Yet Again and Again...

In honor of John Carlos Birthday, I'm reposting this article to my blog.  I originally posted it in 2012.  Hope you'll find it worth a few minutes.

I suppose for the most part we could call this an oxymoron.  A painful one.  I find the arena of the athlete, no matter the country more and more difficult to watch. I find myself lost in cynicism.  I can remember my father's final days still being able to lie in the bed and enjoy a good baseball game.  I didn't get it.  But what I know now is that those games were being played out in a different part of his mind and his body.  There was actually a process of displacement.  Every throw of the ball and every crack of the bat triggered a memory that displaced the one on the screen and replaced it with a young, long lean athlete. One, who took to the fields at another time in this country where segregation was the rule of law; and yet they played THEIR game.  And one that gathered them and their families together to follow the sun to countries of Latin America to play winter ball and be hailed as heroes.

But I don't want to dwell on the seedy side of sport. I want to elevate the heroes. Those that allow us to speak of the nobility of the athlete and the contribution that he/she has made on and off the field. Those who make my heart jump and bring me to my feet. Those who have grabbed their moment in time, at great sacrifice, expose the harsh lines that separate us as human beings, and forced us to have to bend our perception of reality, wrestle it to the ground and force it to succumb to truth.  These are the ones that kept me up last night.

Listen to a few words from Dr. Harry Edwards, then click on the links below to check out some videos.

There was John Carlos and Tommie Smith...

And there was also...  Peter Norman.

I'm having a hard time moving away from the story '68 Olympics this year.  It continues to resonate in my heart and travels deeply into my soul.  Maybe it's the recent publication of The John Carlos Story, his book written with Dave Zirin.  The great respect I have for all of these men.

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Maybe it's because it was also my time in history.  I was a sophomore in college at the time.

Maybe it's because it allows me some kind of molecular connection that I can maintain to G. Larry James, "the mighty burner" himself a '68 Olympian.  A man so dear, a  friend with a heart of pure gold, whose song was song all to softly, and who left us all too soon.

I remember the 40th Anniversary, the return to Mexico.

The celebrations, the honors, the "redemption".

But today I relearned a very important lesson.  We cannot be one story people. It destroys the human experience. It denies our growth. It makes us less than complete. The rest of that lesson: we are not the author's of the stories of others.  Our job is to listen, with an open and willing heart. To hear the truth from another perspective, to honor it as another's truth and allow it to come into our hearts. And it is an honor to hear the story from the author of the life. It is a responsibility to "pass it on" with the honesty and integrity with which it is told.

My last "again"... on the '68 Olympics is that there were 3 men who stood on that podium that day.  One who is too often forgotten, but one whose image though muted is as strong as any other.  There were three men.  John Carlos, Tommie Smith and Peter Norman;