I was raised as a Roman Catholic, which is the main reason I became a fan of the University of Notre Dame football team when I was a child. The other reason was that where the United States Armed Forces short wave radio broadcasts were concerned in the mid/late 1950s, the college football team which was most often featured on Saturday afternoons was ND.
I was also a big fan of Floyd Patterson, at that time the youngest world heavyweight champion, because he was black and a Roman Catholic. But by the time Patterson was humiliated by Muhammad Ali, around 1967 I think, I had become a black revolutionary in my thinking, largely because of reading Malcolm X’s autobiography.
When I traveled to the United States in 1965 to attend university there, Notre Dame football ceased to be a concern of mine. In fact, while in the United States I even lost my total love for the San Francisco Giants of Willie Mays, Juan Marichal, Willie McCovey, and the Alou brothers. Between 1965 and 1968, all I was trying to do was survive. And after that, there was UBAD …
Around 1978, it so happened that one of my younger brothers, Ronald, received a scholarship to attend the University of Notre Dame. My parents having moved to Belmopan in 1970, Ronald attended high school there, where a Catholic nun, a Sister Dianne, was impressed by him and our family members there. Mostly through Sister Dianne’s efforts, Ron got a scholarship to ND.
He became a Notre Dame alumnus and a fanatic supporter of the ND football team. Through his enthusiasm, he re-infected me with the Notre Dame bug during the Lou Holtz era, which began in 1988.
There was, of course, something quite incongruous about that situation, because Notre Dame is the highest profile Roman Catholic university in the United States, whereas in Belize I am probably considered the highest profile critic of the Roman Catholic school curricula. So.
Notre Dame has been trying to prove that you can have a nationally competitive football team while maintaining high academic standards. Overall, major college sports in the United States is bogus, in that some of the most famous sports programs graduate fewer than half of their student athletes. In fact, many of their student athletes do not attend classes. Some cannot even read at the high school level. But successful football and basketball programs earn millions and millions of dollars annually for their respective universities, which is why the academic departments of those universities turn a blind eye to all the discrepancies and irregularities.
Since Lou Holtz retired as their football coach about 12 years ago, Notre Dame has been unable to compete against the “big boys” in football. The reason, I think, is that full time student athletes have problems competing against athletes who are not really students. Notre Dame is determined to prove that this is not so. All I can say is that I wish them luck.
I have engaged in this brief discussion on Notre Dame’s situation with respect to academics and athletics as an introduction to what I wished to do in this column, which is to introduce you to the greatest black man of whom you have never heard. His name was Paul Robeson, and he was, arguably, the greatest student athlete in America’s twentieth century. After excelling at Rutgers, Robeson became an internationally famous actor, singer and political activist during the late 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Because he was a supporter of the communist Russian Revolution (1917), however, he was blacklisted by the American State Department and ostracized by the American media.
To an extent, Robeson contributed to his own problems, because even after Josef Stalin had been exposed as a mass murderer, Robeson did not denounce him. Robeson had been treated so warmly by the Russian people, welcomed as a hero in Russia, that when he compared that with the oppressive and dangerous conditions for a black man in Jim Crow America during that time, Robeson could not bring himself to condemn Stalin’s Russia.
Paul Robeson was an incredible talent. He was also an exceptional humanitarian, who sacrificed himself and his career because of his belief in the rights of humanity at the level of the working classes and the peasants. Robeson was considered a hero in many parts of Europe, even in London, and in Asia. Paul Robeson could never have been considered a racist, but he was a communist sympathizer. For that sin, his country of birth did him in, so to speak.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.