A prison door slams shut. A casket lid falls.
Two sports stars lost.
Quarterback Michael Vick gets almost two years in prison, while fellow NFL star Sean Taylor is dead and gone forever.
The tragedy of both athletes is as sad as a teardrop splattering on the sidewalk.
But maybe the real crime is Vick and Taylor have become two more grim statistics in a lost generation of African-American males.
It’s an era of living dangerously for too many young black men in this country. If rich and famous jocks can be locked up or gunned down before age 30, what hope can an unemployed, uneducated teenager on the streets of Baltimore or Cleveland or Los Angeles have?
“You just feel blessed that the mistakes you made weren’t serious enough to have you in jail or dead,” 32-year-old Nuggets guard Allen Iverson said Monday, shaking his head, with eyes fixed unblinkingly on a sad situation he hates to see.
The leading cause of death in black males ages 18-24 is homicide. One in three black males can expect to spend time in prison over a course of a lifetime, predicts a study by the U.S. government.
The stats are frightening. And depressing.
“Pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American population in America. They’re all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two,” presidential candidate John Edwards warned earlier this year from the campaign trail.
Don’t shoot the messenger.
While there are more than 800,000 young black men enrolled in American colleges, the screaming headlines of Vick and Taylor only reinforce the bleak urban myth that you might as well live fast, before getting busted or capped.
Vick forfeited more than $100 million in salary and endorsement earnings at age 27, all because he operated a brutal dogfighting ring with guys described as longtime friends. “You need to apologize to the millions of young people who looked up to you,” U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson said, when sentencing the quarterback to 23 months behind bars.
Taylor, a Pro Bowl safety for the Washington Redskins, was killed last month at age 24. He was shot by an intruder in his home, during a break-in by perpetrators Taylor apparently knew. Pro football mourned, reeling from another death as disturbing as the bloody murder of Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams on New Year’s Day.
And the saddest news of all?
“It don’t shock you anymore,” Iverson said.
We bow heads in prayer at funerals and wave protest signs on courthouse steps, unable to connect the dots between Taylor and Vick, who might both be victims of the same self-fulfilling prophesy glorified by the delusional philosophies that embrace keeping it real and stop snitching.
“I can sympathize with him,” said Iverson, who relates to Vick sitting in a prison cell as quickly as a cold shiver travels the spine. “Because I’ve been that person. And I feel like, right now, I am that person, to a certain extent.”
Iverson feels blessed to have reached his 30th birthday. After an infamous bowling alley brawl as a teenager and brushes with the law that dogged him in the pros, all his lessons seemed unnecessarily hard. Little miracles can happen, though. Iverson is now a father who preaches being a role model must begin at home, and sounds positively old school when condemning the violence and misogyny of rap music that made him get up and dance a decade ago.
“Back when I was 22, even if I knew somebody got killed in a place a week ago, it wouldn’t stop me from going,” said Iverson, one of those NBA hoopsters who sold more sneakers the more he scared suburban America, which always had trouble getting past the tattoos to give his brutal honesty a listen.
“I’m just happy I got it before it was too late, before I was out of this league or dead or in jail.”
A cemetery or prison yard might be the last place to look for a civics lesson. Maybe there’s too much hurt in the death of Taylor or the incarceration of Vick to realize that young black men don’t need to view being born in America as a life sentence for pain.
“I would hate to feel there’s no hope for the younger generation,” Iverson said.
In sports. In life. A man is nothing without what gives him reason to believe in tomorrow.
Hope.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
