A QUICK SLANT


on a complex issue.

While I was working on another post and juggling a couple of side projects, the great, Scatterbrained Adam Mackie emailed to ask what I thought about Donovan McNabb's claim that black quarterbacks face greater scrutiny than white quarterbacks. My first thought, sprung from a mind still reeling after his dismal performances in Weeks 1 & 2, is that right now McNabb deserves all the scrutiny he gets. I could have completed at least half those passes — hell, Adam could have completed that goal-line slant to Reggie Brown that Donovan threw into the first row — and I'm pretty sure that, right now at least, I could run faster too. (Note to Andy Reid: Brian Westrbook is averaging 5 yards a carry. Run the damned ball!)

But I digress.

My second thought, sprung from the mind of a guy whose favorite football team has featured a black quarterback for most of the last twenty-two years -- Randall Cunningham, Rodney Peete, and Donovan McNabb, all of whom won postseason games and one of whom actually got the team back to the Super Bowl -- is that I don't think it's true. All you have to do is look at Michael Vick, a guy who's a great athlete (and a hell of a dog-killer) but who’s never been anything more than a below-average, maddeningly inconsistent quarterback, to see that a black quarterback can be built up and fawned over with an almost adolescent fervor by "experts" who should damned well know better. That Vick was ever mentioned as, much less even considered to be, an elite NFL quarterback tells you all you need to know about the levels of scrutiny all black quarterbacks — as opposed to, say, one black quarterback who plays in a city of fans that booed Mike Schmidt and Charles Barkley and once famously threw snowballs at Santa Claus — do or not receive.

That said, I imagine it must have been true in pee wee leages and middle school and high school when McNabb was growing up. After all, at that time, you’d had Doug Williams and Warren Moon and Randall Cunningham and no one else you could really name or remember. And you'd had an equal (or greater) number of high-profile players — Vince Evans, Rodney Peete, Major Harris, Tony Rice, Andre Ware — who’d been highly touted but not especially successful. So I imagine that people like Steve McNair and Donovan McNabb and Dante Culpepper and Michael Vick (though in his case, they were right!) probably did face a lot of scrutiny and skepticism and outright pessimism as they grew up and wanted to play the position fifteen or twenty or twenty-five years ago.

But with the success of all those guys, and with the prominence of guys like Kordell Stewart and Aaron Brooks and Shaun King and Byron Leftwich, and with the ascendance of young talents like Vince Young and David Garrard and Tarvaris Jackson and JaMarcus Russell and Jason Campbell— who looked like a seasoned veteran outplaying McNabb on Monday night — and with a whole new crop of great black quarterbacks rising through the college ranks ever year, I doubt that it's true any more.

Unless, of course, you are cursed to play for some racist yahoo piece of shit of a coach — but then you'd be suffering the same levels of scrutiny and indignity whether you were the quarterback or the waterboy.

Posted: Wed - September 19, 2007 at 01:01 PM          

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