Cam Newton has one of the greatest football stories in recent memory. After winning a state championship in high school, he was left for dead in Florida behind Tim Tebow. This was before he transferred to Auburn as a senior and earned a Heisman Trophy and a National Championship. He then went No. 1 overall to the Carolina Panthers, won Offensive Rookie of the Year, then went 15-1 on his way to an MVP and a Super Bowl appearance in 2015.
Advertisement
Newton is one of many success stories of young black men in pro sports, especially the NFL and the NBA. However, there are a very finite number of spots in both leagues. It is all the more limited for footballers since there are no other major pro leagues for the game anywhere in the world, unlike for hoopers.
On his Funky Friday podcast, Newton recently had Nation of Islam student minister Nuri Muhammad, who works out of Muhammad Mosque No. 74 in Indianapolis. Muhammad spoke about the limited opportunities for youngsters looking for a career as an athlete.
Muhammad used the NBA’s D-League and referred to a speech by Magic Johnson to illustrate how the system in place is not built for these young black athletes to have success in anything but athletics.
“Remember the D-League? They call it the G-League now, for the NBA? That developmental league they were bringing the young soldiers through to get them prepared for the NBA. The first year or second year, Magic Johnson was their speaker. Listen to what he said: he said, ‘I wanna teach you brothers how to take the brain you built in basketball and use it for business’. I don’t think he’s been invited back, but he should be there every time,” said Muhammad.
He then argued that one of the greatest “impediments” to the success of Black Americans is the fact that athletics are more celebrated than academics in Black culture. He also noted a difference in the motivation behind putting young black and young white people into sports.
According to Muhammad, white people put their kids into sports to extract the principles from it, while Black people put their kids in sports in the hopes that they will become a pro athlete. When young white athletes fail to make it in the pros, they take the sacrifice, the discipline, and the work ethic they learned to another profession.
Young Black athletes “have their minds wrapped up 100 percent,” and if they don’t make it, “now you’ve got a brother with a broken spirit.”
“Right now, brother Cam, there’s 500,000 black boys playing high school basketball. Only 17,000 of them will actually make it to college to play basketball. And out of them 17,000, only 44 of them will make it to the NBA. And out of the 44 that make it to the NBA, only seven of them will get a starting position,” elaborated Muhammad.
“And the average career of the one who did get a starting position is only 5-7 years. So there’s a half a million Black boys competing for seven full-time jobs that ain’t gonna last for seven years. That’s backwards,” he reiterated.
Muhammad noted that a large factor in this dichotomy is the way the school system is “failing” young Black children. He said that children are generally only learning about white greatness. That’s an issue, because to Muhammad and many others, the most powerful thing a child should see is someone who looks similar to them achieve something great.
Muhammad is an author as well as a NOI student minister. He has written seven books. Four of them, including Before You Say I Do, are Amazon Books bestsellers.
He has also appeared on many shows to share his views on life and Black excellence. These include The Breakfast Club, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Vlad TV, Ebro in the Morning on Hot 97, and more.
