It only took two days and one upset in the 2021 NCAA men’s basketball tournament to remind the world that Black athletes, particularly college athletes, live with a bullseye on their backs for no other reason than they’re Black college athletes.
Cowards, some hiding behind nondescript avatars, took to Twitter this weekend to spew threats and racial slurs at Ohio State’s E.J. Liddell after the No. 2 Buckeyes were knocked out by 15-seed Oral Roberts in overtime. Liddell put them on blast for all to see, opening an ugly window into what athletes are routinely subjected to. It’s shocking, but unfortunately not an unfamiliar situation, if you’re Black, a woman, or generally anything besides a straight white man.
It was so familiar that a pair of players from rival Big Ten programs publicly sympathized with E.J. by noting that they’ve been subjected to similar treatment.
Others also came to his defense. This includes his coach, Chris Holtmann, and Ohio State’s athletic director, Gene Smith, who knows from his own experience how often being Black serves as the sole basis for public and private harassment. The university, in response to Smith’s tweeted “promise,’’ contacted the police about the posted threats to Liddell.
However, there was an extra level of insidiousness involved here, nestled between the typical bitter fan behavior and the gratuitous dose of unvarnished racism.
It’s a level that the college sports hierarchy needs to remain vigilant about.
The continued growth of legalized sports betting.
Sports Betting and Racism
Everything that pro athletes face from angry gambling losers, whether on a team bet or a fantasy pick, has either become a factor for college athletes or will become one eventually.
It’s inevitable. Targeting E.J. Liddell is your proof.
Singling him out for his missed free throw, in a game that was a collective fade with multiple flashpoints of failure in regulation and overtime, took too much effort for it to simply be about losing a game and finding the first available Black face for a scapegoat. Mind you, he scored a team-high 23 points and grabbed a game-high 14 rebounds.
No, it went beyond a busted bracket, or fandom gone overboard.
That’s money talking.
It’s something that’s flown under the radar so far, with so many other issues overwhelming sports and society in the past year. Those who follow the pros, especially football, and see attacks, slurs, and threats toward players who didn’t score enough points for someone’s fantasy team one week, recognize it.
Pros can literally afford to shrug it off, or clap back in their own way, as Todd Gurley once did.
But for various and obvious reasons, this is not a path college players can take. College players, especially Black players, are just as wide-open to this kind of abuse, but without any offsetting support. They’re unpaid labor, still shut out of name, image, and likeness (NIL) revenue, have zero leverage, virtually no power, and are essentially held hostage by a one-sided scholarship system.
Remember, in the same week as the attack on Liddell, fellow college players staged a hashtag protest labeled #NotNCAAProperty. In the aftermath, several of those gatekeepers snapped back by telling them to be more grateful and humble.
This is only a short step from believing the players are, in fact, the property of the sport, university, program, and fans. Actually, it’s barely a step at all. Raining racist fury on players who don’t perform to the level of people’s satisfaction is easy.
And it’s even easier when money is at stake from an ever-easier access to betting.
It’s hard to fathom how much easier it will become in the very near future. Currently, the number of states with legal sportsbooks is still small. The number of schools with ties to gambling entities is small as well, and the NCAA currently does not have partnerships, like the ones major sports leagues do, with the daily fantasy companies and the like.
What is certain is how easy it is right now to give individuals all the ammunition needed to crucify a player for costing them money. Every major college sports broadcast carrier, including ESPN, Fox, and CBS, has embedded gambling into their college programming. There are shows dedicated to betting action, hosts and anchors talking about the lines, and point-spreads and other information crawling under and adjacent to highlights and scores. ESPN’s and CBS Sports’ websites, of course, have held sponsored bracket contests for years, with the NCAA’s public site tracking the results.
The NCAA is sure to try to maintain a firewall between themselves and those companies, at least for appearances. All things considered, though, that’s the only area that hasn’t crossed over directly into their business model.
But what they need is a firewall against yet another avenue of targeted racist abuse against athletes they already demand enough from with too little given back in return.
If one hasn’t noticed throughout this Covid-ravaged season, protecting the human lives that make its wealth possible is not the strength of the college sports infrastructure. At the NCAA or elsewhere.
But E.J. Liddell’s life would be easier right now if it was.
