crabs in da barrel? or just crabby?

[jamesfrmphilly]

Posted on Tue, Dec. 06, 2005

Mondesire blisters McNabb

By WILLIAM BUNCH

If you read it too quickly and didn't see the byline, you might think that a controversial column lambasting Eagles' quarterback Donovan McNabb was another blast from ultra-conservative radio-talker Rush Limbaugh.

It said that McNabb - who led the Birds to the Super Bowl last year but had a sub-par 2005 before succumbing to injuries - was a "mediocre talent" who is "hiding behind excuses dripping in make-believe racial stereotypes" for refusing to run the football more often.

"But then you played the race card and practically all of us fell for your hustle," the columnist wrote.

"You scammed us man, and there's no way any longer to refrain from 'keepin' it real.' "

In fact, it's hard to know what's more stunning: The harsh criticism of the Eagles' most successful quarterback in nearly a half-century or its source - J. Whyatt "Jerry" Mondesire, the fiery civil-rights advocate who heads the NAACP in Philadelphia, publishes the Philadelphia Sun newspaper, and may run for Congress next spring.


READ THE COMPLETE TEXT of Mondesire's column at the Daily News blog Attytood.

Mondesire's screed, published in the Sun on Sunday, is already causing a stir on Philly's talk-radio circuit, from black-oriented WHAT (1340-AM) to sports-talk WIP (610-AM), where former Eagles player and occasional host Garry Cobb called into the station to rant about the article.

The controversy carried echoes of the remark that caused Limbaugh to resign from ESPN's Sunday football coverage in 2003, when he said that McNabb was overrated because of "a little social concern in the NFL," that both the news media and the league wanted a black quarterback to do well.

But this time, there are several twists.

Mondesire, in a phone interview yesterday, said that although Limbaugh was critical of how others regarded McNabb, he is criticizing McNabb himself - for moving away from the style of rolling out and running the ball more, rather than throwing from the pocket. He said the reason was to counter stereotypes of running black quarterbacks.

Eagles officials said yesterday afternoon they were too busy getting ready for last night's game with the Seattle Seahawks to read the article or to track down the injured McNabb for a comment.

McNabb has never explicitly said that race is the reason for his running the ball less. He has made comments, however, suggesting he resents it when blacks are called "running quarterbacks."

And in fact, McNabb has run for fewer yards than the prior season each year since he became the Eagles starter in 2000. He ran for 629 yards that year, while in 2005 - hampered by a sports hernia - he gained just 55 yards in nine games.

Glen Macnow, the WIP talk-show host and author of Philadelphia sports books, said, "I think his refusal to run is kind of stupid as well," although he doesn't necessarily hang that on race. He also said McNabb seems to have more critics among black callers, perhaps because they see his running reluctance as "kind of a sellout."

Of course, no one was criticizing McNabb during last year's near-magical season, but that has changed with a losing record (4-5 before the QB went on the disabled list) and with the Terrell Owens' debacle exposing raw emotions among fans.

Mondesire wrote that some of T.O.'s shots against McNabb were on the money - especially that McNabb "choked" in Super Bowl XXXIX.

"The brash and bombastic Terrell Owens may have committed the unpardonable sin of going public with his put down, but was he fundamentally wrong?" he asked.

"The pressure, the hype, the clock - they all just converged and your nerve collapsed under their combined weight.

"Mediocre isn't horrible in and of itself. Most of us don't live up to our dreams. It's when we fake it that most of the rest of us get irritated."

[jamesfrmphilly]

Donovan McNabb: Mediocre at best
By J. Whyatt Mondesire - Philadelphia Sun newspaper (one of philly's black papers-JFP)

Hey McNabb!

Yo--Donny! I'm calling you man.

Hey, soup guy, over here!

Donovan E. McNabb, you hear me callin' you. Will you please pay attention?
For a whole lot of years now, we've heard you crying aloud about being taken seriously as a black quarterback who can camp out in the pocket and deliver rifle shots across midfield right into the fingertips of the fleetest of wideouts and tight ends. Say, like a Doug Williams, the brilliant Grambling star quarterback of a generation ago who went on to break a Super Bowl record for touchdown passes in 1988.

Well....well...I've seen you Donovan E. McNabb--in your formative years as well as your mid-career development--and one thing is certain. Donovan E. McNabb you're no Doug Williams.


(The Grambling all-star completed 18 of 29 passes for 340 yards and four touchdowns, capping it off with 35 points in the fourth quarter alone. He followed that performance with three conference championships in 2000, '01 and '02.

Your record is another matter entirely. In fact this whole dismal season so far has really been a testament of fallen dreams and lost opportunities most of which belongs at your feet (or should I say hands) and that of your coach, Andy Reid who has allowed you to perpetuate a fraud on the field while hiding behind excuses dripping in make-believe racial stereotypes.

Normally this column talks very little about sports because the games that grown men play pale in comparison to the great issues of racism, politics, social calamities, health crisis's, war and peace, etc.; which gives us plenty of fertile territory to explore and pontificate about.

However, this week I felt compelled to offer some personal thoughts about your horrific on-field performances this season because at their core, there is a lie you have tried to use to hide the fact that in reality you actually are not that good. In essence Donny, you are mediocre at best. And trying to disguise that fact behind some concocted reasoning that African American quarterbacks who can scramble and who can run the ball are somehow lesser field generals than one who can summon up dead-on passes at a whim, is more insulting off the field than on.

Your athleticism and unpredictability to sometimes run with the ball earlier in your career not only confused defenses, it also thrilled Eagles fans. At last, said many of us, now we have a multifaceted offensive threat whose talents threaten to not just dominate the NFC East Division, but maybe the whole NFL for several years. We were elated. We were in awe.

We celebrated the boss's giving you that huge lifetime salary deal which meant we'd have you around until it was time for you to join the other retired stars in television's broadcast booth.

But then you played the race card and practically all of us fell for your hustle. You scammed us man and there's no way any longer to refrain from "keepin' it real."

We could have remained silent too, if you had found another way to remain effective and a winner. But when your mediocre talent becomes so apparent it's time to call it out.

Through the first four games, you completed 110 of 174 passes (63.2 percent) for a league-leading 1,333 yards and 11 touchdowns.

However, in your last five games, you connected on just 101 of 183 passes (55.2 percent) for 1,174 yards and five touchdowns, while throwing six interceptions, two of which clearly were game losers.

The sports hernia you suffered after the team's Week 3 win over Oakland clearly is a mega factor in the latter numbers.

But who can forget your mind numbing fourth-quarter collapse in last year's Super Bowl against New England.

Andy Reid may not have seen it. Owner Jeff Lurie may have missed it on the videotaped replay. But Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder "saw" it. You choked brother.

The brash and bombastic Terrell Owens may have committed the unpardonable sin of going public with his put down, but was he fundamentally wrong? The pressure, the hype, the clock--they all just converged and your nerve collapsed under their combined weight. Mediocre isn't horrible in and of itself. Most of us don't live up to our dreams. It's when we fake it that most of the rest of us get irritated.

So, for you to continue to deny we fans (as well as yourself) one of the strongest elements of your game by claiming that "everybody expects black quarterbacks to scramble" not only amounts to a breach of faith but also belittles the real struggles of black athletes who've had to overcome real racial stereotypcasting in addition to downright segregation.

College football in the South didn't drop its White Only wall until 1966 four years after James Meredith, while trying to enroll at Ole Miss, which went 10-0 that year, even as its practice field was covered federal troops who had bivouacked there.

Earlier this month Sports Illustrated reporting pioneering black players in the vaunted SEC had to endure serious hardships, such as "Fritz Pollard, the black all-America at Brown during World War I, (who) had learned to spin on his back and thrust his cleats in the air when tackled, to protect himself from late hits; how Iowa State's Jack Trice was trampled to death during a 1923 game against Minnesota; and how in 1951, on the first play from scrimmage, an Oklahoma A&M player broke the jaw of Drake running back Johnny Bright, forcing him to abandon football and causing the school to withdraw in protest from the Missouri Valley Conference."

Hey Donny, see any difference yet in your trumped up racial views and those pioneers?

Taken together, your pretty decent arm, strong desire to win, and your instinctive ability to scramble in the backfield gave you an awesome package. Take away any one of the legs from this tripod, and whole thing falls flat as you are right now as you recuperate from the surgery that was long overdue the day you entered the hospital.

Finally, your failure as a team leader off the field to my mind did as much as anything to exacerbate the debacle that has become synonymous with T.O.'s full name.

Professional football is really more about money that sport. The fans know it. The players signs contracts for it. And, of course the owners know it, since they are first and last ones to count it when the season ends.

Just think how the whole media circus could have been avoided had you had the courage to offer only a tiny fraction of your bonus this year to Owens and running back, Brian Westbrook.
The gesture alone would have prompted these guys to run through walls for you. The rest of the team would have praised you. And what the heck were Lurie and team president Joe Banner going to do publicly if they objected or thought you had reach out-of-bounds. Fire you?

Yeah right. Let's really do "keep it real."

Leaders who make sacrifices are the stuff of legends. Who remembers a hoarder except for maybe Midas?

Hey Donny...soup guy! Pull your head out of your million-dollar Campbell's soup bowl for a moment ask which current quarterback in fact made a gesture like that for members of his squad.

Does the name Tom Brady ring a bell? Isn't he the guy who took home last year's Super Bowl ring while you standing in the soup line?

[DBlack]

They don't know what they are talking about. McNabb is easily one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. Multiple pro-bowls, stats, and wins tell the story.

[jamesfrmphilly]

the Philadelphia football fan is highly frustrated at this time.
something bad is going to happen to somebody.
Monday night was ugly.

they have even started to criticize Reid in the papers. he used to be God.

[Corals]

McNabb-Owens flap spirals into unwanted racial controversy

BY JOHN SMALLWOOD
Philadelphia Daily News


PHILADELPHIA - That I disagree with the negative assessment Philadelphia NAACP head Jerry Mondesire made of Donovan McNabb in the Philadelphia Sun is irrelevant.

Mondesire, like everyone else, is entitled to his opinions, and more power to him for having a forum like the Sun to express them.

I guess what I'd really like to know is how or why the quarterback's performance, Terrell Owens' self-created banishment and the Eagles' fall from Super Bowl to the cellar of the NFC East has evolved into a referendum on "blackness" in some segments of Philadelphia's African-American community.

In his column, Mondesire blasted McNabb as an average quarterback who played the race card. If McNabb were Caucasian, would Mondesire have been moved to go against his normal policy of not commenting on sports because "the games that grown men play pale in comparison to the great issues of racism, politics, social calamities, health crisis's, war, peace, etc. . . . "?

If McNabb were Caucasian, I am positive white people would not have been motivated to call into talk radio shows and debate whether the quarterback was a true white man.

But debating Donovan McNabb as a true black man is exactly what a good number of African-Americans in Philadelphia are doing since the Owens-McNabb flap became the focal point of the Eagles' demise.

It's fascinating that this has spiraled way beyond the confines of a football debate. And don't tell me it hasn't, when terms such as sellout, token, company man, Uncle Tom and other racially charged ones have been thrown into the debate.

What this black-on-black verbal violence has caused me to wonder is: Who gets to determine who is truly African-American and what is or isn't a part of African-American culture?

Is McNabb only sort of black because his parents, Sam and Wilma, stayed together and raised him to act like an adult when confronted with something such as Owens' repeated criticism?

When did handling a difficult situation with class and dignity become a negative in the black community?

Is Owens a full-fledged ``brother'' now because he stood up to the man while minstrel-acting his way out of millions of dollars?

Does T.O. lose some of his street credibility because he dropped his "hard-*** brotha" act and basically begged "Massa" to take him back as soon as he realized he really was getting kicked out of the house and off the plantation?

So what is the criteria for being black?

Allen Iverson "keeps it real" because he remembers his roots growing up in the ghettos of Hampton, Va.

Kobe Bryant is labeled as fraud because he grew up in Italy and Lower Merion.

So does that mean Iverson's children eventually will be branded similarly to Bryant because they will have grown up in a wealthy lifestyle of the Main Line?

Who gets to make those determinations?

Is it Mondesire? The fellas on the corner in North Philly? The black lawyer or doctor living in Chestnut Hill?

If my father left the streets of Baltimore to serve for more than 20 years in the Army because he wanted his children to have it better than he had, does it make me less of a black man because I grew up on military bases and in the suburbs of Baltimore?

If I got scholarships for having good grades and worked a job every day so that I could afford to go to the University of Maryland, am I less black than the man who pulled himself up through the school of hard knocks?

I get e-mails all the time questioning my blackness because I work for the Philadelphia Daily News, because I sometimes criticize black athletes, because I don't always say what some black people want or expect me to say.

So is growing up impoverished in the inner city an absolute must to be considered "truly" black?

I grew up in a school district that was only six percent black and was called a "******." Would it have been more accurate had they called me "little kind-of-a-black boy lost in suburbia?"

Damn, it sure hurt like I was being called "******."

If I don't subscribe to the "thug life," does that mean I don't subscribe to the black life?

Sorry, folks, but I'm not buying that. My roots are what they are. I am what I am, African-American.

As black people, the fact that we come from so many different segments of society should be our greatest strength.

Instead, we often let our diversity and the accompanying ability to bring varying perspectives to the table be manipulated into divisive tools that we readily use against ourselves.

So maybe McNabb really is just a mediocre quarterback with a penchant for choking in big games. But how does that make him less of an African-American?

And on whose authority does someone get to decide that?
http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/ml...ll/13368309.htm

[jamesfrmphilly]

Mondesire has been soundly criticized by other brothers for his attack on McNabb.

[Corals]

Wednesday, December 14, 2005
McNabb answers critical column from NAACP leader

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb has expressed surprise and disappointment after hearing of racially charged criticism made by Philadelphia NAACP president J. Whyatt Mondesire in a Nov. 27 column in the Philadelphia Sun.

Mondesire, the Sun's publisher and editor, wrote that McNabb is a "mediocre talent" who tries to disguise his ineffectiveness behind "some concocted reasoning" that African-American quarterbacks who scramble are somehow lesser "field generals."

McNabb, who endured Rush Limbaugh's comments just a few years earlier, was baffled by Mondesire's remarks.

"Especially being the same color I am," McNabb told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Obviously if it's someone else who is not African-American, it's racism. But when someone of the same race talks about you because you're selling out because you're not running the ball, it goes back to: What are we really talking about here?

"If you talk about my play, that's one thing. When you talk about my race, now we've got problems. If you're trying to make a name off my name, again, I hope your closet is clean because something is going to come out about you ... I always thought the NAACP supported African-Americans and didn't talk bad about them. Now you learn a little bit more."

Mondesire also claimed that McNabb's "failure as a team leader off the field" led to the Terrell Owens situation. If McNabb "had the courage to offer only a tiny fraction" of his bonus to Owens and running back Brian Westbrook, Mondesire wrote, the "media circus" could have been avoided.

"When you go deep into that, or say I didn't stick up for someone, or why didn't I give a little bit of my money to someone else who is making money, you try to find an answer for that," McNabb told the Phialdelphia Daily News. "There's no answer that I've found."

McNabb plans to move on from Mondesire's column, but for the first time in his Eagles' tenure, McNabb has to answer questions about locker-room leadership.

"This season was a tough season from the beginning," McNabb told the Inquirer. "People may blame it on just one particular person, but ... it's something that kind of spread in the locker room.

"There's never been a question of me losing the locker room until this year. If I've lost the locker room, then the question goes up why. Is it because now people are starting to look at me sideways for what I've been doing, or what I make, or whatever he had a problem with? That's the question I'm trying to get answered: If I've lost the locker room or not? No answer has come my way.

"But I do know the main reason we're not a good team is because we don't play as a team. Everybody has to realize that in order for us to get back to the Super Bowl and win it, we all have to play well together. You never heard anything like this coming from the Indianapolis Colts. You never heard anything like this coming from the New England Patriots. Baltimore, when they won the Super Bowl, they never had anything like this."
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2258970

[jamesfrmphilly]

BTW - Mondesire is planning a run for the legislature.
I've been wondering if that is why he has done this and if it will help him or hurt him. so far, he has gotten nothing but blow back.

[Living4Him]

While reading the articles posted in this forum, I had thought to myself that Mondesire must have a hidden agenda, and your "BTW," jamesfrmphilly, confirms my suspicions.

By the Way: I grew up in northeastern PA, and I have family in Philly...plus I'm a Sixers and Eagles fan from way back in the day 'til now. Being out of the country, in China, I have not been able to keep up with all of the news. Thanks for helping me stay up on the latest happenings with the Eagles.

Peace,
Living4Him

[DBlack]

Well, I will no longer contribute financially to the NAACP. I'm sick of the leadership in it with their 'crazy' comments and lack of support of the very people they are in existence to uplift.

If the NAACP keeps Mondesire on staff, they will write their own ticket to destruction. People like Mondesire give the rightwingers ammunittion as they are struggling to make political inroads into the black communities. If they can destroy the NAACP then they will surely have it easier in using republican uncleToms to form their own organizations to represent 'us'.

McNabbs' career and life as a person needs no defense here. All I'm going to say is look at his career stats here. His accomplishments speak for itself.


Lastly, I would like to say that Philadelphia don't even deserve a pro football team. Even other football players of other teams have commented on the fanbase and their conduct towards the team. It's bad enough that the fans are a bunch of spoiled rotten brats, but now the city leadership is rotten as well. If I owned the Philly Eagles, I would pack up and more to Iowa. Perhpas the whitefolks in cornfields out there will appreciate what the Eagles would mean to their state morale and economy.