Another unique element of the event is that it happens simultaneously in three cities, led by satellite HBCU Alumni Alliance groups in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington. Living up to their motto of “Run for you. Run for them. Run for us!” each branch combines the funds from registration fees, donations and sponsorships to fund scholarships for local HBCU students.

HBCU Alumni Alliance CEO Dan Ford, an alum of North Carolina A&T State University, created the event in Atlanta in 2007 after Marck Dorvil, a fellow alliance member, expressed disappointment that he hadn’t seen many Black people participate in the city’s flagship running event, the Peachtree Road Race.

“He came to us asking how we can get more people of color involved in these organized runs,” Ford said, since the assumption then was that Black people don’t run. “And we said, ‘Well, what if we did our own organized run?’ But you gotta think, 17 years ago, asking people of color to get up on a Saturday morning to go out to a park and run, and pay for it, was unheard of. People said it was the dumbest idea they ever heard.”

There have been essays, books, studies, TV series, podcasts and other discussions about how Black people weren’t interested in running. Among the reasons for the lack of interest are a fear of “running while Black,” and thus being exposed to racial harassment and violence, the cost of entering races and the safety and walkability of Black neighborhoods. Those barriers mean Black people don’t see one another running, giving them less motivation to try it. Add this to the belief that running doesn’t hold the same cultural cachet as basketball or football, and the result is many African Americans sitting on the sideline and missing out on many of the reported mental and physical benefits of running.

In creating the run/walk, the HBCU Alliance wanted to change these attitudes, but they almost proved their naysayers right. According to Ford, the inaugural race in 2007 at Grant Park in Southeast Atlanta drew only 250 participants. For many, 250 Black people gathered at the park is a certified function. However, that number looks like a failure considering Atlanta is home to four HBCUs, with extended family via alums and Black Greek-letter organizations. The alliance increased its promotion, and the following years saw incremental improvements as word spread. Local running clubs such as Pretty Girls Run and Black Men Run started bringing their crews, but there were still small numbers of runners.

Not yet able to hire professional race event consultants, volunteer organizers struggled with providing basics such as T-shirts, bibs and even proof of registration. However, people kept paying to sign up, eventually generating enough income to pay professional organizers. Ford and his staff introduced the Alumni Row tailgate experience, where schools set up their own tents, and the ones who raised the most money received preferred placement.

In the early 2010s, Ford added a 10K race to attract more serious runners. These decisions initially paid off as attendance increased to 2,500, forcing the race to switch locations to the larger Piedmont Park in the densely populated Midtown area. The move created higher expenses because there were more streets to cross, resulting in higher costs for permits and police officers. As a result, Ford kept the course in the park, a decision he said was a disaster. One year, he even tried to appease runners who complained about running in the morning heat and held the event at night, which was another mistake. In 2015, seeing the numbers declining, Ford decided to cut the 10K, added vendors to the tailgate and shifted the focus to attracting more walkers. Registration has increased every year since.

“You already know how we bring the smoke when things don’t go right, and people had every right to be upset,” said Ford, noting the only years they saw less participation was in 2020 and 2021, when they switched to a virtual option because of the coronavirus pandemic. “Some of our processes were not great experiences, but they stuck with us.”

“One of my first races that I ever did was the HBCU 5K when I first started running,” said Tes Sobomehin Marshall, a respected Atlanta race director and founder of The Race, the nation’s largest Black-owned and operated half-marathon. She has participated in the HBCU 5K as a runner, volunteer and vendor. “It’s literally like the Black runner homecoming in Atlanta.”

Even as the Atlanta HBCU Alumni Alliance was still figuring things out, a demand grew for similar experiences in cities with a high HBCU graduate presence. The first group to create a franchise race was the DC Metro HBCU Alumni Alliance in 2013. Their race was held on the campus of Howard University and stayed there until 2019, moving to the Black-owned St. James Sports Complex in Springfield, Virginia, after a change in leadership. Hearing the negative feedback about the 14-mile drive, they moved the race back to Washington this year and will start at MLB’s Nationals Park. The Philadelphia HBCU Alumni Alliance was created in 2020, and it hosted its first race virtually in 2021. The group currently holds its race across the Delaware River at Cooper River Park in Pennsauken, New Jersey.

“Doing all of the races on the same day is us working together and amplifying it because we recognize that the bigger the stone you throw into the pond, the bigger ripples you make,” Ford said.

The event also serves as a way to bring together even more alums from surrounding areas.

“We’ve got three different Hampton University alumni chapters in our consortium from Virgina, Maryland and D.C.,” DC Metro HBCU Alumni Association President Tanye Coleman said. “But in our alumni row, we only have one tent for Hampton University so they’re not competing with each other. They’re all getting together.”

One of the race’s primary goals is simply to get more Black people active. However, the Atlanta course is certified by the USA Track & Field governing body, so the race still attracts competitive runners. The times are official and can be used to qualify for other races such as the Peachtree Road Race on July Fourth, and many runners use the Atlanta HBCU 5K to tune up for it. This includes non-Black runners who show up for an easy win to pad their stats.

“They were like, oh, that’s a certified race so I’m gonna come out here and just bring the smoke,” said Ford, who says the event is open to all, including Black people who didn’t attend HBCUs. “There were years when I wondered what’s happening right now. We’re giving out medals and ain’t nobody looking like us. But over a period of time, our gazelles started coming out.”

“There’s competition out there with some very good runners,” said Delaware State University alum Shannon Booker, who leads Atlanta running group Movers & Pacers. Booker moved to Atlanta in 2017 and said running in the race has helped him connect with other HBCU alums and Black people in the city. He’s been a top finisher each year he’s participated and won the race in 2022. “For me, it’s just a good time because, unfortunately in a lot of the races I enter, I don’t see many of us, let alone at the front of the pack.”

“I keep telling people, hey, anyone can participate, not just your alums,” said Philadelphia HBCU Alliance president Gregory T. Wilson. “Everybody’s money is green when it comes to supporting the mission.”

Supporting the mission is also a competition. When people sign up for the race, they can register as a member of one of their local alumni associations. As the totals increase, they can also see which schools are raising the most scholarship money, motivating them to spread the word and get more people registered on their behalf. People who don’t plan on participating physically to “exercise their wallet” and donate separately. HBCU Alliance members also use professional connections to get corporate sponsors to support the cause. The results are that some HBCU students get a few hundred dollars to buy books, others receive larger grants from corporate sponsors, and the alumni associations receive a cut of the money they raised on their own, which can be used at their discretion.

“We’re not taking any proxies,” Ford said. “You have to be here, because we want them to experience like this is your HBCU family. So you can’t send your auntie to come get your check.”

“I’ve used that money to help me buy books and a laptop, which I really needed coming into college because the one I already had was definitely rundown,” said Howard University student Sydney Wynn, who has won the DC Metro Alliance scholarship twice. “People are always looking for big scholarships that will give you complete full rides, but people don’t realize that applying for scholarships like this really adds up.”

HBCU alums donating and registering also helps since historically Black universities have been underfunded for decades. Since 1987, HBCUs have been underfunded by the government by at least $12 billion compared to predominantly white institutions. A 2023 study by research groups Candid and ABFE found that large U.S. foundations decreased their HBCU funding by 30% between 2002 and 2019. However, President Joe Biden announced that his administration has invested $16 billion in HBCUs over the last three years.

“You never know politically what type of funding will be available,” Wilson warned, emphasizing that it’s still up to HBCU alums and alliances like this one to do their part. “You’ve heard horrific stories on how many institutions have been shortchanged by the state from getting their federal allotted dollars. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars that schools were supposed to get, but they didn’t.”

While HBCUs may still be miles behind predominantly white universities in funding, efforts like the HBCU 5K Run/Walk are helping close the gap.

The talk reignited over the weekend when Chicago Sky rookie forward Angel Reese was assessed a flagrant foul 1 against Clark, a guard for the Indiana Fever, while trying to block her shot. Once again, the chatter got ugly, with many relying on deeply ingrained stereotypes around race, gender, and sexuality. Earlier this month, conservative sports pundit Clay Travis claimed the Fever star was a victim of discrimination against “white heterosexual women in a Black lesbian league” after Clark received a flagrant foul 1 from Sky guard Chennedy Carter.

With that statement, Travis said the quiet part out loud. Pitting Clark, a white, heterosexual woman who fits into conventionally approved, Eurocentric standards of womanhood, against the rest of the league, which is predominantly Black and perceived as largely queer or gender non-conforming, reinforces long-standing tropes of the queer villain.

Ahead of the most recent matchup between the Fever and the Sky, reporters asked Clark about “the chatter” on social media and how some have used her name to attack other players in the league. Clark initially (and repeatedly) redirected the conversation back to basketball without immediately condemning any of the harassment other players were receiving. The Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington spoke about Clark’s comments on X: “How one can not be bothered by their name being used to justify racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia & the intersectionalities of them all is nuts,” she wrote. “We all see the s—. We all have a platform … Silence is a luxury.” In response, The Athletic staff writer James Boyd asked Clark directly about her name being weaponized and how she feels about it. “It’s disappointing,” Clark said. “The women in our league deserve the same amount of respect, so people should not be using my name to push those agendas.”

In many ways, however, the damage has already been done. The real “Caitlin Clark effect” seems to be a bandwagon of new WNBA fans and media members reinforcing some of the most toxic societal ideas about good and bad, right and wrong, hero and villain. They’re also reinforcing long-held tropes about what kinds of women are deserving of protection. But this is also par for the course regarding the WNBA — and women’s sports in general.

Clark is the kind of athlete women’s sports have historically fought to protect. In the WNBA, this goes back to the beginning of the league, where players given the “Great White Hope” treatment, such as former Seattle Storm guard Sue Bird and New York Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu, were tasked with “saving” the fledgling league. If these white, cis, and (in Bird’s case, perceived) straight athletes were here to save the league, it begs the question of who they were saving it from. The answer, one can deduce, is all the other athletes in the W, many of whom were Black, masculine or gender non-conforming, and queer.

In the Victorian era, the argument against women’s sports was essentially paternalistic — women, and mainly upper-class white women, needed to be “protected” from damaging their bodies through athletic endeavors because men feared it would damage their reproductive potential. There was worry that sports would make women too masculine, a fear that was rooted in anti-gay beliefs.

When sports were slowly opened to women, events such as golf or tennis were seen as acceptable — sports that could be played while wearing long skirts and were perceived as more feminine. Eventually, swimming fit into that category as well. In track and field, women were once only allowed to run short distances because it was believed that they were too weak to handle longer races. In basketball, women played half-court 6-on-6 basketball until shockingly recently because full-court was considered too strenuous for women’s bodies. While the Office of Civil Rights began to consider banning 6-on-6 high school girls’ basketball as early as 1958, it would take 37 years for the sport to be completely erased from schools. In Iowa, where Clark is from, half-court basketball wasn’t abolished until 1993, and it was the second-to-last state to do so (Oklahoma was the last, phasing it out in 1995).

Even sex-testing and trans-exclusionary policies in sports were designed to ostensibly protect white cis women from the perceived dominance of athletes who don’t conform to traditional ideas of femininity, many of whom are Black and/or transgender. Much of the legislation to prevent trans women from playing women’s sports uses rhetoric about “protecting” or “saving” girls and women, painting transgender women as a threat. Portraying Clark as the victim in her interactions with fellow players is an extension of this idea that a certain kind of woman should be safe to play and excel in women’s sports. It not only relies on the concept of white female victimhood but also of predatory lesbians.

Coverage of the incident between Clark and Carter (and the most recent dustup with Clark and Reese) primarily took two tracks: The first claimed Carter was overly aggressive and targeted Clark. The editorial board of the Chicago Tribune went so far as to call the play “assault,” trafficking in dangerous rhetoric seeking to criminalize a Black woman for a play against a white woman in a pro basketball game. Similarly, after Reese’s foul on Clark, some, like former NFL quarterback Matt Leinart, claimed Reese should be suspended because her play is “not good for the game.”

The other argument being made is that Clark’s teammates should better protect her on the court as if Clark, an adult woman playing pro basketball, needs someone to protect her from the league’s players. Both these arguments place Clark in the role of victim and the rest of the league in the role of villain. And there are real repercussions — a fan confronted Sky players, including Carter and Reese, outside their hotel in Washington.

This narrative continued following the Fever’s game against the Connecticut Sun on June 10, with coverage focusing almost exclusively on Sun forward Alyssa Thomas and Carrington — two openly gay Black players — whose on-court behavior was framed as being overly aggressive or targeting Clark rather than hard-nosed defense and heated competition. Following the blowback to Carrington mocking Clark for flopping, she took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to defend herself: “Why yall so mad at me & bein mean!?” she wrote. “I jus be hoopin & havin fun.”

Clark is not the first straight, cis, white player tasked with bringing a “mainstream” audience to the WNBA. The league has always struggled to market itself and its players, fearing that appearing too Black or too gay would alienate “mainstream” audiences and drive the potential of straight, male fans away — something women’s leagues have wrongly assumed they need to succeed. In 2002, Mary G. McDonald described the WNBA’s idealized image as that of the “good white girl,” noting that “constant emphasis on the players’ moral attributes … helps to distance the league from projections of alleged deviance imagined to be embodied by ‘fatal women’ — that is, bodies marked as black and lesbian.”

In 2002, Bird was placed in the position of bringing in viewers as the pretty white girl (she did not come out publicly until 2017, largely because she felt pressured into maintaining the public image the league wanted from her, she said recently). A 2002 article in the Hartford Courant called Bird “articulate with fresh-faced, girl-next-door appeal.” Constance Schwartz, the then-vice president of strategic marketing with The Firm, said Bird was “a beautiful person, which definitely helps.” Sports Illustrated described her as “pretty, quick-witted and not too imposing at 5’9,” noting that “she fits in anywhere” (all of this is, of course, code for “white”).

Ionescu left college in 2020 as the first pick in the WNBA draft and with a lot of hype, including an ESPN cover. Research by Risa F. Isard and Dr. E. Nicole Melton found that Ionescu, a white woman who played in just three games before a season-ending injury, received twice as much coverage as A’ja Wilson, a Black woman who was the 2020 WNBA MVP. Ionescu has a shoe with Nike, has been on the cover of NBA 2K, and was called “basketball’s golden girl” ahead of her WNBA debut.

When Bird entered the league in 2002, she was called “a marketer’s dream,” and several columns were dedicated to the number of sponsorships she would receive, a glaring disparity in a predominantly Black league that hasn’t been overcome to this day. Even before her first season began, Clark had record-breaking endorsements, including an eight-figure deal with Nike.

“In [women’s basketball] you gottah be the best player, best looking, most marketable, most IG followers, just to sit at the endorsement table,” New York Liberty forward Jonquel Jones said on X in 2022. “Not to mention me being a black lesbian woman. Lord the seats disappearing from the table as I speak,” she added.

Isard and Melton’s research found that Black athletes’ gender presentation greatly factored into how much media attention they received. White athletes who presented in more masculine ways received more than five times the number of mentions as Black players who had masculine-of-center presentations (212 to 41, respectively).

“There is a privilege that [white players] have inherently, and the privilege of appearing feminine,” Los Angeles Sparks rookie forward Cameron Brink recently told UPROXX. “Some of my teammates are more masculine. Some of my teammates go by they/them pronouns. I want to bring more acceptance to that and not just have people support us because of the way that we look.”

Some of the rhetoric has been more explicit than others. Fans on social media have said that Clark is being bullied because she is straight. Earlier this year, Travis said other players were “uncomfortable” with Clark “being a straight white girl” because “in the WNBA … there’s a lot of lesbians, and there’s a lot of minorities,” estimating that the league is at least 70% gay, playing up the number in a way that has the effect of making the league seem like an angry mob of lesbians (in reality, approximately 25% of the league is openly queer).

Diana Taurasi, a 20-year veteran known for being a league heel, were attacked in the media for allegedly hating on Clark ahead of the WNBA season as if Taurasi hasn’t “hated on” everyone she’s played against for the last couple of decades. The difference, however, is that Taurasi has embraced the role of the villain for herself, and it wasn’t placed on her by outsiders, akin to what writer Mark Harris has called “a joyous reclamation of the idea of gay monstrosity.”

“I’m not a marketing major,” Taurasi recently told Rolling Stone. “I don’t f–king know how all this s— works. I’m here to ball out and try to kill whoever’s in front of me. You know what I mean?”

Ultimately, long-time fans of the WNBA are frustrated by much of the coverage of Clark because it harms most of the athletes who play in the league. The W isn’t the W without the players who make it the most competitive pro league in the world. Lifting one athlete at the expense of all the others goes against everything the WNBA represents and only serves to reinforce ugly ideas about the women and trans people who play alongside Clark.

Cameras flashed the 28-year-old star quarterback fresh off the team plane, draped in name brands — from Oakley sunglasses to his signature Adidas sneakers and a rolling Louis Vuitton suitcase stamped with a massive “2PM” logo. Mahomes accented the fit with a snapback hat from City Brim Co., a local Missouri brand with less than 1,000 Instagram followers. Yet, on the retailer’s website, the hat’s been sold out for weeks, presumably thanks to the superstar signal-caller who has brands, big and small, salivating at the opportunity to represent them in football’s biggest moments.

This season, Mahomes transformed into the most marketable player in the NFL — and it’s not even close.

“Patrick is a brand in and of himself,” Corey Hill, head of global sports marketing at Oakley, told Andscape. “His marketability is out of this world.”

On Super Bowl Sunday, within minutes after Mahomes threw the game-winning touchdown to deliver the Chiefs a 25-22 overtime victory over the San Francisco 49ers, several of his brand partners fired off congratulatory posts celebrating their marquee endorser. 

According to 1Up Sports Marketing, the agency representing Mahomes since 2018, the now three-time champion and Super Bowl MVP is officially signed as an endorser for 15 different companies. He promotes everything from his own Oakley eyewear and Adidas signature shoes to Subway sandwiches, Head & Shoulders shampoo and even Hy-Vee, a grocery store chain in the Midwest and South. Mahomes’ other endorsements: Airshare (fractional aircraft ownership company), Boss, CommunityAmerica credit union, Coors Light, Essentia water, Fortnite (Epic Games), Prime Hydration drink, T-Mobile and Whoop (fitness/sleep device).

“Fortunately, Patrick is an athlete who had his own vision from day 1,” Jacquelyn Dahl, CEO of 1Up, told Andscape via email. “It’s always been his vision, and we’re just here to help execute it.” 

According to TV measurement company iSpot.tv, Mahomes was the most-seen athlete or coach in national linear TV ads during the 2023 NFL season.

In games from Sept. 7, 2023, to the Super Bowl on Feb. 11, 2024, Mahomes appeared in exactly 575 national linear TV ads. That means, on average, in the 285 total games played during the 2023 season, Mahomes appeared in an ad at least twice during each nationally televised game. And, out of his 575 total national TV ads airing this season, 429 were for State Farm Insurance. Bottom line: In the past six months, watching an NFL game this season without seeing Mahomes in a State Farm spot was impossible.

“We knew early on that Patrick was going to be a great fit for State Farm because of his commitment to excellence and our shared values of making a positive impact on the community,” Alyson Griffin, vice president of marketing for State Farm, told Andscape in an exclusive statement. “We’ve enjoyed working with him over the years and our campaign for the 2023 football season featuring Patrick alongside Travis Kelce, coach Andy Reid and Jake from State Farm is the perfect example of entertaining and capturing the attention of sports fans. We hope to continue that momentum with Patrick in 2024.”

Entering the playoffs, Mahomes actually trailed Chiefs teammate and tight end Travis Kelce in national linear TV ad appearances during NFL games this season, likely due to the mania surrounding his superstar girlfriend, Taylor Swift. Yet, companies doubled down on ads featuring Mahomes during Kansas City’s four-game run to the Super Bowl. Per iSpot.Kelce’s 431 national linear TV ad appearances during games ranked second amongst all NFL players this season, behind only his quarterback, Mahomes.

“Patrick believes in partnering with brands that he truly believes in, top to bottom,” Dahl told Andscape. “He always takes a personal deep dive into what a brand stands for, the leadership, its history and long-term goals. He always says it’s about ensuring that his vision matches up with that of the team behind each brand.”

Mahomes’ reach even extends beyond football. Not only is the Chiefs quarterback the most marketable player in the NFL, but he’s also one of the most advertised athletes nationally across all sports. According to iSpot.tv, since September 2023, Mahomes ranks No. 4 in national ad airings across all TV, with over 26,000 appearances, trailing only Shaquille O’Neal and Peyton and Eli Manning. In the same timeframe, per iSpot.tv, Mahomes ranked No. 1 in estimated national TV ad spend; and, among current athletes, he ranks No. 1 in national ad airings across all TV, with over 10,000 more than the next, LeBron James.

“I say this often because I truly believe it — he’s a unicorn,” Dahl told Andscape. “Not only is Patrick one of the greatest athletes in the world, but he is equally as special of a human, husband, father, teammate, philanthropist and more. 

“It’s all these qualities that make him so attractive to brands who are looking for an ambassador to represent their company.”

In 2017, Adidas became the first company to partner with Mahomes. The Chiefs’ No. 10 overall NFL draft pick from Texas Tech University received a standard rookie footwear and apparel endorsement deal as a rookie.

Fast-forward seven years, and Mahomes now has his own Adidas signature shoe line, which debuted in 2021. Two days before Super Bowl LVIII, the three stripes announced his next shoe, the Adidas Mahomes 2, which will be released later this month.

“Patrick is an integral part of the Adidas family, and we’re thrilled to see his continued success and awe-inspiring performances,” said Chris Murphy, Adidas’ senior vice president of brand marketing, in an exclusive statement to Andscape. “He’s a generational force in sport — not just football — shaping the next generation of athletes and serving as an inspiration to all by finding joy in the game and overcoming pressure in the biggest moments.

“Adidas’ relationship with Patrick is special and continues to evolve from his first signature shoe and apparel collection in 2021. In bringing together Patrick, the most innovative player in football with our design teams, we’re building a unique player brand. And Patrick is closely aligned with and helping to develop our shared future.”

According to Murphy, Mahomes also played a pivotal role in Adidas taking over as Texas Tech’s official apparel supplier, following an 18-year run with Under Armour. In late October, Mahomes pulled up to an NFL game, wearing an unreleased Adidas Texas Tech t-shirt with the caption, “Coming July 2024.” Less than two weeks later, on Nov. 1, 2023, Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt officially announced the school’s switch to three stripes.

After joining Adidas as a rookie, Mahomes landed his first deal as a national spokesperson for an unusual brand — Hunt’s Ketchup — when he became Kansas City’s starting quarterback. The partnership sprouted after a mid-November 2018 ESPN profile published in which Mahomes confessed that he puts ketchup on almost everything. 

“Apparently, Patrick was in Kansas City’s finest steakhouses putting ketchup on steak,” said Dan Skinner, the content and communications manager for Conagra Brands, the parent company of Hunt’s. “It wasn’t in our thought process to say, ‘Hey, Hunt’s, we’re gonna go find the greatest rising talent in the NFL.’ Patrick just had a natural love for ketchup, and we saw it as an opportunity for us. The timing was also perfect, because we were getting ready to launch a new version of our 100% all-natural ketchup. So, we moved very quickly to get Patrick.”

Within a few weeks, Mahomes struck a one-year endorsement deal with the condiment company. And for the first time since television host Roy Clark in the 1980s, Hunt’s had a national face of its brand — the then-23-year-old, ketchup-obsessed NFL quarterback.

To this day, Skinner remembers the exact date — Dec. 14, 2018 — when Mahomes filmed his debut promotional video for Hunt’s. That’s because, less than 24 hours prior, Mahomes experienced one of the worst defeats of his NFL career after the Chiefs fell to the Los Angeles Chargers, 29-28, on Thursday Night Football.

Despite the loss, Mahomes arrived on time for his first ketchup endorsement shoot the following day.

“I hadn’t met Patrick yet. So, it was one of those things like, ‘What kind of mood is this guy gonna be in?’” Skinner recalled. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if his manager called right before and said, ‘Patrick can’t come anymore.’ But he showed up the next morning by himself, ready to go, like, ‘Alright, what do I need to do?’”

Mahomes appeared in four different Hunt’s commercials from 2018 to 2019, when the partnership ended amicably midway through his breakout season, culminating with his first Super Bowl victory.

“I’ve always been so appreciative of what a professional he was that first day,” Skinner said. “The fact that he came to the shoot without any representatives is still wild. But, it was a moment in time when he was a rising star. We had the privilege of working with him early, and loved every minute of it.”

One of Mahomes’ biggest endorsements arrived in 2019 when the NFL agreed to a four-year deal with Oakley to become an official on-field partner and league licensee. In a separate landmark agreement, Oakley named Mahomes the first-ever NFL player to join the global sunglass brand.

“The question was, ‘Who would be the right player in the NFL for Oakley?’” Hill told Andscape. “One of the things we talked about when we considered signing Patrick was we kept seeing all of these young kids who wanted his unique hairstyle. So, we could tell very early on that this guy had some type of ‘it’ factor. To be honest, we originally didn’t even look to see if Patrick wore shades off the field. 

“How he connected with kids and youth really was the main factor in deciding that he would be a great brand ambassador for us.”

In 2021, Oakley teamed up with the quarterback’s 15 and the Mahomies Foundation for a vision care clinic in Kansas City to help kids, and their families cut back on the cost of eyewear.

“Most times, when athletes do an appearance, they’re in and out,” Hill said. “When we did the eye clinic with Patrick, he actually gave his time. He was there with the kids, talking to them, signing autographs. It was pretty amazing.” 

Don’t get it twisted, though: Oakley has reaped the benefits of Mahomes’ ubiquitous rise to superstar status in the past five years. Because, just about any time he’s seen or photographed, Mahomes is sporting Oakley shades.

“When we look at athletes, we ask, “Are people looking at this athlete outside of the sport? How do they present digitally?’ Because the world is so hyperconnected. So, from a visibility standpoint, Patrick has been great for us. Not only is he wearing Oakley products, but you see him in it everywhere — his own platform, the Chiefs’ social channels, and even posts from the NFL.”

Since 2021, Mahomes and Oakley have collaborated for the release of four different signature sunglass collections. His initial “2PM” logo designed for him by Adidas is stamped on the lenses of every pair. You read that right: Somehow, Mahomes and his marketing team persuaded Oakley to put a logo made by another brand on its products. (The “2PM” logo is also on the Louis Vuitton suitcase Mahomes packs for games, though he’s not officially partnered with the luxury fashion brand.) 

“Innovative and meticulous,” said Dahl of Mahomes’ marketing approach. “Patrick is always thinking outside the box on partnerships and brand opportunities.”

Technically, NFL players are not permitted by official league rules to endorse alcoholic beverages. So, in 2022, when Mahomes signed with Coors Light, he and the beer company got creative with their marketing. Mahomes headlined a campaign to promote “The Coors Light” — literally, a $15 flashlight that the brand produced and sold, with all proceeds benefiting 15 and the Mahomies. In 2023, Mahomes appeared in another one of the beer company’s commercials, which introduced the new “Coors Bear” mascot. In conjunction with the campaign, Coors released limited-edition golf headcovers resembling the bear that were also sold to benefit Mahomes’ foundation. 

“Patrick understands the platform he has, and especially his influence over youth,” Dahl said. “And he takes pride in that responsibility with all business decisions he makes.”

Hours before Super Bowl LVII last Sunday, Mahomes pulled up to Allegiant Stadium, rocking all-black Oakleys and a custom-fit black and white Hugo Boss suit. According to a brand rep, Boss collected Mahomes’ measurements at the beginning of this season before designing him an extensive ensemble of suits to wear throughout the year. When the Chiefs punched their ticket to the biggest game of the NFL season, Mahomes became the easy pick to headline Boss’ lifestyle Super Bowl collection. The brand sent the signal-caller every piece in the capsule to wear off the field in Vegas.

Meanwhile, three miles away from Allegiant, Adidas took over the Las Vegas Sphere, where a creative video made by the footwear brand was projected onto the structure. The innovative ad featured Mahomes throwing a football to a digitally rendered version of his younger self alongside a massive three-stripe graphic. The innovative visuals, made specifically to run on the Vegas Sphere in support of Mahomes, were released as part of launching a global brand campaign surrounding youth sports. 

So, for Adidas, it wasn’t a matter of if Mahomes and the Chiefs would reach the Super Bowl. The company consciously decided to make preparations for when Mahomes and his team returned to the final game of the NFL season.

“We wholeheartedly believed Patrick Mahomes would be going to the Super Bowl, so we created a world around him,” Adidas’ Chris Murphy told Andscape. “We brought together some of the most proprietary technology and innovative minds, including Patrick’s team, the Sphere and several partner agencies, to help create this legendary vision. 

“Patrick is the most-innovative football player and a generational force, so it’s only right we used the most innovative tech to honor his likeness.”

With his third Super Bowl title in the past five years, Patrick Mahomes is the best branding investment in sports.

“We definitely believed in Patrick’s trajectory on the performance side,” Oakley’s Corey Hill said. “But, I don’t know if any brand knew that he was gonna be doing what he’s doing now.”

Forget about 43-year-old Tom Brady, who left fans wild Sunday, vowing that “we’re coming back” after becoming the oldest Super Bowl MVP and the most geriatric starter to snag a Lombardi trophy.

But Tom Terrific will have to stay more than another year or two to come close to the sports hero with the most direct access to the fountain of youth, Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige. This Peter Pan-turned-Methuselah started pitching professionally in 1926 when he was 19. He was still pitching 40 years later when he was a year shy of 60. Got another 15 years in you, Tom?

Sure, a seventh Super Bowl win and 20 years in the NFL is impressive, bolstering the argument for Brady as the greatest of all time. But after a full career in the venerable Negro Leagues, Paige broke through to the recently-desegregated majors in 1948, helping propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series at the seemingly over-the-hill age of 42. And the overpowering and artful pitcher still holds his sport’s record as its oldest player, an honor earned during three shutout innings against the Boston Red Sox at an inconceivable 59.

Age-defying, indeed.

Paige’s actual age was the most-argued statistic in sports in mid-20th-century America. The answer depended on who was asking and when. In 1934, the Colored Baseball & Sports Monthly reported that Paige was born in 1907. In 1948, various reports said he was born in 1901 (Associated Press), 1903 (Time), 1908 (Washington Post, New York Times and Sporting News) and 1904 (his mother). The Indians hedged their bets after signing him, writing in their yearbook that Paige was born “on either July 17, Sept. 11, Sept. 18 or Sept. 22, somewhere between 1900 and 1908.” Newsweek columnist John Lardner took him back further, saying that Paige “saved the day at Waterloo, when the dangerous pull-hitter, Bonaparte, came to bat with the bases full.”

The mystery over Paige’s age mattered because age is a way to compare players, and to measure a player’s current season against past performances. With fans who watched him as kids seeing him play a generation later with their own kids and grandkids, it was natural to wonder how old he really was. Paige obliged with tales that grew more fantastic with each retelling: Proof of his birthdate was in the family Bible. Unfortunately, his grandfather was reading that Bible under a chinaberry tree when a wind kicked up, blowing the Good Book into the path of the family goat, which ate it. His draft record showed he was born Sept. 26, 1908, his Social Security card had Aug. 15, 1908, and his passport file indicated Feb. 5, 1908. The three dates shared one thing: All were supplied by Paige.

The truth was both simpler and more complex. In the post-Reconstruction Confederacy, it wasn’t easy to track the ancestry of Black citizens. Until 1902, descendants of slaves in Mobile, Alabama, where Paige was born, were included in neither the city census nor the city directory. Even when they finally did enter the accounting, it was with caveats. Like Paige and his 11 sisters and brothers, most Black babies were delivered at home, so health authorities had to rely on the family filing notice of the birth. Recordings that did make it into the official registers were accompanied by a “B” for Black or “C” for colored.

All of that might have made Paige doubt whether Mobile officials ever got word of his birth. Or it might have until he signed with Cleveland in ’48, and owner Bill Veeck did what Paige could have done – and may have – years earlier. Veeck contacted Paige’s mom Lula, who dispatched his nephew Leon Paige to accompany the Indians owner and his entourage to the county health department. “They saw his birth certificate,” Leon Paige said. “They knew [Lula] had 12 children and they knew when they were born.” In Paige’s case, the registry was clear: His date of birth was July 7, 1906.

So why the ruses?

Paige knew that, despite being the fastest, winningest pitcher alive, being Black meant he never would get the attention he deserved. That was easy to see in the backwaters of the Negro Leagues and in postseason barnstorming games across the Americas when he’d pitch two or three innings nearly every night, year-round.

It remained true when he hit the majors at age 42, with accusations flying that his signing was a stunt. He needed to romance white sportswriters and fans who flocked to white stars such as Babe Ruth (and later, Brady). Longevity offered the perfect platform. “They want me to be old,” Paige said, “so I give ’em what they want.” He feigned exasperation when reporters pressed to know the secret of his birth, insisting, “I want to be the onliest man in the United States that nobody knows nothin’ about.”

In fact, he wanted just the opposite: Paige masterfully exploited his lost birthday to ensure the world would remember him.

Paige crafted an image he knew played into white perceptions of Black people. It was a persona of agelessness and fecklessness, where a family’s history could be written in a faded Bible and a goat could devour both. In the Jim Crow era, white people didn’t expect the Black man to have human proportions, certainly none worth engraving for posterity. He was a phantom, without the dignity of a real name (hence the nickname Satchel), a rational mother (Paige’s mother was so confused she supposedly mixed him up with his brother) or an age certain (“Nobody knows how complicated I am,” he once said. “All they want to know is how old I am.”).

Playing to stereotypes the way he did with his age is just half the story, although it is the half most told. While many dismissed him as a Stepin Fetchit, if not an Uncle Tom, he was something else entirely – a quiet subversive. Told all his life that Black lives mattered less than white ones, he teased journalists by adding or subtracting years each time they asked his age, then asking them, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?” Relegated by statute and custom to the shadows of the Negro Leagues, he fed Uncle Sam shadowy information on his provenance. Yet growing up in the Deep South, he knew better than to flout the rules openly. He made his relationships with the press and the public into a game, using insubordination and indirection to challenge his surroundings.

His stagecraft was so successful that it amazed even him. He pitched so spectacularly, especially when his teams were beating the best of the white big leaguers, that white sportswriters turned out to watch Black baseball. He proved that Black fans would fill ballparks, and that white fans would turn out to see Black superstars. He barnstormed alongside Dizzy Dean, Bob Feller and other white champions, winning them over to the notion that Negro Leaguers could really play ball. He drew the spotlight first to himself, then to his Kansas City Monarchs team, and inevitably to the Monarchs’ rookie second baseman Jackie Robinson. Robinson is the one the world remembers for opening the door to new racial realities but, as one veteran Negro Leaguer said, it was Paige who inserted the key.

Paige was admitted into the Hall of Fame 50 years ago and MLB recently put its imprimatur on the contributions of Negro Leaguers by saying it’ll include their stats in its history books, which could topple the records for everything from games pitched (Paige said he threw 2,500) to wins (his compelling claim of 2,000 would be four times as many as Cy Young).

One record he already holds, and that should be Brady’s benchmark, came as the 1965 season was winding down. The Kansas City A’s whimsical owner Charlie Finley startled the baseball world by signing Paige to a contract and announcing that he would pitch against the Red Sox on Sept. 25. “I thought they were kidding,” Paige, who was 59 at the time, told reporters, quickly adding, “I think I can still pitch and help this club.” For Paige, it was another chance to prove himself. For Finley, it was bold-as-brass ballyhoo.

Finley choreographed the big night. Paige sat in a rocker strategically placed next to but not in the A’s below-ground bullpen. “At my age,” the pitcher explained, “I’m close enough to being below ground level as it is.” A nurse in a white uniform rubbed liniment on his right arm as his personal water boy stood by. Among the 9,289 fans at Municipal Stadium were Paige’s six children. His wife, Lahoma, was at home ready to deliver the seventh and last. In its story that morning, the Los Angeles Times captured the tenor of Paige’s return: “A gimmick, yes. A joke, no.”

The evening’s drama may have been staged by Finley, but it was Paige who scripted the closing act. He needed just 28 tosses to get nine outs. He struck out one and walked none over three innings. The only base hit was a double by Carl Yastrzemski, an All-Star who led the league in doubles and had seen his father hit against Paige a generation earlier in a semipro game. Tony Conigliaro, the brash Boston right fielder, had boasted that “I’m going to get a hit off this old so-and-so.” His was one of the easiest outs. “Satchel had better swings off me than I had off of him,” said Bill Monbouquette, ace of that Sox staff and Paige’s last strikeout victim in the majors. Ed Charles, Paige’s teammate on the A’s, says that after a 12-year hiatus from MLB, the veteran fireballer took just 10 warm-up throws. “He proceeded to go out on the mound and shove the ball right up their you-know-what.”

The plan was to send a reliever in to start the fourth, but Paige came out for a few practice pitches so he could leave to a standing ovation. In the locker room he had stripped to his long underwear when someone burst in to say, “Satch, they want you back on the field.” He returned to the darkened ballpark as fans flicked matches and lighters in his honor. “The old Gray Mare,” an appreciative audience sang, “she ain’t what she used to be.” But he was, this night.

His appearance with the A’s – at the age of 59 years, two months and 18 days – set a Major League record that is unlikely to be broken. He was two years older than the runner-up and 33 more than his catcher that evening. He seemed as old as baseball itself.

That last season in the big leagues underscored another milestone that would matter even more than the tired question of age to Paige, who died in 1982. He knew better than any historian that “we had a lot of Satchel Paiges back then.” But he had experienced something that eluded the likes of Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell. Satchel Paige was the only Negro League legend who lived to savor life in the majors.

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on our nation, causing widespread illnesses and death, and shutting down the economy. There’s nothing good associated with this horrible disease. That said, during this forced timeout, Nick and I rediscovered one pleasure that we’d lost over the years — the power of a father and son spending an hour or two on a baseball field, sharing a laugh and growing closer in these most uncertain of times.

Nick and I have always loved baseball. We used to practice it together three to four times a week until he turned 12. That’s when Nick, like a lot of other boys around that age, began specializing in a single sport, which in his case was hoops.

Like many sports-minded young black men raised in the 1970s and early 1980s, I grew up idolizing baseball stars such as Jim Rice, Gaylord Perry and Reggie Jackson as much as Dr. J and Magic Johnson. Over the years, while my wife and I raised Nick and his two older siblings, we transformed ourselves into a basketball family. But during this pandemic, Nick and I learned that if we wanted to play sports together, baseball was the best option. While cities are removing basketball rims and tennis nets from parks, no one has closed off the local baseball fields. Like running trails, they’re still available.

Nick was born in Arlington, Texas, and when he was a baby, I started rolling balls of all kinds his way. Baseballs. Tennis balls. Basketballs. Footballs. Golf balls. Before he was 4, I took our games outside in the Texas heat. In our driveway and on the side of our home, I’d show him the art of dribbling with his off-hand, fielding ground balls, catching and throwing a spiral, running sprints and distances, as well as hitting a forehand and putting a golf ball. By age 5, I was no longer pushing him. He was pulling me, demanding to go outside and “do sports.”

Nick had two older siblings, but they were teenagers when he was born. A whole ’nother generation. I felt I needed to be even closer to him since he wasn’t growing up with a brother or sister close to his age. His siblings were off to college by the time Nick began joining sports teams at age 6, plus we’d moved to Connecticut and left the siblings in Texas to finish school. In our family, my wife dealt with all the serious stuff such as taking him to the doctor, feeding him nutritious meals and making sure he was good at school. I’ll admit it: I was lucky enough to be the “sports parent.” My contribution was coaching his sports teams and making sure he had the skills to be able to play for as long as he chose.

Once we got to Connecticut, we signed Nick up for T-ball and for a basketball league. He loved both sports and also dabbled in cross country, soccer and tennis.

Things changed when Nick got to the eighth grade. That’s when the high school coach at Kingswood Oxford School in West Hartford, Connecticut, put him on the varsity basketball team. He was about 5-foot-7, 135 pounds. I remember one game against Canterbury School, in which middle-school Nick got caught up in a switch and was matched up against Canterbury’s top varsity player, Donovan Mitchell, the future NBA star (and one-time college baseball player). Nick gave up at least eight inches and 75 pounds to Mitchell. Needless to say, Mitchell got the best of Nick and his teammates, but we were proud that Nick was playing against such high-level talent. It was at that point that Nick decided he had to give up baseball if he wanted to compete against the best players in New England. Nick, now 5-foot-11 and 170 pounds, ended up with 400 3s in high school and was a first-team All-New England player.

Before basketball took over Nick’s life, he and I used to enjoy going to the park and hitting and throwing the baseball around the yard. Our sessions would always end with me on the mound and Nick getting one final at-bat. He’d hit the ball as hard as he could and run the bases. Wherever the ball went, I’d have to run after it and then try to tag him out before he rounded home. It always seemed as if that last play ended at the plate. Most of the time he would score, but occasionally I’d run him down.

Through the years, I noticed that fewer black fathers were taking the time to teach their children the fundamentals and intricacies of baseball. In our Connecticut community, only a handful of black kids would come out for little league baseball tryouts. But a couple of dozen black kids would show up for travel basketball tryouts.

Baseball has been losing black players for decades. The numbers are down in little league, high school and college. In 1981, nearly 19% of MLB was black. Today, that number hovers around 7%. Only one black kid who grew up with Nick is playing college baseball today, while dozens are playing some level of college hoops or will be next year. Nick, who is doing a postgrad year at Suffield Academy, will be playing basketball in college, too, although we won’t know where until the end of April.

In mid-March, shortly after the NBA suspended its season, our local recreation center shut its doors. No sweat, we thought. Nick and I would go to the park so he could stay sharp and put up hundreds of 3s a day. But officials advised people not to play ball in the park and removed the rims from all hoops throughout our community.

Nick suggested going to the golf range and driving some balls. But the golf ranges, like the golf courses, were closed. Next thing you know, the city was removing the nets from tennis courts. We were in full shutdown mode.

I was getting tired of watching Nick play video games and streaming movies.

Then it dawned on me. Nick and I should restart the father-son baseball sessions we had abandoned once he became a varsity basketball player. They’re part workout and part bonding. Nick liked my baseball idea. In fact, his face lit up when I mentioned it.

Our first trip back to the diamond happened the Saturday before Easter. The last time Nick and I had played baseball together, I was 48. I’m now 55. He was 12. He’s now 19. Years ago, skin-and-bones, wide-eyed Nick would jump into the passenger side of my car with his baseball glove and buckle up. Now, a more buff Nick has facial hair. I thought we were riding to the baseball field together, but he jumped into his own car and said he’d meet me at the park. They grow up so fast.

We arrived at Elizabeth Park, which is across the road from the home of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, who has issued strict orders about social distancing and staying home. The governor could look out his window and see Nick and me pulling up to the diamond. Nick joked that he’d gotten a robocall from the governor hours earlier, updating citizens on the virus. What if the governor saw us and sent state troopers to get us? Our crime: playing baseball in public during a pandemic.

They’d also have to arrest a few others who were in the park: a few joggers and a family flying a kite.

The field wasn’t in good shape. The grass hadn’t been cut, so the infield was overgrown with crabgrass and dandelions. The sun bathed us and we smiled and stretched. It all seemed surreal, the times we were living in and the fact that dad and son were back on a baseball field for the first time in about eight years.

I began by tossing Nick some balls that he could hit into the fence above the backstop. That was always how we started things, back in the day. Next, he walked through the crabgrass and out to the mound. I crouched behind the plate and caught about 25 fastballs — some high, some wide and some down the middle. Years earlier, I’d let him send 50 pitches my way, but bending down to catch 50 pitches isn’t in the cards anymore.

We moved to short toss and, once our arms were loose, we tossed the ball long. I hit him some infield grounders and he fielded most of the balls cleanly, given that he was working with uneven turf and tricky hops. Then we got to our main activity, which was dad hitting long fly balls to son, who would roam center field and shag them. We only had two baseballs and that was plenty.

“Hit it farther,” Nick yelled after my first few flies were more shallow than he wanted. “Make me run.”

As best I could, I tried to jack the ball but soon remembered the best way to hit it far was to relax and just make contact. It was all coming back to me. When I tried to hit it hard and far, I hit dribblers or missed altogether. When I relaxed and swung, I was more apt to send it soaring over Nick’s head. He couldn’t get to a few, but chased others down as if he were a Mookie Betts starter kit. After one good catch, Nick hollered, “Call the Mets!”

After about 10 minutes in the outfield, Nick sprinted in and said, “Let’s switch up. You go to the outfield and I’ll do the hitting.” After about another 10 minutes we switched back.

After about an hour, I was spent. I knew we had one more thing to do. I pitched Nick a fastball and he jacked a screamer into deep left-center. I ran as fast as I could after it. By the time I reached the ball, he’d already crossed the plate. He didn’t slow down to give me a chance. He just wanted to crush the old man. We laughed.

If it weren’t for the isolated world of coronavirus that we live in, I doubt that Nick and I would have ever revived our baseball ritual. This was about dad and son and a game that we both love.

“I had forgot how much fun baseball is,” Nick said to me as we packed up our equipment. “When I have kids, I’m going to make sure I play baseball with them.”

“And when MLB comes back, I’m going to watch more of it,” he said.

As I headed off to my car, and he to his, he had one more thing to say.

“Dad, as long as things are shut down, let’s keep doing baseball, OK?”

Three days later, we were out there again.

Besides youngest, fastest, best, and can we say just all around dope, for real, there’s one that gets special traction when black girls-to-women shine. It’s called “Black Girl Magic,” a term created by writer CaShawn Thompson in 2013 to celebrate and amplify the achievement of people often overlooked by the broader culture in both big competitions and the specialness of everyday life.

You see that thing, that you’ve never seen before, that you didn’t even know was possible because it takes a certain kind of mind’s eye to make it happen.

Yep, that’s “Black Girl Magic.”

And it always comes with receipts.

Kosgei, 25, a Kenyan marathoner, won the Chicago Marathon on Sunday with a time of 2:14:04, breaking the record set by British runner Paula Radcliffe in 2003. Kosgei’s countryman, Eliud Kipchoge, had broken the marathon’s two-hour time barrier the previous day, and coming into the race, Kosgei said she wanted to have that same kind of record performance. She had the Radcliffe record on her mind and needed a 2:15 time. She beat that mark, with time to spare.

“I was not expecting this,” a joyful Kosgei told reporters.

But that’s the thing about BGM, it can surprise even the BGs at the center of it.

At 15, tennis star Coco Gauff, who caught our eye in July at Wimbledon when the former junior champion, ranked 313th in the world, upset her idol Venus Williams in the tournament’s first round.

Coco Gauff: The girl who would be GOAT

Turns out that was just an opening smash, and Sunday she became the youngest singles champion in 15 years and the youngest American to win a singles title on the tour since 1991.

Gauff, who grew up lionizing the Williams sisters, hits powerful groundstrokes and is considered the heir apparent to Serena Williams’ game-changing crown. Or could be a tiara. Just depends on the black girl.

Simone Biles, 22, completed the weekend trifecta, winning her 25th world championship medal Sunday, making her the most decorated gymnast in history and the highest, fastest champion the sport has ever seen. Both medals were won with the most technically difficult routines in the sport. It helps the Biles legend that she wins competitions with the moves she pioneered, the Biles dismount on beam and the Biles II on floor.

The BGM hashtag helped call attention to what has often been the face of superlative achievement. But I’m going to argue for an additional term. With so many of those faces consistently winning, and getting the shine that comes with it, I think that our magic can simply morph into the understanding of #Howwedo — for all the black girls, including the ones this weekend, who continue to take their sport to a different level.

Call it creativity and problem-solving, there’s a move in your head and you decide to take it to the mats, the courts, the streets. Or call it a weekend of #Howwedo.

Their lives were linked in ways both uncanny and coincidental. One was named Ferdinand, the other Orenthal, though neither was ever called by those names. Each had a mother from the South. Both played for legendary college coaches named John, at rival schools. Each was among the most celebrated athletes in his respective college sport. In 1969, Lew Alcindor and O.J. Simpson were set to move from the warm familiarity of Los Angeles to the chilly unknowns of two midsize Rust Belt cities: Milwaukee and Buffalo, New York.

And yet as much as they shared, they were, in many ways, opposites.

Their impending professionalism invited attention and judgment, even from people close to them. “Of course I’m glad to see Lewis get all he can get,” UCLA basketball coach John Wooden told UPI at the end of March. But, he continued, “No athlete is worth that kind of money, I don’t care how good he is.”

In July, Ron McGrath of The Daily Report  in Ontario, California, wrote that Alcindor and Simpson “are elevated onto pedestals in an endless sea of publicity. … They’ve been reading their own press clippings.” And “when athletes do that they’re headed for more trouble than the proverbial long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

Although the media and public lumped them together, Simpson enjoyed this new world of commerce. Alcindor did not. He told The New York Times,  “A bidding war degrades the people involved. It would make me feel like a flesh peddler … I don’t want to think like that.” But a bidding war commenced anyway. The Harlem Globetrotters offered $1 million. The Milwaukee Bucks, which won the first pick in the NBA draft in a coin toss with the other expansion club, Phoenix, selected Alcindor and offered him $1.4 million for five years. The New York Nets, who had selected Alcindor first in the ABA draft, made an inferior bid.

“The Nets tried to come back,” recalled columnist Peter Vecsey, who was a beat writer covering the Nets at the time. “Alcindor told them, ‘One offer’ — that was it.” Of the second ABA offer, Alcindor told The New York Times, “This is not the way to do business. I gave [Milwaukee] my word. I would not want to welsh on them.”

Simpson was also a No. 1 pick. But he threatened to sue the AFL-NFL, which were entering their last year with separate schedules before officially merging, because he was limited to speaking with one team, the Buffalo Bills. The Bills’ attorney, former AFL Players Association lawyer Jerry Augustine, told Simpson such suits could take years, and, according to Sports Illustrated, he offered to pull samples out of his own file cabinet as evidence.

Simpson asked Buffalo for a figure based on Alcindor’s contract. Bills quarterback Jack Kemp told UPI that “not many teams can afford to give contracts such as … Lew Alcindor in basketball.” When negotiations stalled in May, Simpson asked to be traded, preferably to a West Coast team.

Simpson wanted to be insured for $500,000, rather than the standard $25,000, to play in the annual College All-Star Game against the Super Bowl champion New York Jets on Aug. 1. He and two other star college players eventually chose to skip the game rather than risk injury before signing their pro contracts.

While negotiations were proceeding that summer, Simpson filmed a bit part in a movie, The Dream Of Hamish Mose, about a lost team of buffalo soldiers after the Civil War. He was a guest star on the CBS drama Medical Center, which would premiere that September. During the shoot for the show in Santa Monica, California, he played touch football with extras.

Eventually, he retreated from his challenge of the AFL-NFL draft. His lawyer, Chuck Barnes, told Sports Illustrated in July, “… the more we think about it, the more we’re afraid that it’ll end up making him sound as if he’s challenging church, mother and home. All of a sudden we might have O.J. the bad guy.” When Buffalo convinced him that his earnings from advertisements were at least partially dependent on playing football, Simpson signed a four-year contract worth $350,000.

Both Alcindor and Simpson came from working-class families, but they took different paths to college stardom. Alcindor came from New York City. His mom, Cora, who grew up in North Carolina, was a department store price checker and seamstress. At his high school games, she closed her eyes during play. Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr. came from a Trinidadian family and was a subway cop.

Simpson was born in San Francisco. His father, Jimmy Simpson, was a chef and bank custodian from Arkansas. His mother, Eunice Simpson, had grown up in Louisiana and raised four children on a nurse’s aide’s pay after Jimmy Simpson left when Orenthal was 4. Willie Mays had helped steer 15-year-old Simpson from delinquency after he did a stint in a youth detention center. “I was you know, goofing off a lot, loafing around, not busy enough. I … got in some trouble. If things hadn’t been different … I might still be standing on a corner,” Simpson told Life magazine in 1967. He married Marguerite Whitley shortly before he turned 20. She told the magazine that Simpson was “a terrible person” in high school. His response: “My wife, she’s very religious, she put me back on track.”

A juco transfer, Simpson didn’t burst into national prominence until he got to USC, coached by John McKay. He set team records for rushing in his junior and senior years, played in two Rose Bowls and won the Heisman Trophy his senior year. He was also an All-American sprinter, helping USC set a world record in the 440-yard relay in 1967.

Alcindor, by contrast, was a national phenomenon in high school, setting a schoolboy scoring record in New York. In an era when freshmen didn’t play varsity ball or leave early for the pros, he led UCLA to three national championships and was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player each time.

The public thought of Simpson as jovial (a reputation cemented by his ads for Hertz, which showed him running through airports). On campus, Simpson told Life, “Yeah, I find students now stopping and staring at me. I guess I like it, though.”

Because of his early fame, Alcindor, even as a teen, interacted with celebrity athletes: Wilt Chamberlain loaned him suits. He trained with Bruce Lee. Jackie Robinson recruited Alcindor to his alma mater UCLA. As a college student, he joined Jim Brown, Bill Russell and other professional athletes at the famous Cleveland Summit in 1967 to discuss Muhammad Ali’s opposition to the draft.

Yet Alcindor was seen as aloof, a reputation fueled in part by the school’s athletic director, who had forbidden the entire freshman squad from communications with the media. And Alcindor found most UCLA students closeted bigots who couldn’t relate to black people. In the 1969 Sports Illustrated cover feature My Story, Alcindor wrote, “It wasn’t long before I realized that certain cats who hated my guts were giving me the big Pepsodent beachboy smile and saying, ‘Hello, how are you?’ ”

Fame brought expectations, especially when it came to social justice. According to Sports Illustrated, Simpson told USC’s Black Student Union that “I don’t have to go through any changes to prove I’m black enough. I am black, I knew it the day I was born.” When hundreds of athletes decided to boycott the New York Athletic Club track meet that was scheduled to open the new Madison Square Garden in February 1968 because the club was exclusively white, Simpson joined their ranks. He told Sports Illustrated, “I wouldn’t run that weekend if my mother was holding the meet.”

But Simpson rebuffed 1968 Olympic boycott organizer Harry Edwards, telling The New York Times that organizers tried to “use” him. “I’m not … enlightened on the situation. I don’t know … what they’re trying to do.”

When a reporter from the Daily Trojan student newspaper asked his opinion of John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s raised-fist protest during a 1968 Olympic medal ceremony, Simpson said, “I respect Tommie Smith but I don’t admire him … I think they’re going about the boycott the wrong way. You can’t change the world until you change yourself. All this is going to do is make some Negro kid in high school football who isn’t playing first string quit, saying, ‘This guy isn’t treating me right.’ ”

Being perceived as militant would ruin the bigger picture. During a night out with Robert Lipsyte of The New York Times in the summer of ’69, he famously told the writer that whites didn’t see him as black, but as O.J.

Alcindor did boycott the Olympics. But he wasn’t naive about the result, telling the Los Angeles Times in March 1969, “Most black nationalists don’t know yet what it really means to run a nation.” Not long after the 1969 Final Four, Alcindor visited Trinidad. “The West Indies was the best trip I’ve ever taken,” he told the Times reporter. “Like the president is black. The cops are black … and you don’t feel no tension.”

In August, Alcindor had his first experience of pro ball at the annual Maurice Stokes Benefit Game at Kutsher’s Country Club in the Catskills in upstate New York. Bucks owner Wes Pavalon tried to fly in for the game, experienced turbulence and missed it. Alcindor dunked on Chamberlain early, made 6 of 11 shots, grabbed 10 rebounds and blocked 4 shots. Ira Berkow later wrote in The New York Times that Pavalon asked former NBA player Jack Twyman, who founded the Stokes game, how things went. “Wes,” he responded, “your boy made some moves you just wouldn’t believe.”

In his last year as a college student, the Los Angeles Times reported that Alcindor lived in a yellow bungalow behind a modest townhouse at the end of a winding driveway in Encino, California, shadowed by sycamores. In Milwaukee, Alcindor was looking at a luxury apartment complex called Juneau Village. He settled on a 13th-story, two-bedroom corner unit with a view of downtown. (Two bedrooms ran $260-$308 a month.) Doors were raised and ceiling lights tucked flush to accommodate Alcindor’s height. The Bucks shipped Alcindor’s oversize bed to him from Encino, as USC shipped Simpson’s custom helmet to Buffalo. The Milwaukee Journal reported that women “seek his [Alcindor’s] unlisted phone number and stroll past Juneau Village.”

After Alcindor arrived in Milwaukee, Look magazine said he told veteran guard Jon McGlocklin he only wanted to play four or five years: “Live in Milwaukee? No, I guess you could say I exist in Milwaukee. I am a soldier hired for service and I will perform that service well.”

Milwaukee was happy to get him on those terms. On Alcindor’s first day of camp, there was a three-minute standing ovation when he walked onto the court. Ten thousand fans paid $2 apiece to see his first intrasquad game. Ticket sales went from an average of 6,200 a game in 1968-69 to 8,500 in Alcindor’s first season. Alcindor attracted huge crowds in the black community. In his first 45 days, he had 10 speaking engagements there.

Pavalon said of Alcindor, “He’s got such an image to live up to. … You can imagine what Lew is up against.”

The white sports press wasn’t always sympathetic, though. The Sporting News‘ Joe Falls excoriated Alcindor for his brevity with the media. Falls wrote, “Alcindor is supposed to stand 7’1″ 3/8 inches … I can tell you he is  much smaller than that. In fact, he is one of the smallest men I ever met. … They brought the big guy into a press conference. … It would have been better for all concerned — including Alcindor — if he had gone straight to his room and not talked to anybody. Never have I seen such a discourteous display put on by an athlete in any sport.” Falls wrote that he and his colleagues had neither time nor space to grill the rookie about his faith or his thoughts on race relations. “When he tells us, the media, that he isn’t interested in us, he is also telling you, the public, that he isn’t interested in you.”

Simpson also had mixed feelings about his move to the Rust Belt. While his contract negotiations dragged on, he told Sports Illustrated he was building a new home in L.A.’s Coldwater Canyon. “I’ll buy myself one of those float-em deals and just lie on it in that pool until … I have to report. … I don’t mean to put down Buffalo, but when you got California in your blood, it’s there and you have a hard time being happy anywhere else.”

George Arthur, a Buffalo resident who served on the Erie County Board of Supervisors from 1964 to 1967, told The Undefeated, “People looked forward to O.J. coming. … We supported him. But he didn’t hang  out in the black community.”

Dan Darragh, the Bills’ quarterback at the time, told The Undefeated, “War Memorial [Stadium] was pretty intimate with the sidelines so close to our benches. They were typical Buffalo fans, so when things were going well you heard it from them, and when they weren’t — the same. You might get beer cans thrown at you while you’re walking to the tunnel.”

Simpson feared he’d be pelted with cans after his holdout, Sports Illustrated reported. But he was met at the airport by 2,500 fans, a kiss from a beauty queen and a handshake from the mayor. “I’ve been trying to get here for six months,” he told the crowd. Bills vice president Jack Horrigan gushed, “You’d think we just won a championship.”

Two differences in the rules eased Alcindor’s adjustment to the pro game. There was no ban on dunking in the NBA. Instead, the pro game banned zone defenses, which he had regularly faced in college. His new teammates were thrilled. “He’s the best big man I’ve ever seen,” Guy Rodgers, a future Hall of Famer who played six seasons with Chamberlain, told Ebony magazine. “He may be the first of the 7-foot backcourt men,” said guard Fred Crawford in Sports Illustrated. “He can dribble and make moves that no big man ever made before.”

The Bucks adapted to him. “On defense you play differently with him in there,” said Rodgers. “We take chances because we know Lew is there.”

Simpson’s adaptation was more challenging. His last year in college, he had been living in a two-room apartment near USC’s campus, with his wife, Marguerite, and their infant daughter, Arnelle. There was also a parakeet named Harvey and, according to Life, a red rubber tarantula hanging from the doorway to startle Simpson’s mother-in-law.

He took no such talismans to the Bills’ preseason camp in Niagara, New York. “Niagara wasn’t much of a college town,” Darragh said. “The chemical industry was still there. We had to cancel practice sometimes because of the air quality.” The players shared dorm rooms, and there was no air conditioning. After training camp, the Simpson family planned to reunite and stay in an apartment complex 6 miles from Buffalo on Niagara Falls Boulevard, where Bills players had their own floor.

When the rookie finally arrived in August, Kemp took Simpson to the coaches’ office. John Rauch, who had been AFL Coach of the Year in 1967 when he was with the Oakland Raiders, told Sports Illustrated, “I wouldn’t build my offense around one back no matter how good he is. It’s too easy for the pros to set up defensive keys. O.J. can be a terrific pass receiver, and we expect him to block, too.”

Defensive end Tom Day told Sports Illustrated he would perform the ritual of shaving the rookie’s head. “He’s like any rookie — a little cocky but a little shy. I think I’ll just cut an O and a J in his hair,” Day said. “But he has so many movie and TV contracts coming up that we may hold off for awhile. Wouldn’t want to ruin the boy.”

But others worried that Rauch was doing exactly that.

Art Spander, a sportswriter for the San Francisco Examiner, told The Undefeated, “Rauch was … old school. ‘You’re going to learn to play football.’ You don’t teach a lion to bite … you don’t teach O.J. how to run.”

“He was the best we had seen since Jim Brown,” Butch Byrd, a Bills cornerback from 1964 through 1970, told The Undefeated. “I had played in five All-Star Games, I was a good player. He was fabulous. But he was at Niagara doing some outrageous stuff. It made me wonder what it would feel like to be that good, to be that fast.”

“You could tell he was upset. Everyone but Rauch knew Rauch was wrong. [Simpson] did what he was told. … Everyone knew O.J. was going to be a star.”

Simpson’s regular-season debut came on Sept. 14 at home against the Jets. The game was broadcast nationally, and Simpson had a reception of nearly 60 yards and scored a touchdown. But Buffalo lost 33-19.

Alcindor’s pro debut, on Oct. 18 against Detroit, was also nationally broadcast. He scored 29 points and had 12 rebounds, 6 assists, 4 steals and 3 blocks. The Bucks won by 19.

Alcindor that year led the Bucks to the Eastern Division finals, where they lost 4-1 to the New York Knicks. His 28.8 points, 14.5 rebounds and 4.1 assists per game earned him Rookie of the Year honors. Simpson rushed for 697 yards and two touchdowns, caught 30 passes for three scores and averaged 3.9 yards per carry. But Buffalo finished 4-10. While Simpson was selected to the Pro Bowl, Boston Patriots back Carl Garrett and Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Greg Cook divided the media’s AFL Rookie of the Year awards. On Jan. 27, 1970, in the last NFL draft before the merger season, the Bills selected USC defensive end Al Cowlings in the first round — largely on the recommendation of his best friend, Simpson.

After the Bucks were eliminated in the playoffs by the Knicks in New York, the team arrived back at Mitchell Field in the middle of the night and about 250 fans greeted them to cheer on their still-new franchise. The next day, April 22, Alcindor was waiting to board a plane for L.A. His eyes fell on a headline announcing that Cincinnati had traded Oscar Robertson to the Bucks.

Brothers and NFL defensive backs Hamza and Husain Abdullah decided they needed a break from football.

It was 2012, and the two men, both devout Muslims, were about to enter free agency. Husain, the younger brother, suggested they perform hajj, the five-day pilgrimage to Mecca and the Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. That year, hajj occurred in October — right in the thick of football season. NFL players typically get only four days off per month during the regular season, and those days can’t be grouped together.

The brothers decided they would take the season off. Earlier that year, retired San Diego Chargers player Junior Seau fatally shot himself in the chest. The legendary linebacker was not a Muslim or a teammate to either Abdullah brother, but he was their role model.

“He was the NFL,” said Hamza. “He was our hero. He gave his life for the game of football.”

They were heartbroken, and they worried it could happen to them.

For both men, the journey to Mecca represented a chance to focus on what mattered most to them: being good husbands, fathers, Muslims and community members. But the time off also put their football careers at risk.

Hamza never played in the league again and suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts. Husain caught on with the Kansas City Chiefs for three more seasons but suffered multiple concussions and faced a controversial penalty for sliding into prayer after a touchdown.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BU-0O92lV-J/

For the brothers, it was their faith that helped them withstand being Muslim in the NFL through Ramadan and their transition out of the league. Now it guides the way they support their families, colleagues and surrounding community.

One brother is out of the league

When the Abdullah brothers returned home from Mecca, they set their sights on training and getting signed for the 2013 season.

“My faith shouldn’t be a burden. It’s an asset,” Hamza said.

“I started working out more and watching film,” added Hamza, who had played in a reserve role for the Denver Broncos, Cleveland Browns and Arizona Cardinals. “Husain worked on a tackling style that helped to protect his head.”

Husain, who had played four seasons in Minnesota, was picked up by the Chiefs in February 2013. Hamza was happy for his brother and felt optimistic that he would get a call too. But the NFL draft passed, summer training camp passed and, eventually, Hamza and his agent stopped calling each other. When the 2013 season officially started in September, he knew his NFL career was over.

“It was painful,” said Hamza, now 35. “I had to mentally shift from being an active player to a retired player.”

Depression started to set in.

“At that time, it was tough because I didn’t know why I was feeling so low and so down. I felt like I was just underneath everything. When I first sought therapy, the therapist implored me to hold on to my faith.”

Hamza had been released three times during his seven-season NFL career, including twice during the holy month of Ramadan, when observant Muslims fast from dawn to dusk.

During Ramadan, he developed a routine to keep up his calories and stay hydrated. He made sure to weigh at least 220 pounds at the beginning of the month because he knew he would lose weight. Once Ramadan started, he would rise before dawn to eat breakfast, then start a day that involved practice, weight training, napping, reading the Quran, attending meetings and then breaking his fast after dusk. In addition to filling up on food, he drank at least half a gallon of water and 64 ounces of Gatorade and Pedialyte over the course of an evening.

Hamza signed with the Cardinals in 2009 and said that team felt more accepting of his faith and his practice of Ramadan. He said the trainers were more willing to work with him. “They thought that [embracing my faith] made me a better player and representative of the team.”

In solidarity, his teammate Michael Adams would fast from foods that weren’t good for him. “It meant a lot to me,” Hamza said of Adams’ support.

Hamza didn’t complete his fast in 2011, his last year in the league. Ramadan occurred in the hottest part of the summer, and he lost 12 pounds in one day. “I prayed about it and asked that God give me the strength to walk in his path.”

Leaving the NFL would test his faith, family and friendships.

The frustration of navigating the NFL’s benefits system in addition to financial woes and depression came to a head on Halloween 2013. Hamza took his grievances to Twitter, posting some 50 tweets lambasting the league for issues ranging from misdiagnosing injuries to treating players like slaves. He also revealed he had been contemplating suicide.

“Every time I go to sleep, I pray that Allah takes care of my family, just in case I don’t wake up,” he tweeted. “And quietly, I’m disappointed sometimes when I do wake up. I’m married to a beautiful wife, have 3 beautiful children, and my financially GOOD, yet I don’t want to wake up.”

He didn’t act on these thoughts at the time. He tried to focus on building a new life, moving his family from Arizona to Southern California to Dallas and finally to Seattle, where they currently reside. He did motivational speaking engagements and published a memoir, Come Follow Me: A Memoir. The NFL. A Transition. A Challenge. A Change.

But Hamza still struggled with depression, and in 2017 he checked into an inpatient therapy facility in Southern California that had treated football players in the past. That first stay lasted 30 days. He returned for two months over summer 2018.

“I no longer wanted to live if I was harming or hurting the people I love the most,” Hamza said. “When I felt like I couldn’t contribute anymore, I felt like it was over.”

While in the facility, he took pills and slit his wrists. Fortunately, the clinical director found him before he lost consciousness. Hamza turned to his faith for help.

“I asked God to forgive me for wanting to end my life,” he said. “God is forgiving and merciful.”

Hamza has since returned to Seattle and sees a therapist regularly. A second book about the transition of NFL players into retirement is in the works.

The other brother returns to the field

Husain was 27, two years younger than his brother, when they decided to go to Mecca. He was focused on the social and physical sacrifices required to thrive as Muslims and professional football players. (Both men had played in college for Washington State.)

“It’s not whether you can or can’t, it’s just are you willing to take that lonely road,” said Husain, now 33. “It’s more of a lonely journey, because you don’t indulge because of your set of values.”

He loved the game and got along with his teammates and coaches on the Minnesota Vikings, for whom he played from 2008 through 2011. But he suffered four concussions in a year and a half. And he was around people who drank, smoked and gambled, activities that observant Muslims are expected to avoid.

“For me, I started noticing that this is going to end, no matter how much money I make, no matter how much notoriety I get. Anything I do on the football field, I need to make sure I focus my attention on what matters most and put that first,” Husain said.

In 2014, a year after signing with the Chiefs, Husain was doing well. He’d successfully avoided head injuries, and NFL Films and The New York Times had run features about his experience fasting for Ramadan while training. A month later, he made headlines again after intercepting New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and returning the pick to the end zone. Husain then slid into a prayer, kissing the ground on his knees.

Husain was penalized 15 yards for unsportsmanlike conduct. Game officials said the slide into the end zone was an illegal celebration. But critics noted that Christian players like Tim Tebow and Brandon Marshall have prayed after scoring without penalty. Chiefs head coach Andy Reid commented, “When you go to Mecca, you should be able to slide wherever you want.” The NFL later said the play should not have been penalized and that Husain would not be fined.

In 2015, Husain got a fifth concussion. His eyesight was affected, and he had to wear glasses to read and watch TV. He tried to stay positive, but he also thought about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). He thought about the fates of Seau and other NFL players who’d suffered from impact-related trauma. Although he said he received excellent rehabilitative care from the Chiefs, he decided that continuing to play football was not worth the risks. In March 2016, at the age of 30, Husain retired.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnShzG4lRUi/

His transition out of the NFL has been smooth. He earned a master’s degree in dispute resolution and conflict management. He started the Ashab Network, which provides a space for Muslim athletes and artists like college basketball player Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir and Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad to support each other. He runs a company that helps Amazon deliver packages and is developing a business that provides career coaching for athletes transitioning out of sports. He currently lives in Dallas with his wife and two children.

Ask the Abdullah brothers whether they would play in the NFL again if they could do it all over and their answers are quick and as different as they are. Husain is a solid yes. Hamza is a strong no. Hamza added that he would tell Muslim players to wait until they retire to perform hajj.

Deion Sanders knew all about success.

He had won two Super Bowls and appeared in a World Series. He’d become a father, made a lot of money, even released an album.

Yet in 1997 at the prime of it all, he drove his car off a cliff, ready to die.

His marriage to his first wife Carolyn Chambers and mother of his two oldest children (Deion Jr. and Deiondra) was ending. “I was going through the trials and tribulations of life. I was pretty much running on fumes,” he said. “I was empty, no peace, no joy. Losing hope with the progression of everything.”

Sanders recounted the suicide attempt in his autobiography Power, Money & Sex: How Success Almost Ruined My Life. Amazingly, he survived what he said was a 30- to 40-foot drop without any significant injuries. He decided his life was worth living.

“I finally just got on my knees and gave it all to the Lord,” Sanders said.

“Slowly, but surely, I had to deal with my faith, deal with my strength,” Sanders said. “I had to get a lot of Word in so that I could fight off the enemy. I wouldn’t be where I am today without my faith. People argue about what faith is, and who Jesus is, but it works for me. I’m not going to sit here and argue about who is what, and what is what, I’m just going to say it works for me.”

He began reading his Bible and seeking guidance from mentors such as Bishop T.D. Jakes.

“No one had told me that life would be tough going from one team to another one,” Sanders said. “Going from the enemy’s team, being one of his soldiers, to God’s team. That’s a tremendous turnaround.”

Even as he continued his sports career, Sanders said, he was committed to live a faith-first lifestyle.

“I don’t believe you can be at your optimum without your faith,” Sanders said. “Sports is sports, it’s a game. My faith is everything. It’s the gas that propels the courage, the truth, keeps me going. It’s the wind, it’s the wings, it’s the air that pumps into my lungs, that provokes me to live. Faith is everything.”

Raised by his mother, Connie Knight, in Fort Myers, Florida, Sanders, 51, grew up in a faith-based household.

“I was in church on Sundays,” Sanders said. “It was mandatory that you must go to church on Sundays, and Sunday school as well.”

He attended North Fort Myers High School and was selected in the sixth round of the 1985 MLB draft by the Kansas City Royals after graduating, but went to Florida State University instead to play football, baseball and run track.

Drafted No. 5 by the Atlanta Falcons in the 1989 NFL draft, Sanders, known as “Prime Time,” played with the San Francisco 49ers, Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins. He first retired in 2001 after one year with the Redskins before returning in 2005 to play two more seasons with the Baltimore Ravens.

During his stint with the Falcons early in his career, he recalls talking about faith with his teammate Bobby Butler.

“I named him ‘Reverend Pressure’ because he could take the heat,” Sanders said. “He would always testify to me on his trials and tribulations of life, as well as in sports. By the time I got there, to Atlanta, he was all of that. He was the constant and the consistency that I needed as a friend, from a friend and teammate.”

Sanders won his first Super Bowl in 1995 with the 49ers and another with the Cowboys in 1996. Playing primarily as a kick returner and defensive back, he finished his NFL career with 53 interceptions. The nine-time Pro Bowler’s MLB career included time with the New York Yankees, Atlanta Braves, Cincinnati Reds and the San Francisco Giants.

Moonlighting as an outfielder for the Braves, Sanders batted .533 during four games in the 1992 World Series, including four runs and two doubles. Sanders is the only player in history to participate in a World Series and a Super Bowl.

Sanders is a member of Vision Regeneration Church in Dallas, a nondenominational Christian church led by Bishop Omar Jahwar. Through Jahwar, he has teamed up with Stand Together, a Dallas agency that is working to eradicate poverty and youth violence.

“Finding someone that’s like-minded at this age and stage of my life is a delight to me,” Sanders said of Stand Together. “They give with no expectation, give from the heart. They want to fight domestic violence, homelessness, poverty, disenfranchised families. There’s so many things that they’re up against.”

Sanders is the father of five children, Deion Jr., Deiondra, Shelomi, Shedeur, and Shilo. He works as a commentator with the NFL Network. And he ministers to others and shares his personal testimony, although he won’t call it a ministry.

“What people call ‘in the ministry,’ I call it ‘in my will.’ I’m in God’s will,” he said. “I don’t really get down with a lot of titles, this and that. I believe I’m just in God’s will. If he called me to minister to a group, or setting, or whatever, that’s what it is. That’s what I’m gonna do. I don’t really desire a title to go and do what I’ve been called to do. I think it’s only right to go.”

On Tuesday January 31, 2019 a new feature-length 30 for 30 documentary on ESPN will take a close look at an unbelievably eventful few days in the life of Sanders. The film will capture the 24 hours in October of 1992, when Sanders sandwiched a pro football game between a pair of postseason baseball games in two different cities, located one-thousand miles apart.

It’s awkward.

Yo Ahmad Rashad is the Michael Jordan of picking terrible groomsmen. pic.twitter.com/u6zst4Ucz4

— Travon Free (@Travon) May 13, 2018

Ahmad Rashad, 68, was recently asked about that photo and his (former) friendships with one man accused of gruesomely murdering two people, including his ex-wife, and another accused of sexually assaulting 60 women and convicted on three counts of aggravated indecent assault. Here’s what he told Sports Illustrated:

“Here’s my feeling about that. Everybody has their cross to bear. Those two guys’ crosses are pretty f—— heavy. And that’s all I have to say about it. I’m sure they knew a lot of people. Maybe you just didn’t know them as well as you thought you knew them. You just don’t know. I’m as devastated as everyone else with these two people. It’s like, holy s—. They were in chapters [of my life]. So were a lot of other people. They weren’t the main characters. I’m the main character in my own book. Those two things are just … maybe the most … oh, I can’t even describe it. It’s just … heartbreaking all around. And not so much for them, but the victims. It’s like, that’s f—— crazy. But like I said, that’s their cross.”

While it’s an extremely low bar, this is one of the best explanations a famous man has given over the last few years in response to one (or more) of his friends being accused of a heinous act. Rashad didn’t attempt to defend his friends (he says he had a falling-out with Simpson in 1988 and hasn’t spoken to Cosby in years) or victim-blame the women. He didn’t call the verdicts against Simpson (who was found liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in a civil trial) and Cosby “lynch mobs” instigated to bring down powerful black men.

In 138 words, Rashad showed he believes the victims. And that’s the most powerful thing he could do.