids a free Ipod and tell them that no strings are attached, and they are going to take it. The ones from the fatherless background often look up to the runner, AAU coach, etc., as a father figure. They trust them to lead them down the right path, when in truth, the kid is just today’s meal ticket. Yes, some coaches really do care, but there are a few who look at the kid as just chattel to be ground up by the system eventually, and they want a piece before he’s gruond out.
The adults in these young people’s lives (parents, family, friends, coaches, etc) are also snared in the trap to try to get the youngster to sign with whomever. Though most of what goes on with the runners is not illegal in the eyes of the law, the media will snatch this up as a character flaw of the family and young player. They will villify the player as if a 12-17 year old should have known better. The player will get undue criticism, and may have to face the wrath of some (Cameron) crazies.
In the end, as in most of the entrenched systems in America, only those at the very top are going to win out. The ones at the bottom are left to either continue providing services for those at the top, or are tossed aside if they are found out to not be good enough. Either way, I hear no one blaming the boosters, runners, agents, AAU coaches, University personnel, etc. That’s the real shame.
Few comments.
What’s up with the lack of paragraphs homie? The writing was off the chain, but damn if it didn’t hurt my head having to go through that one big paragraph of little type. I must be getting old.
You mentioned that this is the state of basketball, but isn’t it really the state of football as well? And I almost feel like the football situation is worse because of the violence of the game and the sheer number of players involved.
Anyway, real good read. I feel your pain on your editor refusing to allow you to include that note on the car dealership. They could have at least noted it, that’s just bad journalism.
Big Man-
Formatting problem - fixed.
Amazing post, D-Wil. Let’s see if any of the Big Box Internet Blogs link to it. This is really one of the best looks at the process you will read.
A few years ago I was talking with some of my friends who were NYC high school prospects - AAU types, one who became a D1 guard, one who did not - about the process. I was around it quite a bit, since the project I grew up next to was a recruiting ground for the big Catholic HS in the neighborhood. The friends I had who did get scholarships there allowed me the privledge of seeing a young Ron Artest, plus Shammgod at his best (and Felipe Lopez), among others, in high school.
Anyway, our discussion was that someone ought to do a series, like The Wire, that really looks at the reality of being a baller - from the ground up. From being that six year old that was allows on the court with the bigger kids (like one local NBAer was to my friend), always wanting to play, to the 11 year old who plays with the 17 and 18 years, to the high school selection process (where middlemen literally offer you a scholarship to get into these “prestigious” Catholic HS, which is where every baller not from Coney Island plays for) to the college level, and up through the NBA level. And, like The Wire, the larger point would be that it is purely cycle. The names and faces change, but the roles are always the same….
kos-
As I write about Mayo, that’s part of the setup - making it look like the athlete’s running things when it’s actually all those behind the scenes……
BM-
sorry to be short earlier… had to fix it and run some errands… yes this can be transposed to football but the mechanism is different. As I mentioned in the OJ Mayo #3, because the players are often all-black with hoops it looks like black-on-black crime. With football there are mostly white boosters involved who are often much closer to the AD department. And that makes it much more important to cover things up and diffuse the blame.
SML-
Thanks… Interesting idea. Maybe if it could be tweaked a bit it could still fly?
SML–Good comment. That reminds me, I should talk to my friend sometime who ended up playing college ball. I have never talked to him about the particulars, but the generalities he told make it seem pretty ugly. If you’re not the star of the team in a big program, the coach essentially owns you and can get mentally and physically abusive. Maybe if we worked hard enough, we could find several former college athletes willing to talk about their experiences and put together a story?
D-Wil–In my time, I’ve run across several former college athletes (even in non-scholarship sports at small schools) who are extremely bitter about the experience. One day there should be a book written by the “cast-offs”, those former athletes who were once treated well because of early promise and then discarded when they wanted to pick a more difficult major, or got injured, or otherwise failed to fit the mold.
mc-
It is very ugly, And the not-so-funny thing is, the pecking order and the treatment of players is pretty much the same in sports as disparate as football and softball, basketball and tennis, baseball and gymnastics (check out the Seattle newspapers for the stories about the Washington softball team and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about - you can probably do a search within the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for “UW softball - drugs” and pick up the stories about the scandal there that was going on about the same time as the Rick Neuheisel March Madness pool scandal).
I like your idea for that show SML, the problem would be avoiding turning it into “Playmakers.”
I hope y’all do talk to a former college athlete about the process.
Wow..this was powerful.
Ya know, this is all beginning to just nauseate me. The NFL combine literally made me ill when I watched the weigh-ins last year and I vowed never to watch any of it again because it was just too troubling. This paints a picture just as dirty for the NBA.
This is one of the best connect the dot articles I have every read. I really love the anology because of the truth evident in it.
MC, SML…the athletes you mentioned, the cast offs the prodogies existed in my family and in the personality of boyhood friends, who end up falling short of the sports glory the seek. From the all too true stories of the basket weaving courses, to bouncing from school to school, never growing up, just being a performing slave for the machine.
Keep writing like this brotherall you’re doing is casting sunlight on the cockroaches , encouriginh others to shine more of this sunlight, eventually making it a brighte day.
“Until lions start writing down their own stories, the hunters will always be the heroes”
—Kenyan proverb
great post dwil… and yeah, there needs to be more stories on the young kids that never make it and what their experience is like. This accounts for about 99% of the star athletes who are first “recruited” at age 13
Great stuff. Man, I am spreading the word about this site any chance I get, and I hope that one day people who are tired of the tripe they see on the MSM can get their heads expanded here.
Miranda, ain’t that the truth. I am so conflicted about the NFL. Usually around this time I am in football withdrawal, but somethings different now. Aspects of the whole enterprise from the treatment of the players by the league, the way the players allow themselves to be treated and treatment of players by the media is starting to make me feel a little sick. Even last year, watching the games was not quite the enjoyable diversion that it used to be. And sometimes it seems that the players aren’t even enjoying themselves. Maybe my enthusiasm will return by August.
SML says:
“Anyway, our discussion was that someone ought to do a series, like The Wire, that really looks at the reality of being a baller - from the ground up. From being that six year old that was allows on the court with the bigger kids (like one local NBAer was to my friend), always wanting to play, to the 11 year old who plays with the 17 and 18 years, to the high school selection process (where middlemen literally offer you a scholarship to get into these “prestigious” Catholic HS, which is where every baller not from Coney Island plays for) to the college level, and up through the NBA level. And, like The Wire, the larger point would be that it is purely cycle. The names and faces change, but the roles are always the same….”
First off. I always get a kick when someone mentions The Wire.” Simply the greatest dramatic Television series of all time IMO. But getting to your point. DId you ever get a chance to catch “Hoop Dreams?”
The documentary pretty much did everything you ask. It was simply brilliant and stunning and heartbreaking all at the same time.
http://www.amazon.com/Hoop-Dreams/dp/B0009E27LC/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1212100047&sr=8-2
Kev (and everyone)-
Duh! I totally forgot about Hoop Dreams (and true about The Wire - and at the same time, what else is there to compare ideas like that to?…). I have a feeling I know where SML is going to say his idea diverges from Hoop Dreams…
Also, there was the doc about, damn I forgot dude’s name who jumped over the car (a VW?) and dunked. He was all that but ended up in the pen. And then there’s the Micheal Ray Richardson doc… If you took elements of all three of those docs you have yourself a nice series of fictional shows.
But I digress.
I’ve lived this with tennis, getting “recruited” at a very young age to go to certain high schools to play tennis, transferring high schools to a mostly boarding school four states away from home with other players to join a couple of dudes at that school to round out another winning high school tennis program…
I’m using OJ Mayo’s recruitment to hopefully create an entire picture about what this system is about, how the athlete is set up to take the fall; how basketball is somehow worse than football because the money is coming from and going into black people’s pockets instead of white people’s pockets; how it, as are most sports-related events, mirrors everyday workings in our society; how the media manipulates people and creates images of them to spin a story the way it makes them the most money, and; to shed light on the fact that young black men and by extension their families are treated like slaves and how ghettos are, as I wrote in this piece, seen as nothing more than hogs’ pens, or cattle pens - chattel pens that are viewed “from above” by people with money who look down on human beings and pluck certain people from them who they feel will produce the most “product” and therefore give them the most return on their investment.
awb,
I was actually watching the Combine with two friends - females - we thought we were gonna enjoy the sites of some fine bruthas…. about 10 minutes into watching the weigh ins - someone picked up the remote and turned it off and we just sat in silence for a minute, I forget who said it first, but somebody said “what the hell are we watching?” It was so bizarre….I mean, it was the sizing up of bucks, it was degrading, I dont’ care how much money is involved, that sh!t was degrading.
Kev: No doubt - I can’t believe I forgot to mention Hoops Dream. That shoulda won the Best Doc Oscar the year it came out (’94?), but I think Michael Moore won it that year. Came out one year before Rumble In the Jungle, another amazing sports documentary.
The difference between a The Wire-like series, and a documentary like Hoops Dream, is that the series could really get into the entire process - the 6 years olds, the high school kids, the college kids, the rookies in the NBA, the veterans. The GMs, the Presidents, the NBA coaches, the NCAA coaches, the ADs, the boosters. That’s what made the difference between a series like The Wire, and a movie like… well, you pick a good movie on the drug game. The point being that there is so much that can be covered that a 2-hour movie would only scratch the surface….
Dwil, Good read. This article could have been written 20 years ago, and will be applicable 20 years from now. There is too much money on the table, and all the participants know how to work the system. So the gravey train will continue into the foreseeable future.
My solution is for the young athlete to boycott all the HRCU (historically racist colleges & univ ) and demand that these colleges increase their enrollment of Black students to match the local percentage or the national percentage whichever is higher. Demand that the offspring(s) of every Black athlete get a free ride. Give free ride to 10 graduating students (Black) from the athlete’s high school graduating class. Demand that these colleges donate money to the athlete’s high school to improve any non-athletic dept. that’s in need.
I think we are in a much better bargaining position than we know, the ncaa may not like it, but that’s kool. We’ll just take our asses to the HBCU, where we should have been in the first place, free of charge, and get the TV money.
Imhotep,
I’ve advocated similar measures, but the power belongs to the athletes right up until the sign with a college. Also, as we’ve seen with kids that say upfront that they are looking at a school’s history of hiring practices for black coaches, administrators, etc. either the media jumps on the kid for being racist or the bloggers/fans jump on the kid for calling their alma mater/favorite team out and the kid gets hammered for even the smallest misstep or left-handed comment.
A parent /guardian/relative that doesn’t allow his kid to get pimped is pilloried by, get this, the sports agents and sneaker reps in a similar to fashion to how Derrick Rose was portrayed by these people when his brothers wouldn’t allow agents, runners and sneaker pimps to whore out their baby brother. Ain’t that a bitch? A black man actually helps raise his own brother and a fucking lawyer says that he has more of the kid’s interest at heart than the kid’s own blood? A lawyer preaching morality? Unbelievable.
If the top 15 or 20 kids in football and basketball went to HBCU’s unexpectedly for the next four or five years, would that make a dent? Not a big enough one, but I guarantee a Charlie Weis would most certainly lose his job if enough kids like that told him and Notre Dame to go fuck themselves and made sure that Beano Cook heard them say it. It would certainly hurt Tim Floyd if elite black kids told him to go to hell. The Fab Five “talked” about doing something like this as per “40 Million Dollar Slaves,” but they decided to make Michigan a boatload of money by going there instead. But now, they’re hated at Michigan because of the Ed Martin revelations. Let’s just say Chris Webber is fortunate that Martin died and was never able to testify in open court about the money he gave Webber. Webber is lucky he never had to get on the stand in open court and try to re-but Martin or have to admit that he took money.
Miranda
I watched the combine one time only and had the same reaction. I wanted to watch cats do the drills, but I caught the weigh in and physical and it was like a cattle drive or slave auction. It disturbed me so much.
I used to play football in high school, I loved it and I was pretty good.
I hate football now. I don’t know if I would allow my son to play. something about that whole system disgusts me. I may have to join some other posters in an outright ban on watching the NFL.
But, I still might buy Madden.
SML
If you’ll remember, Hoop Dreams, while making most critics’ top 10 list wasn’t nominated for Best pic NOR Best documentary. I think some film about Jewish survivors of the Holocaust won for Best documentary.
On the topic of the dramatic series addressing the issues, I agree 100% with you and Dwil on the merit of having such a project. But we all know we’ll never see it. Shit, we were lucky as hell to get “The Wire.”
The combine makes me sick and honestly, ‘Hotep’s idea don’t seem like a bad idea at all.
[…] Should Cedric Benson be exonerated of his alleged misdeeds the press will maintain that the Bears did right by the team and the fans, they will take their criticism of Ced Benson to the extreme just to cover how wrong they are. And they will make statements like this one made Monday by Woody Paige on ESPN’s Around the Horn that speaks to the modern-day slave, auction block nature of the NFL - and all sports: […]