...............................................
cobbland;3360099 said:
Newton's critics racist, Moon says
By CAM COLE, Postmedia News September 22, 2011
It's depressing that we're still talking about it.
Depressing, especially, when the day's allegations of racially motivated criticism of an African-American quarterback come from the greatest of them all, a football Hall of Famer in Canada and the U.S., a former NFL Man of the Year, and pro football's all-time leading passer in all kinds of categories until he was outlasted in a number of them by guys named Damon Allen and Brett Favre.
It's depressing that Warren Moon has to climb back on this stump, 34 years after turning pro with the Edmonton Eskimos, because he hears some of the same code words being directed at Carolina Panthers rookie Cam Newton today that haunted him when he finished up at the University of Washington in 1978 and had nowhere to go but Canada.
Moon, 54, a Seattle Seahawks broadcaster, is also a sort of adviser to Newton, the NFL's No. 1 draft pick, who has passed for 854 yards in the first two games of his career.
So maybe he's taking the mixed reviews of Newton's debut performances a little too personally, but when the critics were looking only at the Panthers' 0-2 record and the rookie's four interceptions and already wondering if he had the football IQ to handle the NFL's sophisticated defences - two games in - it was bound to ring some old bells.
"Some of the criticism was racial ... I started to feel the same way I felt back in 1978 coming out of college when guys were saying I was too small and my arm wasn't strong enough. Some of the same type of blind criticism was being laid on Cam," Moon told USA Today this week.
At the NFL's scouting combine in March, the newspaper said, Moon was equally upset after ProFootball-Weekly's description of Newton's downside included stuff like "very disingenuous ... fake smile ... selfish, me-first makeup ... an enormous ego ... sense of entitlement ... continually invites trouble ... does not command respect from teammates."
"He's being held to different standards from white quarterbacks. I thought we were past all this stuff ... but I guess we're not," Moon said.
Talk about ringing old bells. During the week of the 1993 Grey Cup, Damon Allen said: "Writers don't write about black quarterbacks using the same adjectives."
A tabloid columnist had said he possessed a "low football IQ" after a game that season. Allen forgave the writer, but never forgot the slur.
After the B.C. Lions, with Allen at the helm, beat Wally Buono's Calgary Stampeders in the 2000 Western final, Buono said: "I think we were just out-finessed by a very athletic quarterback."
Far from taking the "out-finessed" part as a compliment, Allen heard only the word "athletic."
"I work as hard as anyone in practice and in preparation, but in 16 years, it's always been my ability that's been talked about, not my understanding of the game," Allen said before leading the Lions to the Grey Cup the following weekend.
But Allen was never accused of being an egomaniac, a divisive influence, a phoney. That is what sticks in Moon's craw about the reaction to Newton - that, and the idea, still sadly lingering, that black athletes can never quite "get" the quarterback position, because it's as much cerebral as physical, and ... well, you know.
Moon's own experience with the stereotype is still a vivid memory.
That he was ever permitted to avoid capture by the NFL for six years and apprentice in Canada was always a joke. It was a joke the first day he set foot in Edmonton - this 6-3, 210-pound physical specimen with the kind of throwing mechanics that give pro football scouts wet dreams, who could run like a tailback but ultimately made his bones as a classic pocket passer - and it was still a joke the day he left for Houston after the 1983 CFL season, to play 15 more good years in the NFL and two bittersweet ones as a bit player at the end.
His CFL career, although a bonanza for the league and especially the Eskimos - who won five Grey Cups in a row in his first five seasons (though Tom Wilkinson was as instrumental in the dynasty) - was, or ought to have been, keenly embarrassing to the NFL, which somehow let him get away.
And anyone who imagines that there was anything other than skin colour involved in that decision is living in a dream world.
So if Moon, who made millions as an NFL star and, in the end, owes his fortune to the league that only very belatedly decided to give him a chance, still sees undertones of a double standard in the way critics have reacted to Newton ... well, he's qualified to make that call, if anyone is.
In Canada, we've come a long way toward conquering the old notions, but we're not immune, even now.
Though the CFL has been a haven for quarterbacks of colour who either weren't taken seriously by the NFL or would have had to switch positions to something less mentally demanding to gain a foothold, there's little doubt even this league is less forgiving of the black quarterback's perceived shortcomings.
How else to explain that in a halfcentury and more of opening its doors to non-white quarterbacks, only a handful we can think of - Chuck Ealey, Danny Barrett, Condredge Holloway, Joe Paopao, Tracy Ham, Damon Allen, and now Henry Burris - have stuck around the CFL long enough to have achieved "venerable" status.
Others may join that list. Darian Durant in Saskatchewan and Kevin Glenn in Hamilton have a chance, but we won't know that for a good, long while.
Allen, who inexplicably failed to make the grade as a first-ballot Canadian Football Hall of Famer despite owning pretty much every passing record in the books when he retired - and who ranks third all-time in rushing yards to boot, behind only Mike Pringle and George Reed - has never doubted that the stereotypes persist.
No one's suggesting the decision to enshrine Danny McManus this year ahead of Allen, though both were eligible, was race-motivated. I know the panellists on the selection committee, for one thing, and I know why they were reluctant to put Allen in, in his first year of eligibility. He played for too many teams, wasn't an all-star often enough, frustrated a lot of coaches.
But Allen was right, too, when he said in interviews he gave me years apart, that football still hangs onto its notions of African-American quarterbacks being, somehow, lacking in the intelligence to call a really smart game.
This weekend, Newton has a chance to become the first quarterback in NFL history, rookie or otherwise, to open a season with three 400-yard games. He's completed 62.7 per cent of his passes, on a team that basically has no running game.
It may be time to give the kid a break.
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/sports/Newton+critics+racist+Moon+says/5439533/story.html
Last edited:
