Randolph should follow Obama's example
Posted: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 11:34 AM
I hate it when a great guy like Willie Randolph gets himself on Sports Center for saying something he never should have said. There’s no cure for it now. He was asked a question, and he made the mistake of answering it. And now his stewardship of the Mets is no longer simply about how he’s running the team but about racism.
Al Sharpton, who makes a living preaching to his choir, can blame racism for anything. Willie Randolph can’t. No one in sports, where nothing matters at the end of the day but whether you won or you lost, can.
It has nothing to do with whether Randolph’s observations to Ian O’Connor, an outstanding columnist for The Record of Hackensack, N.J., are true. All he said was that he thinks some of the heat he’s taking from the media could be because he’s black, and suggested that former Jets coach Herm Edwards and former Knicks president and coach Isiah Thomas were also treated more harshly because they are black.
I think Edwards and Thomas were fired because their teams were moving in the wrong direction, which is the same reason Mike D’Antoni, a man who’d been to conference finals in the NBA and was far more successful than Thomas, had to leave the Phoenix Suns. And Randolph is under fire because his Mets are stumbling along a year after blowing the biggest late-season lead in history last year as well as for gagging against the Cardinals in the NLCS in 2006.
Randolph tried to back out of the controversy the next day in The New York Post, claiming he wasn’t really complaining.
"Listen, we live in this country," The Post quotes Randolph as saying. "Race is an issue in this country. Let's not fool ourselves here. Did I say it was a racial issue? No. I just made a comment just very kind of tongue-in-cheek. But let's get real. We live in a country where racism exists."
I can’t argue with Randolph’s perception, which I know is shared by many blacks. All I can say is that it serves no purpose to bring it up. The only thing that can come of it is even more criticism.
That’s why the subject is best treated the way Barack Obama has handled it. He has a very
good reason to squawk, and if you read some of the things white racists have said about him, you should be appalled that in America, a nation founded on the idea that all men – and women – are equal, such bigots still exist in numbers larger than we care to admit.
But Obama refuses to let the jerks win. He acknowledges that there are people who won’t vote for him because he’s of mixed racial descent, then moves on to the people who will vote for him because of what he promises to do if elected. He knows, as Randolph should, that the object is to win the race, not to worry about how people perceive you. He also knows that the more you whine about it, the more enemies you make.
Few players in New York baseball were better liked and more respected than Randolph was. He was a member of the Bronx Zoo Yankees of the 1970s and 80s, but he was never an exhibit in it. In a fractious clubhouse often led by the supremely dysfunctional – and equally brilliant – Billy Martin, Randolph was an island of professionalism and dignity. When he retired and became a Yankee coach, those of us who admired him as a ballplayer and a person lobbied heavily for him to get a managing job, not just because we liked and respected him, but also because we felt that he had a great baseball mind.
The only question was whether he was assertive enough for the job. It may turn out that he may not be – at least not for the Mets, who have more clubhouse problems than most teams.
I don’t expect Randolph or anyone to take my advice. I am, after all, just another white guy telling people of color – and anyone else who passes in front of my crosshairs - how they ought to look at life. That’s pretty presumptive of me, and I know it. I don’t know what it’s like to be black or Asian. In fact, I don’t know what it’s like to be a WASP or a Muslim or a Jew or anything other than what I am, which is a silly old man who wears a hat.
But I do know this: What we are and what we believe colors how we perceive the world and everything in it. If I am a secular humanist, I can not understand those who believe in intelligent design. If I am a fundamentalist believer of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion, the idea that the entire universe simply erupted from nothing and everything in it evolved all on its own is preposterous.
True believers in President Bush are incapable of perceiving any inconsistencies or less-than-truthful elements in anything he says or does. And no matter how far his popularity sinks, about three in 10 Americans still think he’s doing a crackerjack job. Such is the power of perception.
