AUBREY BRUCE
If God permits it, I will cross the sixty-year old threshold sometimes during the middle of March. Am I looking forward to it? Hell yeah. Am I going to be confused? Hell yeah.
As a result of my rapid advance toward the bone orchard and my warp speed changing life; do I want to drive off of the showroom lot in a blood red corvette with a 28 year old sitting front seat right? No. Why, well because I don’t really like the color red.
One thing that my advancing age dictates more and more everyday is that I attempt to connect with the public in a more honest and direct way. Well get strapped in because here…we….go. I was looking at a Pitt women’s basketball game a few nights ago. The audience at the ‘Pete’ was a bit less than sparse. The quality of play was a bit above average. At that point, I asked myself the question; where have all the people gone, long time passing? Women’s b-ball has been around long enough to be more popular than it currently is. What is the problem? After the game was over the question began to wear on me. Anyway I called a couple of my “boys,” one coaches AAU girls basketball and the other coaches a boys’ high school basketball team. This is where I have to “punk out” because both said if I used their names and quoted them indirectly or directly I would lose their trust and friendship forever and we might have to exchange a right jab or two. I don’t mind rumbling with them but I have known both of them for more than 35 years and I won’t risk losing their friendship so I am going to just have to rely on you the readers to trust that some of the things that I am about to say are not figments of my imagination.
A large percentage of the verbiage has been edited or deleted because some of it was a bit more “macho” than I felt comfortable writing. I asked coach number one why he thought women’s pro and college basketball doesn’t have the social impact that it has economically. “Well first of all he said, when fans male and female want to see some real hoops they are going to turn on the television or get in the car and go see men playing basketball. There are a lot of women playing basketball that not only want to play like Mike, they want to be Mike and men just have a hard time dealing with that.” I am really naïve now because I asked him the question; what’s wrong with them wanting to be like Mike or being Mike?
Coach number one paused, sighed and said, “Brey a high percentage of them want to be men and it’s obvious. If people want to see mannerisms and manly behavior they will go and pay to see men’s teams compete and not women’s.” Coach number two now chimed in. “Don’t forget Title IX,” he lamented, “gender issues have become equal to racial issues. If a White woman walks into an office and applies for a job no one knows whether she is heterosexual or homosexual. But when a Black man or Woman walks into the workplace bias may be automatically based solely on race.” Coach Number one interrupted. “And there are now less scholarships for male athletes because of budget cutting all across the nation and now even less money is going to be available for athletic programs for years to come. Title IX may “level” the playing field for some but lessens opportunities for others. The law is affirmative action and set asides just for women but nobody is complaining.” As far as I am concerned both of my “boys” had valid points but the thing that scares me is the fact that when civil rights are defined in this country there seems to be sort of a melting pot of issues that always seem to be put into the same pot that cooks and ferments racial injustice. Individuals were not enslaved for hundreds of years because of their sexuality or their gender; people were indentured at least in America because of their skin. Women and homosexuals were not dragged from their homes sold into bondage, put into slave ships and transported to faraway lands; but Africans were. All athletes and races are not considered by many people to be created equal and we must all stop pretending that we believe and think that they are. Athletic scholarships are needed and vital for the evolution of the rapidly disappearing Black male because sports are one of the few lamp lights that guide them to a better place. I know, you know and everybody else knows that most women are not genetically engineered good enough to beat a man or a boy playing most games that require physicality. Are there exceptions, yes but that being said the gene pools of females may not evolve to compete athletically against men for at least 10,000 or more years? I don’t care how many scholarships that are awarded by a title IV mandate or any other law we must always remember; women are from Venus and men are from Mars.
(Aubrey Bruce can be reached at abruce@newpittsburghcourier.com or 412-583-6741.)