Making it financially does not protect you, though. Genetic gifts and a gigantic professional contract do not shield athletes from the effect of damaged childhoods.

I personally love Brady Hoke. He played football at Ball State a decade before me. He was the third-leading tackler on one of the greatest Ball State teams in history.

The Colin Kaepernick Kneeling Trojan Horse has turned sports into the victimhood Olympics, the most powerful venue in popular culture to preach critical race excuse-making.

With the pervasive popularity of rap music and a black man sitting in the White House, there's no reason to pretend the NBA has been handicapped by the blackness of basketball.

I jumped on the Brady Hoke bandwagon in 2003 when he left an assistant job at Michigan to be the head coach at our alma mater. During his six years at Ball State, we were close.

The sacrifices you make in your 20s pay off 30 and 40 years later. The same is true when it comes to financial progress. Every dime saved in your 20s turns into a dollar in your 60s.

A right to privacy is at the very foundation of American freedoms. It's a core value. It's a mistake to undermine a core value because we don't like the way a billionaire exercises it.

The Democratic Party, the mainstream media are using fear to control people and to control African Americans in particular. You cannot function properly if you live in an irrational fear.

Great wealth creates an arrogance and, to be quite frank, a god complex in some people that they start feeling like they can do no wrong, they own people, they're superior to other people.

Baseball and its 162-game schedule are challenging enough, but try winning the world series of dugout poker with cards supplied by Royals owner David Glass, the Wal-Mart-trained billionaire.

Baseball died in K.C. - and other small markets - in 1994 when Bud Selig and the players' union stopped the season one week after the Hal McRae-led Royals completed a 14-game winning streak.

I apologize for being the voice of reason here, but this sports fan has almost zero interest in seeing women dunk a basketball. It's a nice little novelty act that has a very short life span.

We overhype everything. We create monumental myths. There are people who still believe that Brandi Chastain and the U.S. women's World Cup team pulled off the equivalent of the Miracle on Ice.

ESPN is the exact network Deadspin desired. It's diverse on its surface, progressive in its point of view, and more concerned with spinning media narratives than with the quality of its product.

Journalists used to be obsessed with working at a New York magazine or newspaper or TV network. Now the entire industry is obsessed with going viral and how words will be received via social media.

You can't be Allen Iverson on a football team. And even Iverson got run out of Philadelphia when he was still a spectacular talent because the Sixers got tired of the headache and his bad attitude.

But at the end of the day, in order for me to reach my full potential, I need an environment that allows me to be me... The executives at Fox Sports get and embrace me. Fox Sports allows me to be real.

You want to be leaders and you're black and I'm here to tell you how to do it. Disconnect from this social media garbage; disconnect from these celebrity athletes who don't really care nothing about you.

As someone who has an affinity and passion for discussing racial and cultural issues, I made it a point to only discuss those issues when they really mattered and not turn the shows into Malcolm X Unplugged.

We won. The media. We destroyed Barry Bonds, drove him crazy, turned the most disciplined and feared hitter the game has ever known into a fence-swinging hack, drained all the excitement out of his 714 home runs.

We've been doing a 40-year end zone celebration of the victories won by our parents and grandparents. We haven't shepherded our history. We haven't taught it so others can learn from it and implement the lessons.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Southern, conservative minister who believed in the American promise. His dream was patriotic and traditional. Family, work, self-determination and religion comprised his core values.

Order rooted in and maintained and restored by fear, intimidation, brutality and incarceration is immoral and untenable. Justice is order's intended soul mate. But serving justice is twice as hard as serving fear.

And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don't have our best interests [at heart].

I didn't brown-nose my way here. I pulled out guns and shot my way here. So people don't mind shooting back. If I'd gotten here brown-nosing and playing all the political games, I'd probably be treated differently.

True story: In the spring, my first in K.C., I'd written a series of columns in the Star demanding the Royals front office give fans discounted prices at concession stands as an apology for the 1994 strike. The Royals acquiesced.

There's no way you can do any homework on Black Lives Matters, and not see that it's a Marxist political organization. It's not about Black Death. It's not about black men. It is a political move. It's a communist political move.

Steve Fisher did not like me at all. I was hyper-critical of him. I didn't think he was much of a coach. He just kind of rolled the ball out there and I was pretty outspoken about that. Steve Fisher and I didn't get along at all.

I'm talking about their supporters, and Donald Trump's support is coming from people who love Donald Trump, who unconditionally love Donald Trump to the point that they will risk their health and go to rallies with thousands of people.

I don't own a gun. I'm a pacifist. I am a critic of commercial gangsta rap music. I don't believe you change people or their flawed perspectives from a distance. You open their minds from up close, when they realize you respect and love them.

New York and San Francisco are distinctly different. San Francisco is driving the American media, not New York. You have young, microwaved millionaires and billionaires reshaping the American media in a way that reflects San Francisco values.

The only place where we're not segregated in mass is in sports. You go to a football stadium or a basketball arena, and all of America is there: the wealthy, the poor, the black, white, Latino, conservative, liberal, and we all talk about sports.

Mob rule is dangerous. Well-intentioned, TV-baited mobs are the most dangerous. They do not consider the consequences of their actions, and they're prone to take a simple-minded, instant-gratification approach to justice rather than a strategic one.

In the immediate aftermath of the civil-rights movement, Democrats marketed liberalism to us as fashionable, sophisticated and liberating. Today it needs a surgeon general's warning: hazardous to your family and the values you were taught as a child.

What has truly impeded ESPN from overcoming its financial mistakes and inability to adapt to technological advances? The decadelong culture war ESPN lost to Deadspin, a snarky, politically progressive sports blog launched by Gawker's Nick Denton in 2005.

If all of my instructions to staff during the seven years I hosted a radio show were written down and examined, I'd sound a lot like Bruce Levenson. Hell, I might sound much worse. The path to inclusion and diversity is not paved with precise, pretty words.

Investing in your long-term health means cultivating the skills to prepare your own meals, developing healthy eating habits and a willingness to make time to exercise. The earlier you embrace these habits, the healthier you will be in your 50s, 60s and beyond.

Dez Bryant isn't Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees or Russell Wilson. Dez Bryant is a typical, me-first NFL receiver diva, cut from the same cloth as Terrell Owens, Chad Johnson, Randy Moss and Keyshawn Johnson, sprinkled with a heavy dash of Pacman Jones.

As the lone black host at two different all-sports stations, black callers and listeners dominated my show. Black advertisers did not. The show was financially supported primarily by white businesses, and the largest demographic for listener growth was white males.

Men do really dumb things. We see weapons of mass destruction where there are none. We over-emphasize sports. We place athletic achievement ahead of academic achievement. We spoil and pamper child athletes and then complain when they act spoiled and pampered as adults.

Removing Donald Sterling from the NBA solves nothing. It sets a precedent that will likely boomerang and harm the black players and coaches who are shocked and outraged that an 80-year-old man with a documented history of bigoted actions also has bigoted private thoughts.

We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Remember that the NFL was cultivated into prominence by Pete Rozelle, a pro-war conservative. In the 1960s, Rozelle hired a World War II veteran-turned-filmmaker, Ed Sabol, to produce highlights, commercials and documentaries that marketed the sport as patriotic and militaristic.

The liberal-run institution of journalism does not allow probing of real problems facing black people. That is prohibited. It might lead to actual solutions. It might provoke black people to wake up every day looking for solutions rather than excuses and meaningless verbal offenses.

I've been a solo act, a columnist and worked from home, only relying on myself. Now I'm part of a team, a leader, and I have to fit in at a big corporation and deal with all the moving parts, all the different personalities. That has been a challenge, to be quite honest, that I've embraced.

Unchecked pride evolves into swagger, a hypnotizing mask of insecurity that can and does compromise our ability to make progress and attain power. Pride stands in the way of forgiveness and a strategic approach to navigating a chessboard rigged to prevent pawns from becoming kings and queens.

It is possible to set your standards too high, which can undermine a man's confidence and ability to perform. Instead of reaching for the stars and settling for the moon, there is considerable evidence that man is better served reaching for a blade of grass and settling for an under-the-table handshake deal.

There is a business built around racial grievance. And that business is booming at such a level that white people are like hey, I'm going to adopt a whole new identity so I can benefit from being Baby Al Sharpton, Baby Jesse Jackson, and in academia, this has been embraced and she has been able to pull off this scam.

And here come the Left Brothers - Al "747" Sharpton and Jesse "DC 10" Jackson - barreling in for a landing on top of Goodell's dome. And this time every black person with an ounce of common sense and self-respect is riding shotgun with Jesse and Al, who have justifiably voiced their displeasure with Limbaugh's ownership bid.

Ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenaged boys bloodied and dead. Handguns do not enhance our safety, they exacerbate our flaws. tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation, rather than avoiding it.

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