#TURMOIL THE GAME UN FREE#

I tried to give them some kind of an example. I was talking to little black kids who are going to suffer because they don't have any examples to model themselves on. That was my summer job. I thought then, and I think now, that that job was a lot more important than winning a gold medal in the Olympics. Instead of being in Mexico City that summer, I was in Harlem, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brownsville, in the East Bronx, in all the slums of New York City, talking to kids for Operation Sports Rescue, telling them to stay in school and to make men out of themselves. How many times can you win the same games?Īs it turned out, while the other cats were getting themselves together to form an Olympic basketball team, I went back to the playgrounds of New York City and did the same thing I had done the year before, with the same people: Emmette Bryant and Freddie Crawford. My going there would only have been redundant. In the second place, the United States was not going to lose the Olympic basketball gold medal, and we all knew it. I was right on schedule at UCLA, maintaining a B-minus average, and going to the Olympics would have cost me at least a quarter, and maybe two, and I'd have had to postpone my graduation. I found it hard to understand why I should mess up my school year and lose my whole summer for the purpose of going all the way to Mexico City to win a gold medal for the United States in a basketball tournament. So this entered into my Olympic thinking. I think in most ways it is the greatest country in the world.

#TURMOIL THE GAME UN FREE#

Very few blacks are patriotic we're too busy just keeping the food on the table to go around hollering about the land of the free and the home of the brave. When they couldn't pin me down to anything positive, because there really wasn't anything positive to say, they started getting annoyed and nasty and acted as though I was lying to them.ĭoes it shock you to hear that I am not a very patriotic person? Well, I'm not. And they were being very self-righteous about it, very pompous. What they wanted was some kind of story they could pin my name on. They weren't interested in relieving my suffering. Why put it all on me, a 20-year-old basketball player? Of course, they were putting it on me because they wanted to exploit my name. If they had cared they'd have been out talking to the presidents of AT&T, Ford, General Motors, the representatives of the power structure. These men in front of me didn't care about racial problems. I was annoyed. I sensed the ridiculous nature of all this questioning. I said, 'Look, man, why do you ask me these questions? Why don't you ask a sociologist? I'm not a sociologist or an anthropologist or a politician. They kicked this around for about five minutes, and then they turned to another subject. What would I, Lew Alcindor, do to solve the racial problem in the United States? I tried to give a serious explanation, but there was so much interrupting and so much derision and negativism that I finally blew my cool.

Turmoil the game un