As the sun rose above Dorsey High School the morning after the election of our new president, the football team joined together in the school's cramped weight room and let out a spontaneous chant: "O-bama! O-bama!" they shouted, "O-bama! O-bama! O-bama!"
These were kids from South L.A.'s hard-nosed streets. Teenagers who, if this had been any other election, say they would not have been paying much attention.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, November 16, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 23 words Type of Material: Correction
Kurt Streeter column: In a Nov. 6 column, Kurt Streeter misidentified a Locke High student as Boniquia Smith. Her name is Doniquia Smith.
This election was different.
Wednesday morning was different, full of new possibilities.
I gathered with about two dozen Dorsey football players; big dudes and small, thin, fast ones, most of them African American, some of them Latino. They told me that seeing a black man become the leader of the free world would have a profound effect on the way they saw themselves and their futures.
No longer, several said, could kids like them think there were but a trio of paths out of the inner city: by conquering the streets, or becoming an entertainer, or becoming a star athlete like Dorsey alum Keyshawn Johnson.
"If Obama can be president, well, this gives us hope," said Darius Turner, an astute senior defensive back who is said to have a future in big-time college football. "Kobe doesn't have to be everybody's role model anymore."
No offense to Kobe, but that was music to my ears.
Throughout this long political season I've wondered whether having Barack Obama as president might alter the sports landscape. I have a theory -- the Obama Effect, I'm calling it -- and it goes like this: Among our next president's many attributes is that fact that he has real intellectual heft; he's as sharp a tack as we've ever seen on the political stage.
Our kids see this, see how he has created a winning life through his wits, his ability to reason and his dedication to book smarts. Many of them come from the black and brown inner cities that produce an inordinate amount of our pro athletes. For generations, weighted by poverty and race and all of the attendant problems, far too many of these kids have grown up thinking the life of the mind was something to be shunned. Being smart was "acting white," which made you a target. Physical prowess and overwhelming toughness have for too long been the coin of the realm.
Now comes Obama, buster of all mythologies, a powerful symbol that great power can come though the mind, a president who can make a certain geeky-coolness a bit more in vogue in urban America.
