Thoughts and then some...

It is a given that readers - professional reviewers or consumers - will never interpret the book you wrote the way you envisioned it. Books have three stages of ownership. First, they belong to you, then the publisher, and then the world. The Heritage stopped belonging to me back in January, when the surrender occurred, deadline hit, and the publisher said "NO MORE CHANGES." It will belong to the world a month from tomorrow and already the focus on this book is leaning heavily toward being perceived as a meditation solely on "athlete activism."

What I envisioned, however, was a collision of equally powerful forces: the post-9/11 American sports industry colliding with the socially revived, post-Ferguson black athlete. The effect of ignoring the effect of 9/11 on the fans and the industry will be a distortion with a dual effect: first, we will frame the black activism and resistance incorrectly as the sole perpetrators of the infusion of politics in sports, and secondly, we will absolve the sports culture of its culpability in creating and profiting from the post-9/11 environment of pageantry that wasn't supposed to be complicated - but in its own way is as politically divisive as kneeling players. We will dismiss the attitudes and energy toward America that 9/11 produced and have not gone away. - HB