“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Building off of that quote and the tireless work of the beloved Civil Rights activist, our latest episode of The A Lot of Sports Talk Podcast takes a look, from a sports perspective, at the ongoing issue and history of race relations in the United States (with a particular focus on the state of South Carolina) on the backdrop of the racially-motivated shooting at a South Carolina church on June 17. We are joined by A.D. Carson, a graduate student in Rhetorics Communication and Information Design at Clemson University who, in 2014, wrote a poem called “See The Stripes,” highlighting the racist and pro-segregation stances taken by men who were instrumental in first shaping the identity of Clemson University. In our conversation, we ask A.D., among many other things, about the reaction he received on campus when the poem went viral just before the start of the 2014 college football season, how aware the student-athlete population is of the men who are posthumously honored throughout the school and what his experience was in personally going down to Charleston, S.C. a few days after the aforementioned shooting. Also, A.D. expresses to us why the reaction by the Clemson administration to the event in Charleston, while progressive on the surface, ends up being hypocritical.
Afterward, current Los Angeles Sparks center Jennifer Hamson joins the program to talk about her transition from being a two-sport megastar in college at Brigham Young University to being, as of now, just a rotation player as she begins her WNBA career. Just a few months ago, Hamson was the “it” girl in college sports, leading the BYU basketball team to its second-ever Sweet 16 in March of 2014, then taking the volleyball team to the national championship game this past December. Before the Sparks’ game with the New York Liberty, Hamson talked with us about how tough it was to leave volleyball behind to start her pro basketball career, the hardest part in adjusting to life as a professional and the person in her family who, she says, will be an even better player than she was at volleyball. (Jennifer was a two-time AVCA All-America while at BYU, mind you.)
Please enjoy the podcast, and leave us any and all comments that you have. Click here to go to the A Lot of Sports Talk podcast page on iTunes, and from there, you can download this show as well as subscribe to our podcast page and receive new episodes on your device the second it is posted. You can also open iTunes, and in the Podcasts section, type in “A Lot of Sports Talk” in the search box to find our shows.
Interview Order: Intro (0:00 – 4:12); A.D. Carson (4:14 – 30:50); Jennifer Hamson (30:55 – 35:52); Wrap-up (35:57 – 38:55)
[Cover photo (Jennifer Hamson on right of photo) courtesy of Joseph D. Sullivan/Newsday]
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