As soon as I read Tooley's comparison of Obama's election to the trade of Ewing to the Knicks, the first thing I thought was.. more like Benoit Benjamin.
So I looked up Benoit's career and found some very cool stuff on Wikipedia, which is the names of all of the first and second round draft picks going all the way back to 1947. It was in '57 that the first black face was picked, that of Elgin Baylor. And then in '60 we got Oscar Robertson (The Big O) and Lenny Wilkens. Earl 'The Pearl' Monroe came in 67, the same year as Phil Jackson, ten years after Baylor. Dr. J was drafted in '72.
The interesting thing is that in any year you look at the first round draft picks, only one or two names stand out. These guys are the best of the best and yet only a few of them become recognizable, fewer still become stars, and only handful ever make the Hall of Fame. Ewing, the famously gifted talent, never got a championship ring. He came ever so close year after year.
I was expecting today, an outside chance of a trifecta in my picks: Phillies, Hamilton and McCain. But sports ain't like politics - the political contest doesn't always go the strongest or fastest man, but to the man who thinks he can. But when it comes to breaking racial barriers, however, I think the parallels to sports are apt. Everybody is thrilled and proud (rightly or wrongly) that 'America' makes this great leap forward, but stars are not born, they are a long time in the making. There are at least 50 black Americans who might have been The One, and there are many more to come, now in places we don't suspect or know where to look. And the evolution of realized possibility in the Obama victory accellerates someone else's ambition.
There are no shortcuts of course. There's nothing particularly unusual about the trajectory from Harvard Law to the Illinois Statehouse to the US Senate that lands one into the White House. The paths are well worn, like the paths to the NBA. There are lots more people on that path than you might think. And so in all the celebration of Obama's success as a black man, let us keep in mind that this is the very beginning of that beginning. Like Elgin Baylor, Barack Obama is a pioneer. America's number one pick in a great tradition. But there are a lot more on that same path - so get used to it.
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