Hungry for Success: A Sports Myth

Shabazz Napier had the childhood that sports writers dream of. Born in Roxbury, a historically African-American neighborhood in Boston, and raised in the Mission Hill housing projects, Napier led the University of Connecticut Huskies to a NCAA Men’s Basketball title this year.

As the star of a low-seeded team reaching the Final Four, Napier received a glut of press attention, and profile after profile traced a straight line from Napier’s low-income roots to his prodigious basketball talent. He had to “fight his way out of the rough Mission Hill neighborhood in Roxbury,” wrote the Washington Times. The Boston Globe contended that Napier, the “battle-hardened point guard from Roxbury,” got his “swagger on the court . . . from his rough-hewn background” in the “inner city.”

Unfortunately, these publications are not alone in fetishizing poverty as an incubator of athletic success. Every year, journalists trace the roots of athletic prowess to the hardscrabble existence an athlete has to overcome to reach the big leagues. In this well-tread narrative, poverty becomes a crucible that breeds athletic talent. Middle class kids don’t stand a chance against the “hungry” kids from the projects (literally hungry, if you ask Shabazz Napier).

The narrative holds sway globally, as well. In an interview in January, a Croatian soccer coach made the ridiculous argument that American soccer players lag behind players from other countries because American kids “generally have a good life economically” and therefore are not “hungry for success” like kids in Africa or Brazil.

The data don’t support these claims. As statistician Seth Stephens-Davidowitz wrote in the New York Times last year, “growing up in a wealthier neighborhood is a major, positive predictor of reaching the N.B.A. for both black and white men.” Nutrition is a factor here, too. Players who are better fed throughout their lives grow up to be, on average, taller and stronger, a big advantage in a league where the average player is almost six feet and seven inches tall. As Stephens-Davidowitz concludes, “the data suggest that on average any motivational edge in hungriness is far outweighed by the advantages of kids from higher socioeconomic classes.”

These facts shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s a lot easier to practice left-handed layups or perfect a spiral without also having to contend with food insecurity, violent crime, failing schools, and the countless other physical, mental, and emotional hardships that accompany poverty. In addition, the growing pay-to-play system in American youth sports privileges parents with higher incomes.

A University of Michigan study documented that athletic participation fees average $381 per player, and almost one in five children from lower-income families reported having to discontinue youth sports because they were too expensive. The Michigan study defined lower-income families as those earning under $60,000 per year, a figure well above the Federal poverty guideline of $23,850 for a family of four. It’s safe to assume that children growing up in severe poverty are being forced to give up athletics at far higher rates.

So, given the reality that children from lower-income families face more obstacles to play sports than their higher-income peers, why does the projects-to-prospect narrative persist in sports writing, and why are readers so eager to consume it?

Since Andrew Jackson clawed his way out of the Tennessee hinterlands, the myth of meritocracy has pervaded American life. “People achieve success and rewards through hard work, education, risk taking, and even a little luck,” droned Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign. For Romney, the United States is strictly “a merit-based society” just as the Founding Fathers and “our Creator” intended.

While many commentators and voters found Romney’s message to be incongruent with the structural impediments that prevent hard working Americans from climbing out of poverty, sports remain, in the American collective imagination, a comforting example of how society should function. Games take place on an “even playing field,” as the cliché goes, and the best athletes, regardless of their circumstances, rise to achieve fortune and fame, dazzling all with their sublime skill and virtuosity.

Unlike life, a game clearly fixed from the start, sports represent a bastion of fairness in a world strangled with injustice. When a defensive tackle jumps offside, his team gets penalized. When a pitcher throws three strikes, the batter is out. The team with the most points at the end of the game wins.

But this isn’t actually the case, when the “best” players are often the same athletes who have consistently had access to the best resources. While it’s reassuring to believe that sports are a venue where hard work and dedication represent more than tired clichés, sports do reflect American society—and American society is often unfair, ugly, and unequal.

There will always be stories about kids like Shabazz Napier who rise from very little to accomplish a great deal in sports, but those narratives treat poverty like a creation myth instead of the obstacle that it really is. If sports writers were honest about Napier, they’d highlight the fact that he attended a private prep school for two years before earning a scholarship to UConn with the same verve that they discuss his inner city roots. While he may have honed his game in Roxbury, it was polished at Lawrence Academy.

It may be heartening to read stories about athletes who have managed to rise above their ascribed stations in life, but if Americans want to embrace sports as an embodiment of meritocracy, the rest of American life must become one first.