Opportunities

From a New York Times article about the life of George Floyd:

After graduating from high school, Mr. Floyd left Texas on a basketball scholarship to South Florida Community College (now South Florida State College).

“I was looking for a power forward and he fit the bill. He was athletic and I liked the way he handled the ball,” said George Walker, who recruited Mr. Floyd. “He was a starter and scored 12 to 14 points and seven to eight rebounds.”

Mr. Floyd transferred two years later, in 1995, to Texas A&M University’s Kingsville campus, but he did not stay long. He returned home to Houston — and to the Third Ward — without a degree.

I know nothing of George Floyd’s experiences in secondary and higher education. But I know something about the ways in which educational institutions can exploit student-athletes. And I know something about the ways in which educational institutions can leave students, athletes and non-athletes, woefully underprepared for future learning. So I think it’s reasonable to wonder: did high school, where George Floyd excelled in both basketball and football, prepare him well for college? Did community college prepare him well for a four-year school? Did that four-year school offer him — a first-generation student, raised in poverty — the support he might have needed to succeed?

This comment in the Times article, from Stephen Jackson, a retired NBA player and friend of Floyd’s, struck me:

“I tell people all the time, the only difference between me and George Floyd, the only difference between me and my twin, the only difference between me and Georgie, is the fact that I had more opportunities.”

*

October 8: A Washington Post article about how systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life describes his time in college:

By the time Floyd left high school in 1993, he wasn’t academically prepared to go to college. But his athletic skills earned him a place at a two-year program in South Florida before he transferred closer to home — to Texas A&M University-Kingsville, a small, mostly Latino school known as a pipeline to the NFL.

“Big Floyd was always talking about going to the league,” said his close friend Demetrius Lott, who also was on the football team and lived in the same apartment complex. “It was what we all wanted.”

The Black students stuck together and supported one another. The red tile-roofed Spanish Mission architecture of the campus, with its rustling palm trees lining quiet streets, was a world away from Third Ward projects. Adjusting to college life wasn’t always easy for him, his friends said, but it was a happy, triumphant time because few from his neighborhood had made it that far. . . .

Floyd, a tight end, went to practice every day, but he wasn’t making the grades or completing the credits that would have allowed him to get on the field. Many of Floyd’s friends also fell short, unable to finish college or make it to the pros.

Other students, particularly White ones, had “a better foundation, a better support system,” said college roommate Marcus Williams. “Me and Floyd didn’t have that.”

There are more Washington Post articles to come. The next one is to be all about education.

*

The second article in the Post series clears up the question of whether Floyd was an athlete at Texas Kingsville: he was taking developmental (remedial) classes that did not count toward eligibility. Thus he could practice with the football team but not play.