For some who entered their teenage years in the nineties, watching SportsCenter was a form of devotion. I used to wake up at 6 AM to watch the early airing so I would still have time to shower eat breakfast and get ready for school. That SportsCenter post-theme song saxophone vamp announced morning for me. More likely than not, I'd already seen most of the highlights from the late edition the night before, but that didn't matter. You watched SportsCenter for the verbal brio of the hosts--how they described what you already knew. Olbermann. Patrick. Kilborn.

Stuart Scott was different because he was down. It was rare that you saw a "down-ass" African-American man at the SportsCenter host table. By down, I mean Scott was as composed and smooth as his counterparts, but he spoke the language of the subjects, the predominantly African-American athletes. His diglossia transitioned between "standard" and "black" English in a way that flouted the idea that you couldn't go to the top without scorning the language you learned and spoke when you were at the "black" bottom (the "bottom" as an equally relevant cultural realm and not a terminal point on a hierarchy). He conducted energetic, sharp, and casually intelligent interviews that managed to convince you that he and his subjects were "homies" who shared a mutual respect.

I lost my grandmother to cancer. It took her so fast it felt like a blur. Maybe being out of the country this fall has enhanced this feeling, but, to me, it seems like it was just yesterday that he announced he was battling cancer. In reality, it has been about a year, and--sadly--so go these things.

In my twenties, I attempted to write a book of hip-hop-inspired poems--"T.H.U.G.: A Truncated History of Urban Griots." I lost faith in the project and abandoned it. Since, some of the poems have popped up here and there. One of the poems that never surfaced was "Don't Hate the Player"--not quite a tribute, but definitely a gesture to Stuart Scott. It wasn't one of the better poems, but I will post it here in memory of a man who brought a lot of wonder to my young sports fanship.

DON'T HATE THE PLAYER

Scott's never ending attempt to bring a hip-hop flavor (or should I say "flava") to ESPN has done nothing but turn off countless viewers. We don't care if you're African-American. So are many other reporters and they don't make idiots out of themselves and shove their "blackness" down our throats. We also don't care if Michael Jordan is one of your homies.
~Random Cyber-Hater, http://www.carolinasucks.com/stuartscottsucks.htm


When a fifteen foot putt echoes
first Samuel chapter 16 verse 12,

is it hip-hop at play? The lord
said you got to rise up. 

Soul-man commentary—sports
highlights seasoned with neck bones, 

street salts and Sunday-morning
inflection. Every game and ball

demands its heralds. Men with air
in their soles leap in ways that render

gravity insecure--later hoping to earn
the staple stamp of Booya

on the six o’clock Sports Center.
Got to do better than that player.

Swish five trifectas? You might
garner an it’s getting hot in herre.

Where Dan Patrick will easily give
an en fuego (gringo accent and all)

Stuart Scott will make you work--
for he knows a black star

must shine that much harder
to avoid being charted as a hole.

One of D.C.'s (and thus the nation's) literary gems is Beltway Poetry Quarterly, founded and still edited by Kim Roberts. For the new year, Beltway has released a rich and diverse issue dedicated solely to the sonnet, co-edited by Michael Gushue. I was fortunate enough to be featured in the issue, but let me first note some of the other poems I think are worth reading first. There is "Brown Sonnet" by Tony Medina, "Scars of Last Year's Leaves" by Myra Sklarew, and "A Blizzard Blues" by Melanie Henderson.

As for my piece, "Failed Sonnet After the Verdict," I appreciate the piece being highlighted in the issue's introduction, but I have some concern about how it was characterized. 

Have you ever read Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia? As an African-American graduate of Mr. Jefferson's university--U.Va.--the text has always been of particular interest to me. It holds some "interesting" insights into Jefferson's mind, though nothing shocking when situated in historical context:

A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.[1]

Why am I bringing this up now? Well Michael Gushue, who I respect and am sure meant no harm by it, suggests in his introduction  that my poem represents "anger." And I just want to remind people that you have to be mindful about situating the emotional responses of "black" people on a binary spectrum of either rage or ecstasy. There is a lamentable history in America of denying "black" people their emotional complexity. There is, I'll say as the author, no anger in the poem. Sadness, maybe, but not an acute sadness about Trayvon Martin; more so a sadness about the fact that there are people who need dead "black" bodies to feel safe in America--sadness for what the insides of their minds and hearts must look like.

This isn't beef at all, nor an attempt to single out Michael, just a note--an amicable one--about being mindful about how to characterize our (negroes) emotional reactions to what we have been facing in recent times.