I received news Sunday night about an award I’m being given. No, I didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize, although I wouldn’t turn one down. Instead, I’m getting an award far more prestigious, because it’s coming from an organization that I’d like to think values the contributions of men (and women) who look like me.
The Sam Lacy Pioneer Award is not part of some beauty contest, as Pulitzers tend to be. Look at the roster of winners each year, and I think you’ll see my point. Great journalism happens in more newsrooms than just The New York Times and The Washington Post.
I know, because I’ve been in newsrooms that produced such excellence. In some ways, it might be why the Sports Task Force of the National Association of Black Journalists is giving me its highest honor. I suspect the honor is coming my way for my lifetime achievements.
I don’t want to sound immodest, but I have accomplished a lot in print journalism and in teaching journalism to others. I’m told I’ve mentored scores of journalists — Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians. I’m proud of that, too.
But a Pioneer Award for me? I’m undeserving of it.
I think of pioneers as the generation of Black journalists who came before me. They’re the ones who took all the arrows. Yes, I took some too, but not like Lacy, Wendell Smith, Rollo Wilson, Doc Young, Chester L. Washington and those who put their pen to paper before Black men could find a seat in a press box. They ducked and dodged those arrows, but they stayed in the fight. They committed to telling the story of my people — the good, the bad, the ugly of what we did in sports.
Surely, those journalists found more good to tell than bad, which is the reason they deserve more recognition than what they’ve been given. They pushed hard for integration, for the right to do what white men did.
I didn’t have the same fight they did. Times had changed in April 1982 when I got hired in the Sports Department at The Detroit News, but what did it mean? I found the path to a front seat in the press box littered with hurdles so high I needed strength like Superman to leap them.
I did. Oh, did I clear those hurdles — most of them, anyway.
Yet if I did anything worthwhile during my journalism career, it was that I never forgot to cut down the weeds, to clear the path ahead for those who would follow me. No doubt, they’re better off in the start of their careers than I was.
I won’t recap what I faced. Yesterday is gone, and I’m not going to get it back. Instead, I’ll focus on today and what tomorrow might hold. Perhaps I can still lend a helping hand to someone, offer him or her sage counsel on what sports journalism might offer them if they stick to it.
When I accept the Pioneer Award on Friday, August 8 at a downtown Cleveland hotel, I’ll keep what words I do say short. I will make sure, though, I speak the names of Lacy, Smith, Wilson and others who took arrows. I do them wrong if I stand behind a microphone, a shiny plaque in hand, and not acknowledge that I’m getting this award because of them. For they were true pioneers — fearless souls who wanted a career in sports journalism so badly they endured the anguish of working in the last rows.
They had more pluck and grit than I ever did.
