“What the successful black person has received in this exchange, often in wild abundance, is money. Tiger Woods wasn’t attempting to be accurate when he called himself Cablinasian, because no one was calling him white. He wasn’t reasserting his mother’s Thai or his father’s Native American heritage because no one ever devalued it. He called himself Cablinasian only because the world was calling him black, just as the world called Madison Keys black, and she rejected that. The cultural pressure to agree to this bargain is so enormous that it resembles a rite of passage, a privilege. Or perhaps the bargain is even more sinister — not to transform the black into white but to ensure the black becomes antiblack. Black people can be claimed as success stories as long as they are willing to abandon the black people who need them politically and socially.”
– Howard Bryant writes for The Undefeated about why black athletes run from black identity.
“The 23-year-old Dubliner had never tasted the big time quite like this, up against Nick Willis, a two-time Olympic medallist, and Filip Ingebrigtsen, a world 1500m medallist. Heavyweights of the sport with hefty professional contracts to boot. They knew about hardship, but hadn’t spent the past three weeks sleeping on a couch. They knew about exhaustion, but not the kind you feel after a 10-hour night shift at McDonald’s. They’d taken some wrong turns, but had never been kicked off their college team for a late-night booze-up; or been so drunk that they couldn’t recall being beaten to a pulp on a street in Florida. Coscoran had done all of this, yet here he was, racing with the best, live on NBC to the nation. His had been a curious path to high-performance.”
– For the Irish Independent, Cathal Dennehy tells the story of Irish Olympic hopeful Andrew Coscoran.
“It may yet be enough. The word is City are stockpiling a cache of inflammatory evidence against other clubs, in anticipation of an epic fight. Perhaps, armed with a battery of lawyers and accountants, they will get their ban overturned. Perhaps, as some of the more bellicose voices insist, they will even destroy the apparatus of football as we know it, which definitely feels like a proportionate response to not being allowed to sign Stevan Jovetic.”
– Jonathan Liew of The Guardian assesses the two-year ban from European competitions handed down to Manchester City.
“Garrett graduated to the lofty role of Munster coach after a stellar career as a five-time Munster Senior Schools Cup-winning coach with CBC where he was now a well-respected member of the teaching staff. From there he did a brilliant job as senior coach with UCC before taking on the same role with the province. Munster’s defeat of Australia in Musgrave Park in 1992 proved his proudest moment. A picture of the Munster scrum demolishing the Wallaby pack en route to a penalty try hung proudly in his office at Musgrave Park. The Wallaby captain and hooker that day was none other than David Nucifora, now the IRFU’s influential director of rugby, in effect, Garrett’s boss. Suffice to say, Nucifora looks less than comfortable in that photo. Garrett and I often joked about it.”
– In the Irish Examiner, Donal Lenihan remembers his friend and former Munster Rugby CEO Garrett Fitzgerald, who passed away last week.
“He was summoned to the club and headed in and up the marble staircase that led to the oak panelled offices he always loved for the tradition they reflected. Graham was a club historian, a stickler for detail, a winner, a preacher of the requirement for “standards” and “class” that had been passed through the generations since the 1930s. Nobody wore the cannon on the blazer with a finer blend of authority and panache. At the same time Graham was one of the central figures in murky dealings that involved a Norwegian agent who had arranged the transfer of several players to Arsenal and had given the manager £425,000 in cash. As he would later explain in his book, The Glory And The Grief, accepting what he insisted was an ‘unsolicited gift’ was something Graham wished he had never done.”
– (€) Twenty-five years removed, The Athletic’s Amy Lawrence looks back on the sacking of George Graham as Arsenal manager.
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