In a long overdue tribute to the first African American to break international tennis’ color barrier, a new statue of Althea Gibson was unveiled at the opening day of the U.S. Open.

The statue is comprised of five granite blocks and created by American sculptor Eric Goulder. It sits outside Arthur Ashe Stadium at the Billy Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, New York.

In 1947, Gibson broke into the elite ranks of the tennis world winning the first 10 consecutive American Tennis Association women’s titles. (The ATA was the tennis equivalent of baseball’s Negro Leagues.) At the age of 23, Gibson became the first African American player to compete in the U.S. Nationals, the precursor to the U.S. Open, in 1950.

Between 1956 to 1958, Gibson made her mark. She won 11 majors, and was the first black player to win the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals. When she retired in 1958, she was the top-ranked woman in tennis having won more than 50 singles and doubles championships.

Perhaps because she was a star during a period when tennis champs made no real money and because she was a woman, more than a few people believe Gibson did not get all of the respect she earned as a trailblazer.

“Recognizing for me as an African American woman and recognizing what Althea stood for and understanding that she truly broke the color barrier for tennis – a lot of people think it’s Arthur [Ashe], but it was Althea 11 years before him,” said Katrina Adams, former president and CEO of the U.S. Tennis Association.

Adams, along with Billy Jean King, helped lead the campaign for the Gibson statue.

“I said, ‘She’s our Jackie Robinson of tennis and she needs to be appreciated for it, and she’s not,’ ” King told the Undefeated in 2018. “I wanted something there that was permanent. I didn’t want just a one-day highlight.”

“It’s about bloody time,” said Angela Buxton of Britain, who won the 1956 French and Wimbledon doubles championships with Gibson, referring to the statue as quoted by the Associated Press.

Buxton, who is Jewish, shared more than doubles titles with Gibson. She knew first hand what Gibson endured as a black competitor in a sport dominated then by white players.

“Althea, with her two ticker-tape parades, still wasn’t allowed into a hotel where the whites sleep or a water fountain to drink where whites drink, but she helped to break that down,” Buxton said.

After leaving the tennis world, Gibson had a brief career as a golfer, becoming the first African American woman to join the Ladies Professional Golf Association.

Etched on one of the granite blocks of the Gibson statue is a quote from her: “I hope that I have accomplished just one thing: that I have been a credit to tennis and my country.”

Gibson died in 2003 at the age of 76.

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The University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide have won five national championships in the past 10 years. “That’s too many!” shout the haters, who especially love to pillory Alabama’s stern head coach Nick Saban. But in Alabama — and especially the team’s hometown of Tuscaloosa — there’s mostly devotion.

A new college football season begins Saturday, and for the Crimson Tide, there is a renewed sense of mission. In last season’s national championship game, Alabama got walloped by rival Clemson. With a new season upon us, Saban and his team are determined to, as he likes to say, “not waste a failure.”

A season approaches

It’s a sweltering mid-August morning in Tuscaloosa, and the Alabama campus is largely deserted. Bryant-Denny stadium is empty, but you can hear a football season approaching.

T-shirts are already stained with sweat as members of the Alabama marching band drumline rip their way through morning practice.

Five, six, seven, eight…one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Band members count off as they move in formation without drums. Once the drumming starts, the rat-a-tat sound reverberates for blocks. This morning session is the first of three. That’s right: three-a-days for the group known as the Million Dollar Band.

Hit your notes. Hydrate. Roll Tide!

On the same morning, business is bustling at the Waysider. It’s the city’s famous Alabama football-themed restaurant where a small black chalkboard out front marks the number of days ’til the next kickoff.

Inside, the walls are crowded with photos and paintings of players and coaches. Diners order from a menu with “Breakfast of Champions” written on the front. Including a woman whose striped shirt and lipstick match the school colors.

“Every day you need to wear a little bit of crimson,” says Mary Jo Mason, a real estate professional who has lived in Tuscaloosa for 51 of her 78 years. She’s been a season-ticket holder for all 51 years and has cheered many national championships. Under the legendary Alabama head coach Bear Bryant, and since 2007, Nick Saban.

Mason is buzzing about the upcoming season.

“We’re riding high,” she says. “We have a great recruiting class and nobody ever questions Saban’s ‘process.’ And we’re looking forward to being in the [college football] playoffs and going into the national championship which is in New Orleans this year.”

Indeed, for ‘Bama fans, heading into a new season these days isn’t a question of ‘how will we do?’ It’s more, who are we going to play for the title?

Amidst her optimism, Mason doesn’t mention last season’s Clemson game. When asked to consider the national championship drubbing, Mason says she doesn’t have revenge on her mind.

“I don’t care who we have [as a title game opponent],” she says, adding, “I just want to win the national championship. [Beating Clemson] should not be our focus. Our focus is us, and what we have to do to get there.”

She sounds a lot like the head coach she reveres.

“I felt like I personally needed to do a better job of keeping people focused,” Saban said a few hours later. He was talking about what he learned from the 44-16 beat down by Clemson.

“I think one of the most difficult things is for the players to stay focused on not the outcome, but what does it take to do to get the outcome.”

Trusting the process

That is the foundation of his success. Getting young men to do what’s required to accomplish a lofty goal. At Alabama, it’s called “the process” and it’s a hallowed term in Tuscaloosa, albeit a big vague.

Ask what the process is exactly, and you get different answers. But you’re not wrong if you say the process involves accountability, coachability, effort, discipline. Doing things the right way so many times and with such little deviation that you can’t do it wrong.

“We’ve had good players who buy into the things that we do here,” Saban says, “to help them be more successful as people, students and players. And it’s worked fairly well for us.”

In his 12 years in Tuscaloosa, Saban’s won five national titles [he also won one coaching at LSU earlier in his career]; he’s got 141 wins against only 21 losses; and he’s had more players drafted into the NFL than any other coach. His recruits are regularly among the best in the country.

But there’s another important factor that links Saban’s success to Bear Bryant’s decades ago.

“The one way in which they’re alike is that they had 100% confidence in what they’re doing,” says sports writer Cecil Hurt. He’s covered Alabama football for the Tuscaloosa News since 1982.

“But they also had the ability that very few people have,” Hurt continues, “to convey that confidence onto the people that they are leading. It’s one thing for you to be confident in yourself. It’s another thing for a room full of 18-to-21 year olds to be confident along with you.”

After the Clemson loss, Saban didn’t lose confidence in the process. It just needed shoring up.

“We didn’t have as good of accountability and preparation,” he says. “We have to have everybody put the team first. [And] those are all the things that we’ve tried to re-emphasize, to get our players to stay focused on.”

The message has gotten through to players like senior defensive back Shyheim Carter.

“People think just because we [are], you know, Alabama, we just going to walk in the stadium and win,” Carter says, adding, “it doesn’t work like that. We have to prepare just [like] everybody else, just [like] every other game.”

Saban urges his players not to dwell on losses, or wins. But Carter says the Clemson defeat has come in handy.

“When leaders on the team feel like practice is going sluggish,” he says, “they always say ’16 to 44.’ Remember that. And you know that kind of gives everybody an extra boost.”

16 to 44. Alabama is first, even in defeat.

Don’t waste time

There was nothing sluggish about practice on this day. A loud horn sounded off when players were supposed to move to the next drill. Quickly. Saban was in the thick of it, wearing a straw hat with crimson-colored band, working with his defensive backs. He moved well, despite recent hip replacement surgery. That was in April. He was back at work within 36 hours of the operation.

Saban doesn’t like to waste time.

Indeed, before our interview, one of his assistants advised us not to meander with questions. Be direct. How will we know if it’s not working? His leg will bounce, we were told. Fast.

Or maybe, we’ll get a snarl. Search “Saban rant” and YouTube is filled with clips of him yelling at practice or snarling at the media.

There are moments of levity too. But those don’t always make it onto the highlight shows. We’re left with the snarl, which, in Alabama-unfriendly territory, has earned Saban nicknames like “satan” or the “Nicktator.”

What does he think about his reputation as the dour leader of what’s been called a joyless juggernaut?

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Saban says. “I think in this day and age it takes about 40 seconds for anything that you say or do to get out there publicly to be evaluated one way or the other. Obviously you can’t always please everybody but hopefully we can please the people in our organization and help them be more successful.”

And, Saban says, they do have fun at Alabama.

“It depends on how you describe fun. You know is it fun cutting up and doing crazy stuff that is not going to help you sort of be successful in the future? Or is [it] fun knowing you did your best to be the best you could be at whatever you choose to do? And that doesn’t mean you don’t laugh and enjoy yourself and the relationships that you develop while you’re doing it.”

It also doesn’t mean it’s not hard.

Saban is a perfectionist, which he says he got from “great” parents.

“I worked for my dad in a service station,” he says, “and if you didn’t wash the car right you wash it again. If you didn’t do things the right way, you know there were consequences for it. So I guess it just became a part of how things are supposed to be done and need to be done for you to create any value for yourself and your future.”

An admirable trait but it can be wearing on others. Saban certainly can be tough on his team. Thirteen assistant coaches have left Alabama in the past two years. They are in high demand, and many went to more prominent jobs, after having worked for a demanding boss.

Former Crimson Tide offensive coordinator Michael Locksley told the Wall Street Journal, “Every day you walk in that building you better bring your ‘A’ game. My goal was to show up every day and not have Saban have to rip my butt.”

There are seven new coaches this season, and a renewed dedication to the process. Will it be enough for a seventh national title, giving Saban the most of any college coach in history?

A final answer won’t come until January, when Alabama may be playing for another championship. But don’t ask Saban about that now, eight days before ‘Bama’s opening game of the season against Duke.

It would ignore “the process,” and for sure get that leg working overtime.

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Ever since Jay-Z announced a partnership between his Roc Nation entertainment company and the NFL — ostensibly to help the league step up its Super Bowl halftime show and amplify its social justice program platform — the whole thing has played out like a tragic blaxploitation flick. One powerful scene in particular from the era keeps replaying in my mind, like an eerie precursor to last week’s press conference and the resulting fallout. It comes from The Mack, that 1973 cult classic about an ex-con who turns Oakland into a pimper’s paradise while dodging both the clutches of The Man and the revolutionary angst of The Brother Man. With the opening notes of Willie Hutch’s “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” stirring in the background, Goldie the pimp (Max Julien) and his movement-minded brother Olinka (Roger E. Mosely) square off in a war of words pitting black capitalist against black activist — one thriving off the system’s inherent inequality, the other dead-set on dismantling it piece by unconscionable piece.

“You really don’t understand, do you?” Olinka asks in his red, black and green knitted beanie. “Hey man, don’t you realize in order for this thing to work, we’ve got to get rid of the pimps and the pushers and the prostitutes? And then start all over again clean.” Goldie, his wide brim tilted to the side, strikes back: “Nobody’s closing me out of my business,” he says. “Being rich and black means something, man. Don’t you know that? Being poor and black don’t mean s***.”

To pimp or be pimped, that’s the eternal question — and from the cheap seats, it’s hard to tell which role Jay-Z has cast for himself. When it comes to espousing the ideals of free market enterprise, there is no bigger cheerleader in hip-hop than the rapper born Shawn Carter, who has come a long way from Brooklyn’s Marcy projects. But when the oppressed find themselves sitting in the seat of their oppressors after two decades of musical chairs, that’s no anomaly: It’s the system replicating itself as designed. For his part, Jay-Z helped raise a whole generation of fans on a don’t-hate-the-playa-hate-the-game ethos of black capitalism that doesn’t even begin to account for how rooted the system is in white supremacy and inequality. Can’t knock his hustle, but the dangerous thing about Jay’s latest deal is that it comes at the cost of a struggle already in progress. Whatever his intention, he’s only succeeded so far in further polarizing the movement that made Colin Kaepernick a modern-day Muhammad Ali.

“I think we’re past kneeling. I think it’s time for action,” Jay-Z stated while announcing the deal last week, sitting alongside NFL commissioner Roger Goddell at Roc Nation’s Manhattan headquarters on Aug. 14, three years to the day after Kaepernick’s first protest. The partnership has effectively turned one of the NFL’s most vocal (and certainly one of its most powerful) critics into a paid contractor. Two years ago, Jay wore a Kaepernick jersey during his Saturday Night Live performance. Last year, he thumbed his nose at the league with the line, “You need me / I don’t need you,” on the song “Apes***” that he released with Beyoncé. And when he urged artists like Travis Scott not to entertain Super Bowl performance offers, the assumption was that he was motivated by the same social politics in doing so. Now, the deal he’s struck for an as-yet undisclosed amount has raised questions what his motives were before.

“Jay-Z Helps the NFL Banish Colin Kaepernick,” sports journalist Jemele Hill headlined her piece for The Atlantic. Indeed, the quarterback continues to pay the price of daring to use the NFL’s platform to bring visibility to social and racial injustice in America. Jay claimed last week that he had had a conversation with Kaepernick before closing the NFL deal, but refused to share the details of their talk. Kaepernick’s girlfriend, radio personality Nessa Diab, called that “a lie,” saying that Kaepernick was “never included in any discussion” with Jay-Z or the NFL about their eventual partnership. An anonymous source close to Kaepernick told Jemele Hill that he and Jay-Z did talk, but “it was not a good conversation.”

It’s easy to imagine that conversation going about as well as the one between Goldie and his brother in The Mack. Reactions to the deal have been equally explosive, especially on social media where age-old arguments about black America’s best path forward for true liberation — be it market-driven or movement-driven — were reignited. “F*** Colin Kaepernick,” rapper Freddie Gibbs posted on Instagram earlier this week while making it clear that he’s riding with Jay-Z. (He later tweeted that he’d had an enlightening conversation with Jemele Hill, after she posted that his response was exactly what the NFL wanted.) Other vocal Jay-Z supporters have included Vic Mensa and Cardi B, but with the caveat that they both believe Jay’s involvement will ultimately help Kaepernick get back into the league. Roc Nation’s own J. Cole and filmmaker Ava DuVernay have been among the high-profile supporters of Kaepernick in the past week, while Carolina Panther Eric Reid, who was the first to join Kaepernick’s protest, called Jay-Z “asinine” for saying the time for kneeling has passed. On the day of the press conference, Kaepernick himself wrote on Twitter,”I continue to work and stand with the people in our fight for liberation, despite those who are trying to erase the movement!”

According to Jay-Z, his switch from staunch NFL critic to potential ally came not as an abrupt about-face but through a series of conversations with Goodell over the last several months. He credits Patriots owner (and President Trump supporter) Robert Kraft with helping to start their talks; Kraft has also played an active role in Roc Nation’s criminal justice reform initiatives, most notably as a supporter of Meek Mill. Plans for collaboration include expanding on the league’s existing Inspire Change initiative by adding a program of unofficial anthems (“Songs of the Season”) from select artists to be played during NFL broadcasts, a podcasting platform for players (“Beyond the Field”) and a visual album of Super Bowl halftime shows. Those plans have already been criticized as a platform designed to move player protests off the field, and it already seems to be having the subtle effect of silencing NFL players on the field. One day after Miami Dolphins player Kenny Stills criticized Jay-Z for “choosing to speak for the people, [as if] he had spoken to the people,” Dolphins head coach Brian Flores reportedly had his team play eight straight Jay-Z songs to open up practice.

Maybe it’s easy to forget due to the narrative being hijacked by critics, but Kaepernick was never protesting the NFL. He was protesting police brutality and racial injustice, and for good reason: Young black men in America are now more than twice as likely to get killed by police than their white peers, according to a recent study. Clearly, this stuff is bigger than football. What remains to be seen is how Roc Nation’s collaborations with the NFL will address these systemic issues, and actually help bring us past the time for kneeling. As it stands, the deal feels like the NFL attempting to invalidate Kaepernick’s sacrifice, without extending him the courtesy of a seat at the table. And its success hinges on Jay’s ability to leverage black cultural capital for the benefit of a league that has spent the last three years publicly devaluing it.

At one point during last week’s press conference, Jay-Z turned the questions on the reporters in the room, asking several of them: “Do you know what the issue is?” It was a rhetorical question, meant to highlight his belief that Kaepernick’s protest has already done the job of highlighting what’s at stake. But the real question is whether Jay-Z truly understands the issue. After receiving pointed criticism from Harry Belafonte for a lack of social responsibility several years ago, Jay’s done admirable work pushing for criminal justice reform, producing documentaries on Trayvon Martin and Kalief Browder, and bankrolling legal defenses for Meek Mill’s probation case and 21 Savage’s immigration case. But he’s also been known to oversimplify the ways that money, power and racism intersect to marginalize Americans who look like him.

This is the same black billionaire, after all, who encouraged a concert hall full of his own skinfolk to, “Gentrify your own hood / Before these people do.” The freestyle was meant to pay homage to Nipsey Hussle’s economic revitalization efforts in South Central Los Angeles. But it failed to contextualize how property values and racial privilege remain tethered together in ways that overwhelmingly leave black folks displaced and erased in the process. Nor did it mention his own previous role in that same erasure: The 1% minority ownership stake he held in the Brooklyn Nets helped pacify concerns about the future economic impact of Barclays Center, a development that has helped gentrification creep into Biggie Smalls’ old hood just a few blocks away.

Despite the criticism, there’s still room for the Roc Nation / NFL initiative to do impressive work. The current fallout is largely about optics rather than execution. And Jay does have a history of shaky rollouts: Remember the live-streamed Tidal launch, anyone? His streaming service has not only survived alongside big boys Spotify and Apple, it’s built up its own brand loyalty by catering to an urban demographic. (As a longtime subscriber, I should know.)

Only in black America are entertainment moguls tasked with being as astute in the political arena as they are in concert arenas. Every individual decision a black celebrity makes is weighted with the responsibility of representation. There’s a long history in this country of black artists being used to quell protests or co-opt movements; the question is whether Jay-Z fully grasps what’s at stake. You can’t be critical of the status quo — and the NFL definitely represents the status quo in this country — if you’re working to uplift it. The new deal shouldn’t let the NFL off the hook for mishandling Kaepernick, and Roc Nation shouldn’t be taken as a proxy for the people, even if its work does ultimately benefit the people. It’s clear that Jay-Z knows his worth, but hip-hop’s first billionaire must learn to wield his power in ways that don’t undermine the efforts of activists putting in ground work.

If you haven’t seen The Mack in its entirety, the ending — spoiler alert — is a revelation. Despite competing worldviews about how to uplift the black community, Goldie and Olinka end up linking to defeat their common enemy: corrupt cops. Resolving the distance between capitalists and activists is easier to romanticize on the big screen, but the truth is hustlers, club owners and entertainers helped bankroll and bail out the leaders of the civil rights movement, too.

Instead of sitting with Roger Goodell at last week’s press conference, Jay-Z should have been sitting with Colin Kaepernick. Even if their methods are different, we needed to see Jay working to reconcile the NFL’s relationship with the player who spearheaded the fight for social justice on the field before working to repair the NFL’s reputation off the field.

If the brothers gonna work it out, they’ve gotta stick it to The Man together.

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