Years ago, I remember reading and being fascinated by a story about Tommie Smith and John Carlos in Sports Illustrated. Part of this stemmed from a fascination with anything and everything related to track and field (that’s right ladies, I was just that cool). But, in retrospect, there was something else that drove this interest – a feeling of missing out on something important.
By the time I arrived on the scene in the eighties in my lily-white suburb of Denver, the generational, sexual and racial upheaval of the sixties seemed more foreign than Mypos, that country Balki came from on Perfect Strangers. I just couldn’t relate to it, but a feeling that I had missed out on something always bothered me. Would my generation ever participate in something so important – something that could truly change our country? In twenty years would other kids read about anything that my friends and I had done or accomplished? It sure didn’t seem like it.
Now, with a little time to look back I am starting to realize that we may not have done anything on the level with what was accomplished by previous generations, but we did sit right on the edge of a huge cultural power shift, just none of us realized it at the time.
This past weekend ESPN’s 30 for 30 series broadcast The U. The story of the Miami Hurricanes rise to prominence and on-going dominance of college football in the 1980’s. It wasn’t that the Canes became the team of that decade that made them noteworthy but how they won those games.
The Canes didn’t just win, they won with a level of swagger or confidence or arrogance and fun that college football had never seen. They didn’t just win games; they danced, strutted and talked the entire game. They didn’t just beat you; they taunted you while doing it.
While the movie was entertaining, it was of course a little painful for a Nole to watch. The director Billy Corben, was very open that he had been a Cane fan forever so while he didn’t shy away from some of the negative aspects of the Canes run (illegal payments by Luther Campbell, arrests, etc) he also didn’t discuss the games that didn’t fit his storyline – for example the 1989 loss at FSU by the Canes (the game that first made me think of FSU as a possible college destination and to this day the loudest game I have ever watched on TV) skipping right to the Canes national title later that season or the 1992 Sugar Bowl when the Canes appeared to be on the verge of continuing their domination before a big underdog Alabama team shocked them.
Immediately after the show, I was flipping around the dial and ran into a documentary about NWA. It seemed fitting to follow the football team that brought the ghetto mentality into the US conscious, with the rap group that did the same. NWA didn’t shy away from the reality of growing up in Compton and didn’t sugar coat their message for a largely white music buying public.
After nearly two decades of rappers using sexually explicit or violent lyrics to get their message out, it is easy to forget that at the time what NWA was doing was beyond controversial – it was obscene.
It isn’t a coincidence that both the Canes and NWA arrived at the same time. Some combination of wider spread media (the rise of MTV and ESPN) and the burgeoning fruits of the racial equality fight of the previous 30 years may not have been able to improve the lives of many still struggling in the ghettos of LA or Miami but it did start to open that culture to the rest of the country.
Before the Canes and NWA, the African-American athletes and musicians that had the greatest nationwide acceptance were those that sought to fit in with white culture rather than bringing their own culture – for example: Whitney Houston in her bubble-gum pop phase, Michael Jackson literally whitening himself or O.J. Simpson’s classic turn as Nordberg in The Naked Gun.
You think it’s a coincidence that of the two best adjusted of the above list one would become addicted to crack and the other accused of pedophilia? Pretending to be someone you are not takes its toll.
In the late 80’s for the first time some shmucky 7th grader in Littleton, Colorado could watch NWA on Yo MTV Raps each afternoon and then watch the Canes strut their way up and down the field on Saturday and realize that he was in fact a shmucky 7th grader. While at the time it didn’t seem like a big deal (except to those conservatives that were frightened by yet another encroachment on their Cleaver-esque ideal), in hindsight it is easy to see both the Canes and NWA as the first repudiation of the Reagan era 1980’s. An entire generation was growing up not just learning from their friends and family but also from glimpses at life from all across the country.
I may have still been that shmucky 7th grader living in Littleton, but for the first time I was exposed to the lives and mentality of people living in Compton or Overtown. This wasn’t some abstract story on 60 Minutes or the Nightly News, these were the people we listened to and cheered on. Ok, cheered against but the lessons were still learned.
As we now know the Canes and NWA were just the start. Soon every team strutted and danced on the football field – even old school programs like Nebraska and Michigan. UNLV and the Fab Five brought swagger to college basketball. Dr. Dre moved on from NWA to a solo career and introduced the world to Snoop Dogg and Tupac.
Whether you like it or not (and I am guessing Sarah Palin and I disagree on this one) both the Canes and NWA have shaped the country we live in today. Many of the things we take for granted in our daily lives would have been unimaginable in the mid-80s. Two and a Half Men is the highest rated comedy on network TV, yet there are more sexual innuendoes in an average episode than half of the songs that nearly got censored in 1989.
More than ever before we recognize and appreciate that not everyone in America has the same experience or comes from the same culture. We are no longer a ‘one-sized fits all culture’. Not only have we integrated and adopted Black culture but also Hispanic, Asian and even homosexual culture into our lives.
Bet the boys from NWA never saw that last one coming.
I don’t think anyone will argue that those of us that came of age in the late 80s and early 90s have had quite the impact of the revolutionaries in the sixties.
But just maybe we were doing a little more than we even realized. I can’t be the only one that can draw a line (no matter how circuitous and faint) from Easy-E and Michael Irvin to a President named Barack Obama.
