The odds that any high school athlete will play a sport on the professional level are about 10,000 to 1. Yet according to a recent survey conducted by Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society, 66 percent of all African-American males between the ages of 13 and 18 believe they can earn a living playing professional sports. That is more than double the proportion of young white males who hold such beliefs. Black parents also are four times more likely than white parents to believe that their children are destined for careers in professional athletics.As an industry, sports have also created a relatively small, elite class of black multimillionaires. But these black players and their outrageous salaries, together with the media and advertising endorsements, have created the impression among many lower-income blacks that there are unlimited opportunities on the playing field. The result, say experts, is an obsession with sports among many young African-American males often at the expense of the more traditional, if less glamorous, route to upward mobility: education. "There is an overemphasis on sports in the black community, and too many black students are putting all their eggs in one basket," says Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint. (www.usnews.com/usnews/Febissue/sports.htm)In his controversial book, Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race, "The whole problem here," writes author John Hoberman, "is that the black middle class is rendered essentially invisible by the parade of black athletes and criminals on television." That in turn fuels the perception that African-Americans excel in physical pursuits and Caucasians in intellectual endeavors. As in most high schools, the real social champions at a nearly all-black public academy on Chicago's South Side are not the boys and girls who can think and problem solve but, rather, the kids who can dunk a...
