(CW/TW: discussions of racism, racist slurs, media bias.)
When a sign of an athlete obeying in advance — how quickly gotta support the team becomes normalizing fascism!! — shows up on the radar, it evokes Jake Powell, who is easy to confuse with Ben Chapman.
This bit of cope draws heavily on the essay, “Jake Powell is the bigot who unwittingly sparked change,” Steve Wulf wrote for ESPN.com in 2014. It appears here slightly condensed in audio. It was published during the Obama era — just months before Ferguson, and a year before youknowwho came down that escalator. Wulf remarks upon not only the deed, but also how ‘excuse machinery’ works.
On this date, eighty-seven years ago — July 29, 1938 — Jake Powell of the New York Yankees tried to do A Funny. The 29-year-old outfielder made a racist remark about brutalizing Black Americans during a live radio hit with Bob Elson before a Yankees-White Sox game at Comiskey Park.
He said the quiet part loud. Then, thanks to Wulf and author Chris Lamb, we know the apologists said the loud part quiet.
They examined how, when “the evil of bigotry (is) in the air,” media outlets will offer “many defenses and rationalizations.”1 ’Tis safer to do that instead of comforting the afflicted and confronting bad-faith actors, some of whom are paying the bills. (Subscribe to Mark Jacob for more about that.)
In this passage, one can spot tropes that linger today.
Elson, the broadcaster who approached Powell for a radio interview after batting practice on July 29, 1938, was hardly a provocateur. He was just a hard-working pro in the middle of a 40-year career … Like many of his colleagues, he probably saw Powell as a colorful character who played hard and spoke his mind.
No tape of the interview exists, but the Chicago Defender, a newspaper for African-American readers, reported the following exchange between the broadcaster and player:
Elson: "How do you keep in trim during the winter months in order to keep up your batting average?"
Powell: "Oh, that's easy. I'm a policeman, and I beat n-----s over the head with my blackjack."As soon as the words came over the radio, WGN cut off the interview. Irate listeners were soon calling the station; the Commissioner's Office, which happened to be in Chicago; and the Yankees' team hotel. The station and Elson tried to apologize over the air, and Powell would tell reporters, “To the best of my knowledge, I said I was a member of the police force in Dayton during the winter months, and simply explained my beat was in the colored section of town.”
Too little, too late: Pandora's box had been opened, and the evil of bigotry was in the air. (ESPN.com, Feb. 21, 2014)
Jake Powell had an increasingly bad time for the rest of his life. And, eventually, all he and Ben Chapman were remembered for in baseball was racism. Golly-gee-whiz, there might have been another convenience sample of that on the news the other day, but I was already halfway through writing this post.
So why do the media and society extend a sympathetic ear to someone who lashes out due to untreated toxicities? Well, people read it. It shouldn’t subsume what is right. The only compassion should be knowing that the offender is demonstrating that hurting people hurt. That must not become the lede or an outright excuse.
The Smiths probably satirized the tendency to grant automatic second chances minus consequences very well.
He was a sweet and tender hooligan
And he swore that he'd never, never do it again
And of course he won't
(Not until the next time)
That modicum of compassion is also needed if the cringey athlete was in a combat or collision sport. Their thinking was likely affected by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which can only be diagnosed posthumously. It was diagnosed in Bobby Hull, Hockey’s Cringiest Superstar (trademarked: Gare Joyce).
One must be open to the possibility that the recently departed wrestler Terry Bollea also suffered from it as a result. Bollea, after all, performed in wrestling shows up to 400 days a year in non-union promotions. Oh, if only Bollea had the clout, fame, and the drawing power to lend to labour organizing during his Peak. There is nothing complicated about him; he was a coward, like all bigots.2
Grant you, the death of Terry Bollea on July 24 would seem a much more convenient jumping-off point for we humble Substack shiteposeurs than a long-ago obscure ballplayer. I do not follow pro wrestling. I share memes with friends who will appreciate them.
So, sorry, you get a dusty bit of baseball history.
Knowing all this, seeing pro athletes — please feel free to seek your examples — obeying in advance in the 2020s should not ruffle or raise a ripple. They know not what they do... at least, not right now. They follow the folly of Jake Powell and Ben Chapman.
There is no expectation that someone whose specialty generates abundant economic rents will know better than to self-protect by choosing such ignobility. Hey, it feels good in the short run! You just wanna be on the side that’s winning… Bob Dylan. Might-makes-right makes sense if you hit the genetic and hand-eye coordination lotteries.
Of course, they’re gonna go bathe in the status quo. All tides turn, especially when, as Wulf writes, crudeness expose a Big Lie.
What happens when the tide turns? What do you have inside? Might wanna let that marinate.
There is also a bit of folk psychology to understanding what lurks in the jock mind. In Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s series BoJack Horseman, one of the most compassionate TV series made, the film director character Kelsey Jannings (Maria Bamford) posits that people emotionally and cognitively lock into their age.
BoJack’s stunted, too. He got famous in his twenties, so he’ll be in his twenties forever. After you get famous, you stop growing, you don’t have to.
… Your age of stagnation is when you stop growing. (BoJack Horseman, “YesterdayLand”)
For some-but-not-all athletes, for entertainers, that might as well mean they stay somewhere between the ages of 10 and 22. They built up their talent; it was rewarded. Ergo, the capitalistic society that compensated them should not change.
Reflect on the first time you realized your favourite athlete, or the players on your favourite teams, were arbitrarily assigned to wear the hat or shirt you aligned with. They had their special skills, man-o-man did they have special skills, but there was no leg-up on helping you sort out your way to do critical reasoning with good humility.
There is the same proportion of intelligence and curiosity in a locker room as in any other environment. So, on that date in 1938, critical reasoning and good humility flew the coop when Jake Powell got on the mic.3
Now, off the top, there was a reference to confusing Jake Powell with Ben Chapman. They were both righty-bat outfielders on World Series-winning Yankees teams in the 1930s. Each of them was hella-racist.
However, in my mind, it became ‘didn’t Chapman also wisecrack about being a policeman and assaulting Black people?’ No, that was Powell.
Chapman is a principal antagonist in the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 (2013), starring the late Chadwick Boseman alongside Nicole Beharie and Harrison Ford. Chapman was the manager of the Phillies who verbally assaulted Jackie Robinson in 1947, knowing full well Robinson was sworn to turn the other cheek. That was also a lesson in unintended consequences, since the bullying led Robinson’s Dodgers teammates to rally around him.4
In the movie, the slur-hurling Chapman is portrayed by comic actor Alan Tudyk.5 A certain comedian who was quote, unquote cancelled during #MeToo has a great bit about imagining the audition for the part. Having to show you can convincingly shout that racist slur while in a period-appropriate baseball uniform. In a fairly paint-by-numbers biopic,6 casting Tudyk against type was a brilliant choice.
In his hectoring scenes Chapman is both a class clown and a classic bully and each reminds the movie’s audiences that racism is just as often accompanied by a smirk as it is a scowl or a shout. Writer-directior Brian Helgeland wanted a character actor who might make the audience lean forward with his charisma before making them recoil with his dialogue. (EW.com, April 15, 2013)
The movie 42 felt like its final script and edit were subject to the express written consent of Major League Baseball. But at least it got one of the realities about the pervasiveness of prejudices right. It showed that while change is inevitable, here is why growth isn’t, due to charismatic charlatans.
To be fair, there is documentation that Chapman grew during his post-baseball dotage. He stretched enough to have his life called “complicated” in a headline.7
Around 1992, a year or so before he died, Chapman told author Ray Robinson, speaking of Jackie Robinson (the two Robinsons were not related): “A man learns about things and mellows as he grows older. I think that maybe I’ve changed a bit. Maybe I went too far in those days. But I always went along with the bench jockeying, which has always been part of the game. Maybe I was rougher at it than some players. I thought that you could use it to upset and weaken the other team. It might give you an advantage.” He then paused, and added, “The world changes. Maybe I’ve changed, too. Look, I’m real proud that I’ve raised my son different.” (SABR)
It just takes some people longer to grow.
Getting the wrap-it-up sign…
A moral of the Jake Powell fabulism is about the peril of us letting “foibles (be) usually forgiven.”8
That loops with the long-term benefit of opting out from ‘separate the artistic output from the artist’ moral and mental gymnastics. Find a good but not greedy pocketful of their work that means something to you, and run far and run fast.
Up until July 29, 1938, based on Steve Wulf’s premise, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and his 16 bad-faith-acting bosses could cosplay as the moral authority with segregation. Speak of vague long-term consequences of integration. Pandering to fear of the unknown is highly marketable.
We see that same shittiness in the present. The organized assaults on trans health care and rights. It is a noisy, heartless, peanut gallery goaded into dehumanizing and erasing people, with the end goal of destabilizing citizenries. The tropes are all the same.
By the way: Odd how the ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ crowd believe their ideology supersedes science. Isn’t science rooted entirely in facts, while ideology is rooted entirely in feelings?
Leadership can egg this on for only so long. What happens, inevitably, is someone such as Jake Powell shows their arse. And gives the game away.
Wulf again:
What is true is this: It took a racist like Powell to lay bare the racist hypocrisy of baseball and build support for the integration of baseball. As Chris Lamb, a professor at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis school of journalism, writes in his book, “Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters And The Long Campaign To Desegregate Baseball”: “The publicity surrounding the Powell story made it harder — though obviously not impossible — for baseball to ignore the issue of race.”
Landis and baseball owners had resisted integration both on the field and in the stands for years. But because of the public outcry over Powell’s interview and threatened boycotts wherever the Yankees played, Landis and the team had to do something. “Jake Powell was not alone in his opinions,” Lamb says. “He just didn't have the impulse control to hide his feelings, or the common sense to know a radio audience might react differently to his wisecrack than teammates and writers might. Basically, though, he was a miserable human being.”
So, the TL:DR for this post: Jake Powell is allegorical whenever you see anyone in sports, entertainment, or other forms of media going along with or normalizing rising fascism. We shall see how long the latter lasts.
Giving hate is not the rejoinder to hate. Committing to grow is the way. Well, except when it involves the New York Yankees.
A friendly reminder about #Resistance
I post about current affairs in Notes and on Bluesky (n8sager). Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe and be kind.
Cha Gheill, et continue à écrire / fortsätt skriva. Elbows Up. Let’s Go Blue Jays.
June 19-July 29, 2025
Hamilton, Ont. : traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
Steve Wulf, “Bigot unwittingly sparked change,” ESPN.com, Feb. 21, 2014.
You might also know Terry Bollea from recent headlines such as “Hulk Hogan Was a Racist, Liar, and Scab,” (Dave Zirin, The Nation, July 25) and “Hulk Hogan, Enemy of Free Press and Rabid Trump Fan, Dies at 71,” (Robert McCoy, The New Republic, July 24), and “Jim Cornette on Hulk Hogan’s Lies Over The Years” (Official Jim Cornette/YouTube, Sept. 16, 2021).
Wulf, ESPN.com, 21-02-2014.
Bill Nowlin, “Ben Chapman,” SABR.
During promotion of the film, Tudyk said it made him ill to deliver some of Chapman’s dialogue.
I was left cold by 42. It came off at times like Jackie and Rachel Robinson only existed in 1946 Montréal and the sphere of the 1947 National League. It omitted decades of activism and shaming aimed at getting the gatekeepers of the 16 clubs in the American and National leagues to, well, grow a set and hire the best players. The other barrier breakers, Larry Doby at Cleveland in the American League, and Johnny Ritchey with San Diego on the West Coast of the United States, also don’t rate mention.
Eventually, I stood down on my hyperfixation and realized that if inspired some conversations among families with adolescent children, so much the better.
One fan theory: the more honest, but unbankable Robinson biopic — it might work as a historical novel — would cover the lion in winter, the great athlete at the end of his also tragically short life in the early 1970s. The embittered man who was fed up with the glacial rate of change, the lack of Black managers and coaches, and bearing the trauma from his earlier life, died at age 53 from complications of diabetes.
See Creg Stephenson, “The complicated legacy of Birmingham’s white baseball legends: Ben Chapman,” AL.com, June 28, 2024.
Wulf, ESPN.com, 21-02-2014.
