Excerpts from "What's my Name, Fool?"

“D” Was never so “Smooth”

“Coach, you know how you were always on me about working on my right hand dribble. Well I’m going to start.” With this line, delivered amid laughter and tears, former Notre Dame basketball standout, southpaw Danielle “D-Smooth” Green, told the horrifying news to her ex-Fighting Irish coach Muffet McGraw: a grenade had blown off her left hand when she was—as Army MP Green—patrolling a Baghdad police station.

Like late NFL safety turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman, Green could easily be used as a symbol of patriotic resolve and sacrifice. She would fit neatly into that potent place where athletics meets war and produces pro-military demagoguery. Yet unlike Tillman, who cannot speak for himself, D-Smooth has foiled attempts to exploit her experience for pro-war purposes by speaking out against what she sees, from firsthand experience, as an unjust war. From her hospital bed, Green told the New York Times, “They just don’t want us there. I personally don’t think we should have gone into Iraq. Not the way things have turned out. A lot more people are going to get hurt, and for what?”

Secretary of State Colin Powell, confronted with her words on Meet The Press, could only mutter, “I hope she will see in her time that her sacrifice was worth it.” Green does not give him much basis for hope. “I’m not gong to lie, I didn’t understand the mission, the purpose. If you understand what you’re fighting for then you’ve got something to hang on to. But we didn’t even have that. I think if I hadn’t lost my arm, I would have lost my mind. It was enough to drive you insane, and I think that’s where I might have been headed.”

If D-Smooth weren’t so quick to speak her mind, she would be perfect fodder for a pro-war press desperately searching the rubble of Iraq for positive news about the U.S. occupation. Green would otherwise fit the bill. She was a decorated athlete at Chicago ’s Roosevelt High School, winning eleven letters in four sports. She was also sports editor for the school newspaper, a lieutenant colonel in Junior ROTC, treasurer of the student council, and a member of the National Honor Society. She accomplished all this while emerging from a childhood in which her prime adult role model was a mother addicted to drugs. “I was six or seven years old the first time I saw my mom smoke reefer,” Green remembered. “Then it got to be an everyday thing. And then I saw her smoke out of a crack pipe. I went to my room and cried. But I also made up my mind that day what I was going to do with my life. I wrote down some goals. I wanted to go to Notre Dame someday, I wanted to be GI Joe in the military.”

Those dreams have been shredded, along with her illusions about why she enlisted. “The most disappointing thing about Iraq is that I thought I was going to change some peoples’ lives. But in the four months I was there, I don’t think I touched one life.” But by not being silent, Green will touch more lives than she can imagine. “D” has never been so “Smooth.”

 
Boxing

No sport has chewed athletes up and spit them out—especially Black athletes—quite like boxing. For the very few who “make it,” it is never the sport of choice. Boxing has always been for the poor, for people born at the absolute margins of society. The first boxers in the United States were slaves. Southern plantation owners amused themselves by putting together the strongest slaves and having them fight it out while wearing iron collars. After the abolition of slavery, boxing was unique among sports because it was desegregated as early as the turn of the last century. This was not because the people who ran boxing were in any way progressive. They make the people who run boxing today resemble gentlemen of great character. Those early promoters simply wanted to make a buck off the rampant racism in American society by pitting Black vs. white for public spectacle. Unwittingly, these early fight financiers opened up a space in which the white supremacist ideas of the day could be challenged. This was the era of deeply racist pseudo-science. The attitude of the social Darwinist quacks was that Blacks were not only mentally inferior but also physically inferior to whites. Blacks were cast as too lazy and too undisciplined to ever be taken seriously as athletes.

When Jack Johnson became the first Black heavyweight-boxing champion in 1908, his victory created a serious crisis for these ideas. The media whipped up in a frenzy about the need for a “Great White Hope” to restore order to the world. Former champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement to restore that order, saying, “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”

At the fight, which took place in 1910, the ringside band played, “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” and promoters led the nearly all-white crowd in the chant “Kill the nigger.” But Johnson was faster, stronger, and smarter than Jeffries, knocking him out with ease. After Johnson’s victory, there were race riots around the country—in Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Most of the riots consisted of white lynch mobs attempting to enter Black neighborhoods and Blacks fighting back. This reaction to a boxing match was the most widespread simultaneous racial uprising in the U.S. until the riots that followed the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Right-wing religious groups immediately organized a movement to ban boxing, and Congress actually passed a law that prohibited the showing of boxing films. Black leaders, such as Booker T. Washington, pushed Johnson to condemn the African-American uprising. But Johnson remained defiant. He not only spoke out on all issues of the day, he also broke racist social taboos by marrying white women, and as a result faced harassment and persecution for most of his life. Johnson was forced into exile in 1913 on the trumped-up charge of transporting a white woman across state lines for prostitution.

The “Johnson backlash” meant that it would be twenty years before the rise of another Black heavyweight champ—“The Brown Bomber,” Joe Louis. Louis was quiet where Johnson had been outspoken. An all-white management team handled Louis very carefully, and had a set of rules he had to follow, including, “never be photographed with a white woman, never go to a club by yourself, and never speak unless spoken to.” But the Brown Bomber’s timid public face became fierce in the ring. Louis scored sixty-nine victories in seventy-two professional fights—fifty-five of them knockouts.

Despite the docile image demanded by his handlers, Joe Louis—and his dominance in the ring—represented dignity and resistance to Blacks and to the radicalizing working class of the 1930s. This played out most famously during Louis’s two fights against German boxer Max Schmeling in 1936 and 1938. German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler promoted Schmeling as the epitome of “Aryan greatness,” and in their first bout, Schmeling knocked out Louis. Hitler and Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels had a field day, and the southern press in the United States laughed it up. One columnist for the New Orleans Picayune wrote, “I guess this proves who really is the master race.”

The Louis-Schmeling rematch in 1938 was even more politically loaded—a physical referendum on Hitler, the Jim Crow South, and antiracism. The U.S. Communist Party organized radio listenings of the fight from Harlem to Birmingham that became mass meetings—complete with armed guards at the door. Hitler closed down movie houses so all of Germany would be compelled to listen to the fight. The cinema doors probably should have been kept open; Louis devastated Schmeling in one round, with lightning combinations that stunned the big German. In a notorious move, Hitler cut all of Germany ’s radio power when it was clear that the knockout was coming.

The Brown Bomber held the heavyweight title for twelve years, the longest reign in history. He beat all comers, the overwhelming majority of them white, successfully defending his title a record twenty-five times. He was, according to poet Maya Angelou, “The one invincible Negro, the one who stood up to the white man and beat him down with his fists. He in a sense carried so many of our hopes, and maybe even our dreams of vengeance.” Thirty years after the fight against Schmeling, Martin Luther King Jr. reinforced its significance by reminder readers of Why We Can’t Wait that

More than 25 years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the victim reacted in this novel situation. The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came the words, “Save me Joe Louis. Save me Joe Louis. Save me Joe Louis.”