Chapter 12 Jael Richardson in conversation with Angie Abdou Turn It Upside Down Race and Representation in Sport, Sport Literature, and Sport Lit Scholarship

Angie Abdou: Since some of our readers are American or European, for people who might not know tell us—who is your dad?

Jael Richardson: My dad is Chuck Ealey. In 1968, he was recruited to play football for the University of Toledo. He grew up in Southern Ohio, so it wasn’t a huge distance but a change from a little town to a big city. Also, 1968 is a critical time in history: the Vietnam war and the shooting of Martin Luther King. JFK had already been shot. It was a very turbulent culture time. The University of Toledo recruited my dad to play quarterback, a revolutionary move in an era of very few Black quarterbacks.

My dad had gone undefeated as a quarterback in high school, but University of Toledo had never seen him play a football game. They heard his record and saw him play basketball then recruited him for football. My dad competed as the team’s starting quarterback and they remained undefeated from 1968 to 1971, winning thirty-five straight games, never losing.

My dad ended up going to Canada to play in the CFL afterwards. The NFL wanted him but not in a quarterback role. They gave him offers as the “back-up to the back-up” quarterback or as a running back. He wanted to be quarterback. So, he came to Canada and played for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and became the first Black quarterback to win a Grey Cup.

AA: In 2012, you published The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lessons, a Father’s Life, which explores the impact of racism on your father’s sporting career. The Stone Thrower starts when you’re thirty and you travel to Ohio with your dad for his fortieth high school reunion. You learn the reasons your father left Ohio. Can we sum up that reason as racism?

JR: Racism was an underlying reason he couldn’t make choices other people might have been able to make. For example, other universities gave him offers in his grade twelve year based on his undefeated streak, but they all wanted him to play positions other than quarterback. At the time, he finished his high school football career with three years undefeated and had no offers because he refused to play other positions, even as a scholarship athlete. He was going to go and join the military potentially, the only option left available to him. His principal intervened and invited someone from University of Toledo to come watch him play basketball, which changed his trajectory.

AA: Why do you think he didn’t tell you that information about his background? A protective impulse?

JR: My dad didn’t talk about his past, even the NFL not taking him. He sent a letter to teams saying he would only play quarterback, and that’s when the offers stopped, but he never talked about those inner workings. Researching for my book, I realized how racism shaped his opportunities. He didn’t share those details for two main reasons. First, he didn’t think they were important. He didn’t see the relevance or meaning at the time or even now in some ways. Second, silence was his way of coping, managing the stress and disappointment of that experience.

He’s about to get inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, an incredible moment of him achieving recognition previously denied him because of racism. Now is the first time I’ve heard him admit that these achievements were things he deserved and wanted. He didn’t talk about them being withheld from him because what was he going to do? How are you going to cope with the fact that you live in an unfair system? You can fight it and wrestle with it, but that’s an exhausting way to live. Instead, my father chose to say: This life isn’t fair, and it’s never been fair, but I’ll do the best with what it’s offering me.

AA: Do you think you writing the book and the way you framed his life and the issues led to him seeing the influence of racism in sport culture differently?

JR: I think writing The Stone Thrower and spending time together, during the research and more so during the touring, did change his perspective. When the book first came out and we would travel together, I would share stories about my dad. For example, someone would ask him, “Did you experience racism growing up?” and my dad would answer, “No, not really.” I would say “Excuse me?!!” and share stories of inequality that he himself had told me, about interactions I knew were racist. He would say “Oh yeah, but that’s just the way things were.”

He couldn’t quite recognize how unfair things were. He’d just trained himself to ignore and move on and leave those negative instances behind.

Now when I hear him answering those questions about racism, he does answer them differently. He answers the questions about inequality and injustice more openly and honestly because he knows his answers help other people.

In our travels, when he shared the stories of injustice on and off the field, like sharing what people called him at games, audience members connected, saying “I’ve been there!” or “That must’ve been rough!” He finally admitted the hardship, and you could see the exchange of honesty and thoughtfulness. Knowing he’s on that far side of those experiences has allowed him to share more honestly and see how being honest about racism he experienced can help other people, not just himself.

AA: Is that part of why you wrote The Stone Thrower, why you shared his story, to help other people?

JR: I wrote The Stone Thrower because I wanted people to know the story and the whole story. I also wrote about my dad’s football career because I needed to know the whole story. I wove in my own story because I wanted people to understand not just that my dad had an incredible career, but that he had a very fractured way of sharing it. He didn’t know quite how to talk about his experience with his family. Him not being able to be open about his struggles affected our relationship. I needed to see where my dad had been to understand why he raised us the way he did, why he talked to us the way he did.

I had all these White friends and felt confused about whether I wanted to be Black or not. Recognizing that my dad grew up around a lot of White people at a time of extreme racism helped me clarify things he’d said to me and ways we related to one another.

AA: I like the story behind the book’s title. Can you explain why the book is called The Stone Thrower?

JR: When my dad was around ten years old, he lived in the projects in Portsmouth, Ohio. It was an all-Black neighborhood segregated from the rest of town. He would have to cross over train tracks. In most American cities, there’s some sort of dividing line that historically marks the division between Black and White neighborhoods. In his town, it was these train tracks. He went to a White school, so he had to go over these train tracks every day. When the long coal trains passed, he got in the habit of throwing stones, aiming at certain letters to practice his precision. He said another skill the stone-throwing taught him was timing—how early to throw the rock, how quick to release it. Later, a university study showed that this practice contributed to his success because his timing was impeccable.

The title also alludes to a couple other important moments in my book—like when Martin Luther King Jr. talks about the 1960s as a moment like a stone thrown in the water, where the stone will drop and have an immediate effect, but it will also have a ripple that continues to affect people through history. The idea of stone throwing in my memoir, then, is also about the long-term effect of my dad’s time as quarterback and civil rights movements happening during that time.

AA: How do the themes of racism and sport and the goals you set out to accomplish with telling your dad’s story transfer over into the children’s version of this book you more recently published?

JR: The picture book was tricky because the memoir has the long story of my dad’s life and all his accomplishments, and it’s too big for a children’s book. I had to figure out a core focus for the children’s book different than the adult book. My dad is passionate about ideas featured in his organization, The Undefeated Spirit. The main idea is that we all have to navigate hard moments with focused repetition and effort. The Stone Thrower children’s book zooms in on the moment when my dad goes to the train tracks and throws stones for the first time—and how that focused throwing repetition led to his success.

The children’s book also talks about transitioning that repetition and effort and success into the classroom. Importance resides not simply in being a good athlete, but my dad also had to repeat that hard work in school and be a good, successful student. He must repeat hard work at football practice, repeat hard work as a student, and repeat hard work as a leader.

Those skills learned through “stone throwing” translate well beyond the football field.

I think my dad actually likes the children’s book more than the memoir because the kid version has that concentrated message that it wasn’t just him throwing a football that made him really impressive. Rather what he learned through throwing a football helped him in other areas of life and continues to help him in business and as a dad and in all things.

AA: The Stone Thrower is about so many things—race, father-daughter relationships, communication, civil rights issues, the insidiousness of racism—but I’m approaching The Stone Thrower here mostly as a sports book, a story about football. Many sports books focus on father and son relationships. You’ve made a switch in writing a father-daughter sports book. Do you think coming at his career as a daughter instead of a son influences the story significantly?

JR: Yes, I think it’s really interesting to come at the football story as a daughter instead of a son. My brother actually went to University of Toledo and played football there, like my dad. That’s a story in and of itself, but the interesting thing about being a daughter is I don’t even have the opportunity to play the same sport, so what is the father-daughter bond? What is the thing that connects us? What has my dad passed to me from his athletic career?

That is really exciting and special because I realized writing this book that my dad and I are very similar. I never thought of myself as someone who is focused and who repeats things over and over until I get them right, but I see now, in my professional life, the same diligence and same borderline obsession on getting things right and making sure everything is done well and making sure I’m leading responsibly. Like my dad. Also, like my dad, I learned some of those lessons in sport and carried them into my professional life.

AA: A lot of your work, both your writing and your work as founder and Executive Director of the FOLD, addresses racism and raises awareness about importance of diversity and equality. Are these issues the same inside of sport and outside of sport? Is sport a mirror of what goes on in larger society or is it completely different? What’s your assessment of racism in sport?

JR: It’s really tricky. Looking at books, the issues are much clearer: we need more stories by these groups or by this community. In sport, racism can be a lot more covert. People can say decisions just come down to talent or it’s just about who’s the best without recognizing how we disadvantage kids. Sports that are really expensive, for example—how does that cost disadvantage kids who might be good athletes, but their parents don’t want to prioritize sports? There can be class-based inequities that are very prominent in sport. Class maybe weighs in more than overt forms of racism in sport, but when classism weighs in, race follows close behind.

I’m working on a project now about raising issues of diversity in sport, and it’s been exciting to navigate those questions and to mix sport with what I do with the FOLD. Sport, for example, brings up questions about accessibility with disability. I realized recently that hockey helmets aren’t created to make room for a cochlear implant, so at this point a child who has a cochlear implement simply cannot play hockey. These issues don’t get discussed and addressed often, but I hope they do soon.

AA: If racism in sport is a little more invisible and harder to pinpoint, what can writers of literature do to help?

JR: What writers do that is so very important is we draw attention to things. Think of all the stories of sport that don’t feature women or people of color, yet they’re heralded as “amazing books.” Readers love and celebrate classic sport stories without realizing how many faces are missing and how many people could’ve seen themselves in the book if attention would’ve been drawn differently, if thought had just been a little deeper.

Writers need to be doing this kind of thinking and evaluating about representation. Publishers need to make room for writers of different races, colors, and communities to make different kinds of stories, with a different focus of attention, available. Seeing yourself in a book is so important. The people who that kind of seeing seems insignificant to are the people who have seen themselves in books their whole lives.

If you’re a girl and you’ve only ever seen boys in a hockey book or a basketball book, how do you think of yourself as that kind of athlete? Once writers put that female character on the rink, the story reflects a new possibility. That’s the beginning of reshaping what a reader views as acceptable or possible.

A book doesn’t have to directly tackle racism within the story, but the narrative can represent different types of people and represent events accurately; sometimes that kind of accuracy will expose ideology or behavior that readers recognize as wrong in a way they didn’t before.

AA: My next question speaks to your role as the founder and director of the Festival of Literary Diversity. My co-editor and I both belong to the Sport Literature Association, as do most of the essay contributors. We have recognized within our association a concerning lack of diversity. When I started thirteen years ago, there were maybe three regular women. The society was made up mostly of White men. Now we’re up to close to half women. But we’re still very White. In a book like this one, the conversation has shifted, and we have diversity in terms of the sports, authors, athletes, and ways of understanding, but the list of scholars still lacks diversity. We’ve made efforts to include more diversity within our association and within our publications, but we’ve had very little success. How do you go about saying, “Okay, we want more diverse voices in this conversation,” and then making that happen?

JR: Great question. That’s the core of where many organizations must begin, recognizing that the lack of diversity as a problem and then recognizing they don’t have an immediate solution. If there were an immediate successful solution, we’d implement it right away. The reality is that the work of diversity is a long work. I often say, “It’s a long journey in a singular direction.” You must commit to the stance that diversity is an important issue that you will continue to bring up over and over again as it continues to shift and change. In a lot of cases, that commitment requires honesty about what it might be like for someone from a marginalized group to join the community. Would the group be open and accepting or do they just create the appearance of being open and accepting? Then you must hand-recruit people to join the association. Ask yourselves: How can you actively recruit new members from these communities? It’s like any kind of recruitment. You might ask twenty people and two say yes. So, if you want twenty people, you might have to ask two hundred people to join. Build a team with this specific goal of creating a space that’s welcoming for different communities, and then actively recruiting folks to join and being willing to do that on repeat.

So you start with, “Can we continue to grow a group of people who feel that the organization is a welcoming place?” and then the next goal becomes, “Can you change the structure of the leadership?” Ideally, that’s the end goal, but you can’t change the structure of leadership if you don’t have the body of people in the organization. Changing to a more diverse, inclusive, and open community is a long and intentional act.

AA: A group of younger scholars in our organization have started a committee with the specific goal of increasing diversity and welcoming scholars from a wide variety of communities. The other challenge is that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour) scholars are so in demand because everyone wants to hear from them, and they’re overloaded and overburdened and overworked. So, when we say, “Will you write an essay for my collection?” they say, “No!” They’re far too busy. We realize their time is valuable, and they have too much on their plate. What do you suggest as a strategy to include those voices without overburdening certain scholars?

JR: Yes! That’s the challenge. It’s like the pilot crisis right now. The industry let go of pilots, and now everyone wants pilots, but it takes a long time to become a pilot.

You have to look at “What are the qualifications?” and “How do those qualifications prevent us from making room?” Can you make space for those at a different stage or different entry point just to have those voices contributing?

That inclusion might involve a lot of cracking and breaking and reassembling what you’ve traditionally done. It might require turning everything on its head. Instead of looking for “qualified” scholars, look for the voices and stories you need and give them the opportunity to be part of the conversation on the path to getting qualified. If the end goal is to have more diversity in your association and in your publications, you start with that very specific target and ask how you can channel people to be more ready to contribute.

These scholars are in demand right now because they’re “hot.” But I remind people: this work is not trendy. It’s just what we should be doing and should’ve been doing all along. It might require patience and rethinking how you’ve always done things. Maybe you approach a younger audience—undergraduates or masters students—and then they get a breakthrough moment with your publication, and you accomplish your end goal of diversity while elevating scholars who would normally have had to wait five more years to get a similar chance. Remember: Traditional qualifications might not always be the best indicator of talent or engaging content.