(ThyBlackMan.com) When I was a kid back in the day, I didn’t watch very much sports on cable TV (and still don’t to this day) because I actually played PE sports like kickball (my favorite sport), flag football, tug of war, played sports video games, and I even played baseball in front of my old house on Jackson St.
I was one of the fastest kids in elementary school and I greatly took pride in that because when I used to play kickball, when I ran so fast, I was unstoppable.
But when I got to middle school, everything had changed because one day, any sort of aspiration that I had for pursing a future in sports had come to an end because I found out that I wasn’t good enough to be a pro athlete and that is actually the best thing that 
had ever happened to me in my life.
Whenever I go to certain places in Montgomery, I noticed many young inner city boys are in helmets and shoulder pads as peewees practicing to play their next opponent and the first thought that comes to mind is “Why in the world are we forcing our young boys to achieve excellence in sports and not education?
Football is NOT a place for us to sacrifice our son’s brain because I remember seeing a few episodes of Friday Night Tykes online and I was disgusted with the verbal abuse they endured at the hands of the coaches. In fact, in a particular episode, I remember one coach telling one of his peewee players “I want you to rip his head off” and it disgusted me.
The Sports Industry in America comes with a very dangerous and destructive culture with the painkillers, turning up at the club, blowing through their money like crazy, sleeping with everything that moves, having multiple kids with multiple women, and heavy alcohol and drug abuse.
The Sports Industry in America is NOT a career because the lifespan of a pro athlete is less than 5 years and it’s only a temporary ride to a more meaningful and productive life.
These sports systems, mainly The NCAA are designed to athletically exploit and mentally and physically destroy inner city men because they generate the most money for the big universities and The NCAA and most of the people that are getting rich off the exploitation of these athletes are guys from the suburbs.
I’ve even heard stories of athletes killing themselves as well as committing horrible crimes because of all the brain damage they sustained throughout their years of playing football and this topic is explored in the film Concussion.
The Sports Industry in America is a reminiscent of slavery because the slave masters would have slaves on the opposite sides of the plantation fighting for “bragging rights” and this is evident today with football and basketball players lining up on opposite sides of the field or on the court.
The worst thing I’ve ever heard an athlete from Alabama say was when Derrick Henry said a few months ago “I was born to win The Heisman” and at that moment, I felt very sorry for him because my thinking was “Here’s a guy who has been so brainwashed to believe that his sole purpose in life is to win a propped up meaningless validation award for that big systemically racist university in Tuscaloosa as their prized cash cow and prized inner city athlete” and to me that spoke volumes because he’s saying that “He’s a trememdous asset for The University Of Alabama, but he’s not an asset to his community” and that comment personally dusgusted me because he is born to do so much more in life than running the football, taking repeated blows to the head and risking paralysis.
The Conclusion – Sports should NOT be our sons Plan A, education and skills should be their Plan A and sports should be their Plan B. Let’s teach our sons that they can have a better life and future outside of the sports industry in America.
Staff Writer; Joe Davis
FB Page; http://www.facebook.com/joe.davis.165470
