Friends, at this juncture we're going to take Time Out for a moment to discuss a subject many may find uncomfortable. Recently some cellphone video from a basketball game McCaskey played within our league in an opposing gym surfaced on social media. In the footage one of our players is jogging to the bench after having been substituted for, as he is leaving the court a male voice could be heard yelling "ah, n*gg*r" (vowels purposely deleted but we all know what the word is). When the video went viral the hosting school investigated and concluded that there was no racial slur involved, one of the members of the school's student section took responsibility and claimed he was yelling "Thon Maker", the name of a professional player our man allegedly resembles. This explanation is patently ridiculous because (a) the video was shot from high in the bleachers at midcourt on the side of the floor where the benches are located and the student section is on the other side of the court at a far end of the gym, (b) the voice on the video was clearly coming from a location close to where the video was taken and (c) what this person yelled was certainly not "Thon Maker" unless his pronunciation of the letters M and K sounds remarkably like N and G. This is unfortunately not an isolated incident, it's nothing new and it's been going on for fifty years. When the league we play in was formed in 1972 it was basically a reorganization of the existing Lancaster County League with the addition of five schools from Lebanon County plus McCaskey joining from the (at that time) Central Penn League. From the beginning there was opposition to JPM being a part of the new league, several of the other schools felt we belonged in with Reading, Harrisburg, York and the other larger districts we played against in the CPL. They felt the urban inner-city minority-oriented school district had no business playing the smaller suburban otherwise-oriented districts. In that first year we played games in neighboring districts where we were viscerally hated because we were from The City and our roster was predominately young men of color. One game in particular featured the home team's student section throwing frankfurters at one of our guys during pregame introductions, their way of saying he was a "hot dog" (This is a true story, friends. I was there, I witnessed it). If a McCaskey crowd ever did an opposing player like that there would be more hell over it than you could imagine. When the explanation for this recent incident went public Coach Ramos and several of our players posted a video on social media calling for reform, fairness, discipline and equality. As a graduate of McCaskey (1974) and a thirty-four-year associate of our school's basketball program I've never been prouder of a group of young men. The opinions in this post are strictly my own, there are those who will agree and those who may not. What do YOU think? Thanks for reading.
