Oh man, here we go again. I'm thinking about eliciting the aid of an astrologist to find out if we're in the midst of some weird planetary trine or something because too many sports figures, from athletes to players' representatives to coaches are talking like no one's around but them and their boys and a half-empty second bottle of Maker's Mark.

Dennis Georgatos of the San Jose Mercury-News reported that yesterday in a conference call that Mike Nolan, San Francisco 49ers head coach, said the unsaid but much-said privately among white coaches, GMs, and owners:

Free agency begins tonight at 9, and Nolan said the 49ers, with a league-high $38 million in salary-cap space, will aggressively seek to upgrade the roster and might be willing to take the same kind of risk they did a year ago with Bryant.

"It's not about the money. It's more about us adding good football players,'' Nolan said.

"We want the same kind of guy in free agency as we're looking for in the draft. That's first and foremost a guy that can play the game well, and secondly somebody that's got great character and fits in with what we're doing. But if you go with the second one first you're just going to end up with a lily-white team that doesn't beat anybody.'' (emphasis mine)

Mike, is somebody, anybody kicking you in the ass repeatedly right now? Ack. Anyway, I went about looking for more evidence of Nolan's conference call. Checked the San Francisco Chronicle - nada. Checked the Oakland Tribune (at least what's left of it) - nein. Checked the Contra Costa Times - nyet. Was there a conference call? I emailed Georgatos - no reply. Maybe he's too busy tire ironing his editor's shoe out of the only orifice on his body he can't readily see to write back.

Regardless, what we have here in this country is a full-blown race, gender, sexual preference, religious preference, ethnicity, sensitivity, respect problem. And every time we try to sweep it under the rug, the dust balls grow to the point where with the slightest step on the rug's farthest corner and all the dirt that's been ignored for so long billows out and chokes off even the most well-meaning conversation.

Recently we have seen ex-NBA player John Amaechi, with great help from ESPN's book publishing arm, release a kinda tell-all tome in which Amaechi reveals he's gay. ESPN does a helluva job in making even the most ardent blogger believe the book is due out on Valentine's day as if it's meant as some twisted "I heart the NBA" 200 and something page "bleep you" note to the association that provided Amaechi with career earnings enough to leave him comfortable for the remainder of his life - at age late 30-ish. The book's release was only meant to coincide with the then oncoming NBA All-Star game.

We saw ESPN release their hounds upon the sporting world and make Amaechi's personal revelation appear that it was the most important topic we've ever witnessed; somber voices in suits and ties speaking with throaty voices full of tolerance as if their collective basso could force viewers and listeners to lower their eyes and pray properly for the redemption of humankind.

After ESPN’s television attempts to act alternately with an empty piety and a forced stolid stance failed, the WWL turned to its Internet arm, ESPN.com to turn up the heat on Amaechi's tepidly-received announcement. Agent provocateurs like neo-fundamentalist Christian Chris Broussard and his gay foil LZ Granderson let loose with hateful and self-hating venomous words written to draw out opposite-equal sides from the shadows. And then....

Dan LeBatard called on an old friend in an effort to hit paydirt. Dan was comfortably on the phone with Tim Hardaway who was in Las Vegas working for the NBA. LeBatard knew consciously or not that Tim was the man for this occasion. LeBatard set up the moment by massaging Hardaway's NBA arena-sized ego, lauding Tim for always being honest, even brutally so. The interview only dealt with basketball and more specifically, the present-day Miami Heat. And then...

“Finally, last question, how do you feel about a gay teammate?” And Hardaway let one of his patented sidewinder three-balls, shot right in the face of gay men and women in the world. Hardaway's words had barely slipped through the net when the mercenaries at the world wide leader had placed his remarks on the forefront of the battle for John Amaechi's suddenly burgeoning book sales dollars.

Yum.

------------------------

Next on the hate tour came NBA All-Star weekend itself. On Saturday night at the dunk contest retired luminaries and contest judges, Michael Jordan, Julius Erving, and Dominique Wilkins used the dunk off to illustrate their desperate need to feel relevant for time immemorial. When young center Dwight Howard of the Orlando Magic took a pass from Jameer Nelson, dunked with his right hand while placing a sticker 12' 6" on the glass with his left, the three hall of famers' self-centered psyches allowed them only to feebly hold placards with the paltry number "eight" on both sides. They even shot looks of authoritative disdain into space in response to the smattering of boos they received from the event's crowd. Like the Three Unwise Men they sat; inert, effete, philandering royalty, shining and a little bloated in their $5000-suited finery.

They, like the masters they have served for decades, would rather kill the dunk contest they made famous than move their names over to make room for one of the saner young men in today's NBA.; black people often appear in a state of sad caricature when they attempt to emulate those who have stolen their culture from them - always feeble, never righteous.

Meanwhile, in the City of Schemes' back alleys and ropes he hadn't the power to make part, an always too-rotund Jason Whitlock vainly made a huffing-puffing effort to show his homeboys just how sports journalists do it when all the athletes know their names. Too bad Whitlock smiled in one too many faces one too many times and turned the following morning to spit poison on one too many athlete's carefully-constructed persona just to serve his Kansas City or faceless Internet constituency.

Too much Italian food, too many vodka shots, too many strippers, and too much money spent on seeing Jamie Foxx, a bitter Whitlock returned to KC to stretch the truth to his NASCAR Belt followers. And stretch the truth he apparently did. For the following day, when the hangover finally sloughed itself from his flatulent, overloaded being, Whitlock let loose with a wildly contradictory and maniacal diatribe rebuking all he imparted to the Midwest the day before; recovering from hangovers are never fun, especially when one remembers he found the hard way that he wasn't the near the center of the festivities, wasn't an inside-the-ropes, there's a wake behind me type of human after all. That knowledge can make a man feel real insecure.

So Whitlock took it out and took it out and took it out - on black people. Whitlock declared all black people, other than those on the Whitlock Civil Rights Revolution bus, to be the enemy; to be the rag wearin', gun totin', night ridin', gang-bangin', drug slangin', women's heads off stage bangin' - black KKK.

His caustic, yet drama queen-filled words rang out with all the power of -

Little Debbie cakes.

Poor Jason got slapped this way, that way, and the third.

Speaking of threes, don't let the third piece of Whitlockian tragic magic fool you. For every one overly-simplistic one step forward he took two steps back. Reading talking points from a liberal on a FOX News Sunday show is always good for practicing alternative ways - to wince in disgust. His hackneyed remedies for blowing random manifestations of the downward spiral that is corporatism into our collective short-term memories is nice - if you're an apologist.

But Jason's Friday the 13th hack job of blaming the victim wasn't the only, I wanna front for you front for you moment in space. Arianna Huffington - wasn't she a devout Newt Gingrich video girl groupie(?) - contributor Ken Levine, even before Whitlock, pulled his pants down and unceremoniously took a shhh-p-it on black athletes, without so much as a passing thought that what he wrote was racist to its core.

Fortunately for us all he was put on proverbial blast by a sports media reviewer unafraid to necktie tackle a sideline sports politico who relies on relaying the "the salacious" to the public from the announcer's booth rather than providing erudite insight to anyone.

----------------------------

The cocktail straw used to roil evolutions' waters so that haters and baiters of all stripes could arise from the bubbling DNA alphabet soup was twizzled by Adam "Pac Man" Jones; not to mention rapper Nelly and both men's "crews" made up of wanna-be Jimmy Cagney villains, fugazy "security" forces, and assorted jock carriers.

Eighty-one thousand one dollar bills donated by negroes of all colors for the purpose of recreating Quentin Tarantino's fondest dream starring Uma Thurman and 20 Thurman look-alikes, all shoeless and caressing the pole. Hiroshima's ashes raining down on radiation-scorched Japanese skin in the form of American currency in its lowest form before the graphically bloody, paralyzing final scene wherein peripheral players all fatally , or nearly so, absorb aerodynamically perfect death projectiles while the scene's primary movers slip out the faintly red-lit tinted fire exit back room door.

It's a wrap!

-----------------

The fallout from the bomb dropped by the pilot of Fat Boy's hull re-opened eyes to a painful reality: It's a small world, after all.

While we all may know each other six people apart, we're really only one person, a neighbor removed from Jason Whitlock's ball of racial and societal confusion, or Chris Broussard's onward Christian soldierism. Just one person away from Nelly's and Adam Jones' radioactive rain or Etan Thomas' and Talib Kweli's reflection eternal. We are just one person away from Harvey Araton opening the eyes of largely white NYT readers to racism's realities, or from Bethlehem Shoals rising beyond color into the world of self-reflection while writing Parker be-bop and Miles ballads, making sense of the world through the NBA; one person away from the knee-jerk reaction of Jemele Hill and thoughtlessness of LZ Granderson - three strikes on a gay star third baseman and they're out. We're one person away from the guttural dreams of the person plotting to be gleefully absorbed, bought and taught the secrets of corporate psychosis courtesy of ESPN, one person away from the presently dormant vision of fully-empowered black people and all other minorities, courtesy of the J. Edgar-Hoover-doused flame that was Fred Hampton.

Blowing up the prison industrial complex and the drug war is of no consequence unless we first blow up the processes of thought that allow us to fear the "other" - and each other; without first blowing up an economic system rife with greed and cronyism that results in the need for a black budget economy to keep our failed monetary system afloat.

Three strikes is no remedy for what ails our society or the NFL, unless we remedy our failure to teach the premise that responsibility is a learned behavior, not a gift stumbled upon - and then teach; that three strikes is just another way to push away the fact that we have failed as society builders.

Our need to swing our political, cultural, and societal pendulum to the opposite extreme, just for a universal millisecond, is necessary to flow back to a point of collective stasis where all individuals can be valued for who and what they are; to reach a point where our differences are respected and even celebrated, but most primarily, understood.

You see, when we marginalize that which is unlike us in order to remain blindly comfortable, we fail in the most elementary way to fully live our human existence – and we become Mike Nolan.

The question is, which neighbor will you choose to befriend?