Playing Through the Pain

Some people still call it that. Some players call Boston much worse. And because the athletic community is very much a fraternity, those sentiments harden and are passed from one person to the next. The effect is rote learning, a unified belief that the city is racially intolerant.

“From the African-American athletes I speak to, it’s accurate to say that the perception is out there,” says Stephen A. Smith, ESPN’s volatile but well-sourced NBA analyst. “There are the Paul Pierces of the world, and they rave about Boston. But, from the outside looking in...it’s extremely prevalent and pretty much common that athletes think Boston is not that receptive to improving race relations. Understand something: When this city celebrates its tradition, what they’re saying—at least in the eyes of some in the African-American community—is ‘Those were the good old days. We liked the way it was.’ Well, black people didn’t. We had a problem with the way it was.”

And those problems eventually hurt Boston teams where it counted most—on the field. Early on, Yawkey and the Sox didn’t want anything to do with black players. But in time, the reverse became true and black athletes didn’t want anything to do with Boston. In his book, Bryant reports that there have been plenty of great black baseball players who either said they were reluctant to come to Boston or had language written into their contracts specifically preventing them from being traded here: superstars like Ken Griffey Jr., Albert Belle, David Justice, Tim Raines, Dave Winfield, and Gary Sheffield. Ultimately, it wasn’t some abstract curse that kept the Sox from winning a World Series for 86 years. It was their refusal, and then their inability, to put the best athletes in uniform.

It probably doesn’t help Boston’s reputation among black players that when they’re here, they are not often surrounded by people who look like them.

Boston’s suburbs are the country’s third whitest, which contributes to the fact that the metro area has about half the black population of cities of comparable size. As Guy Stuart, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, notes, Boston’s black population is also disproportionately foreign-born: Where the national average is about 7 percent, Stuart says, here it’s closer to 26 percent. “They’re more likely to be Haitian or Cape Verdean in Boston,” he explains.

The notion that Boston isn’t a “black city”—that it doesn’t have the same African-American presence as, say, Atlanta or DC—is something that I heard several times while reporting this story. Several people told me they’d conducted their own informal sociological observations while in Boston, and the results made them uncomfortable. “I’ve traveled all over the world, all over the country, and I never look around in most cities and see how many black people are in a place,” says Jerome Solomon, who covered the Pats for the Globe before moving to the Houston Chronicle. “But when I was in Boston, I was like, ‘Man, I’m always the only black guy here’.... The perception when it comes to athletes is that same thing.” To Solomon, that Boston is a racist city is less a matter of conjecture than of reality. “I’ll say this, if you talk to an athlete—and I talk to dozens every week—if you bring up Boston, racism is always the first thing that comes up, regardless of the sport they play.

Basketball and football especially.... With guys who have recently left, they’ll talk about it freely. Guys that I’ve talked to, they’ll say, ‘Oh, man, I thought you were in Boston.’ When I say I’m in Houston, the response is always ‘You had to get away from those racists in Boston, huh?’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, it was cold, too.’”

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