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Love or Hate Him, Whitlock’s The Undefeated Needs to Succeed

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You may have read Deadspin’s Greg Howard 10k word Etherish takedown of Jason Whitlock’s ESPN project “The Undefeated”(if you haven’t you can take a look here).

Whitlock and I haven’t seen eye to eye on many things over the years and Howard and I got into a brief Twitter dispute over BSO not being included in his original piece on Whitlock and the state of minorities in online sports media.

This won’t be 10k words and I am not really concerned with how people personally feel about Whitlock’s management style or manifesto. My concern as always is how minority journalists are seen in the world of media and specifically sports media. One thing that jumped out to me about Howard’s piece was how much people must really hate Whitlock to leak the amount of information they did. This wasn’t one rogue email or text message. Howard essentially had as much information as someone who worked with Whitlock. Someone was secretly recording staff meetings and forwarding confidential information to Howard. It made the Sony Hack look like Nigerian scam email.

There are obviously people within ESPN or who are working directly with Whitlock that want him and his site The Undefeated to fail. The more I thought about that, the more I feel that would cause more harm than good.

For the record, after reading Whitlock’s playbook and vision I think he is WAY off on what makes a successful website in 2015. His thought process is of a newspaper man, which makes sense because he is a newspaper man and the people who influenced him the most made their name by being incredibly talented and trailblazing writers. Nothing wrong with that, but media is no different from any other thing in life, you have to evolve and adapt with the times. You have to give people an incentive to read your 10k word posts. It looks like there are people on his staff that understand that you have to switch it up, you can’t just shoot skyhooks, you have to add some Dream Shakes. His inflexibility might have been the downfall of the site even without Howard’s pipebomb, but because Howard so thoroughly exposed him, we are sort of stuck with this problem.

ESPN has poured a ton of money into this project and while some of the hires (yes I am looking at you Mike Wise) were curious there are GREAT young minority writers on The Undefeated’s staff (I would have given more unknowns a chance, but that is why I have my site). If the project was to fail, there will be a ripple effect.

It would put a lot of good people out of work, it would make other networks leery of putting together an urban specific site in the future.

Let me stop there for a minute because something should be made clear. A site like BSO isn’t a BLACK site, it is an URBAN site. The difference being it just isn’t for black people it is for cool people. Urban culture drives what is cool, being cool doesn’t have a race. White people love BSO, because they think it is hip, non-traditional and the opposite of mainstream. There SHOULD be more Urban sports sites. There should be more sites like the Shadow league, Jocks and Stiletto Jill, Sports Fan Journal, Geeks and Cleats & etc. Urban sports sites have never gained the traction of urban entertainment sites. Which never made any sense to me because sports and entertainment go hand in hand.  They don’t have to all be the same, but they should have one thing in common.  They should speak to the urban community the mainstream largely ignores.  The ironic thing is white owned sports sites that also blend entertainment and pop culture are BOOMING.  Mainstream media has taken a lot of what Urban sports blogs have used for years and incorporated into their coverage.

Part of Whitlock’s issue as I see it, is he wants to be an urban site, but he doesn’t want it associated with any urban culture. You can’t have an urban site and blame rap music for everything. Basically, the current set up of The Undefeated is less cool version of VICE or The Players’ Tribune with more black people. The Undefeated needed to be different and break the glass like Stone Cold, instead it seems to want be an elitist version of Grantland. Grantland shouldn’t be more Urban than The Undefeated. You can’t compete with the Bleacher Report and UPROXX of the world trying to the Black 60 Minutes.

With that being said, we need The Undefeated to succeed. Because even if Whitlock doesn’t realize it or not, he holds a lot of futures in his hands.

My uncle, the same one who told me when I walk out the door I am already down 14-0 in society and not to do anything to increase the deficit, told me two other things that I’d like to share.

The first thing he told me is to always open the door for people. He was adamant about it and when I asked why, he said.

“Because by doing something a simple as opening a door you are breaking a stereotype and maybe just maybe the next person they see who looks like you, their first thought will be positive not negative.”

At this point, much of what we are hearing about the project is negative, we desperately need some positive, before that negative spreads like a disease and affects people who aren’t as secure in his position as Whitlock.

The second thing he told me was this.

“When a white person fails, it is ok because society is set up to give him or her another chance, if a black person gets a golden opportunity & fails, he or she won’t get it again.”

I know this isn’t always true, but the premise is valid that as a black person in society you don’t have many chances to FAIL before they turn on you and eventually kick you out. I don’t like to see any anyone fail. Just because I am indifferent to Whitlock and disagree with some of his philosophies doesn’t mean I want him to fail, because if he fails it has a trickle down effect on all of us.

Someone said to me yesterday, I must be happy that Whitlock’s project is not going smoothly, since less competition in the space, but my brain doesn’t operate like that. I don’t get joy in someone’s else pain, even if they brought it on themselves.  Also I think it is a HUGE problem in the black community that we actively root for people to fail.  This isn’t so much about wanting Whitlock to succeed, but the project to succeed.  Maybe Whitlock wasn’t the best person to QB but the team, but if  you drafted Geno Smith you have to make the best of it unless you ready to get a better QB.  I hope Whitlock doesn’t just dismiss the Howard piece, sometimes you need something like this to force you to take a long look in the mirror. Because it is less about Howard and more about people in Whitlock’s inner circle so frustrated with him they freely gave the information to Howard.  It was like an intervention, so if that doesn’t change Whitlock’s thinking nothing will.

I don’t know what is going to happen. I don’t know what ESPN is going to do. I don’t know if Whitlock will change. All I can hope is that at some point this site which is DESPERATELY needed gets off the ground and becomes a success, because while the site is called UNDEFEATED it already feels like it has taken an L.

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