(ThyBlackMan.com) I remember the version of manhood a lot of us were handed coming up. Your daddy provided, and if he stuck around at all you counted yourself lucky. Emotion stayed folded up somewhere behind the ribs. A boy learned early that a real man kept his answers ready and ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) Darius Rucker turned 60, and something in him finally exhaled. The country singer sat down on The Dan Patrick Show recently and said out loud what plenty of us keep buried. Glancing back at his last calendar, he tallied the concerts. 110 of them. Then came a question that ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) Come the eleventh of August, Gary lost power, and for thousands of households the lights still had not flickered back on more than a week down the line. A derecho came barreling through Northwest Indiana that night. Winds got up near 100 miles an hour, and they snapped utility ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) Say the words Martha’s Vineyard to somebody who came up when I did, and watch what their mind conjures. Old money. Doctors and lawyers with summer homes handed down like heirlooms. The Obamas strolling near the water. For decades that picture held, and there was truth in it. Oak ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) Adrien Broner once carried the kind of promise the fight game rarely hands out. For a while, people talked about him like the next Floyd Mayweather. World titles across four weight classes, mouth running faster than his hands, a swagger that made you either love him or want to ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) Somebody decided a while back that a serious Black man ought to look as if he is hauling a boulder up a hill. I never agreed to that. My pushback happens right here in the kitchen, volume up, nothing loud about it. Most of what gets published about brothers ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) Something about the Paul Pierce mess has been sitting heavy on me all week. Not the dollar figures, loud as they are. What bothers me is the posture of it. A grown man treating his responsibility to his own flesh and blood the way he might treat a bad ...

(ThyBlackMan.com) There is an old wisdom I inherited from men who worked with their hands and thought with their whole lives, and it went something like this. A house is only as sound as the ground it sits on. I have carried that idea into my later years, and I ...