Legendary Jim Brown To Current Players: Stop Dancing In The End Zone

Saw this in this morning's paper and wondered if there were any thoughts out there considering some of the nuttiness (the nicest word I can find for some of it) done by players in the end zone after they score a touchdown.

From AP:

"...Brown said that if today's black football players understood history better, they wouldn't be doing any dancing in the end zone.

Brown was in Kansas City this week for a roundtable discussion at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and for a townhall discussion about social and economic issues. And he reiterated why he is opposed to the celebratory end zone dances.

'If today's players understood the struggle that went on for African-Americans to be considered first-class citizens,' Brown said, 'and to have their citizenship recognized and the fight they had just to get a job...If (today's players) understood the fight against stereotype.

"A lot of the old movies portrayed the style of the black prose and the dialect...this was humiliation and degredation. Then you get the modern athlete, who has benefited from that struggle (to change the stereotype), and they score a touchdown and they go do a buck dance in the end zone.'"

Not that it'll matter what Brown says....We've seen plenty of celebratory stupidity recently (and it really needs watering down, at best, in my opinion). But I am just wondering what my fellow sportswriters thought of Brown's comments.

 

bojangling for the man [/scoop]

 

Hey, keep me out of this!

And isn't ``bojangling'' Whitlock's word?

 

Yes. He accused Scoop of bojangling, in fact.

Barry Sanders had it right: Act like you've been there.

 

Some of this is grouchy-old-man stuff, John McCain shaking his fist and screaming, "you kids stay off of my lawn," but Brown has a point.

But it shouldn't be up to (mostly-white-old-man) rulesmakers to decide that any celebration whatsoever is disgraceful and must be stamped out.

 

Brown has a point. Kids won't listen to a word he says. To them he's nobody in today's world.

 

Anybody remember Richard Pryor's routine about Jim Brown?

 

I don't believe scoring a touchdown should be any more cause for celebration than is a home run or a goal in hockey. It is what it is. If it wins a game or a playoff series then, by all means, whoop it up. Otherwise, do the hug thing and then get the fuck off the field/ice.

 

"Rubber-brick thrown' mother-fucker."

 

It is, but I didn't want to make it look like I was dogging Whitlock, when i wasn't

 

Brown made a similar point in a GQ story a couple of years ago. It obviously had no impact.

But he's right. Seems to me there's a subtle racism in thinking the shuffling and shaking are inevitable: "Them peoples just gots to <i>dance</i>, they can't he'p theyself."

 

Current players to legendary Jim Brown: Stop beating women.