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The Young Guns Story: Quest for a title :: Listen
Here's one to end Black History Month.

What if I told you there was a team called the Young Guns, a softball team that over the past eight years has won 20 championships? It's a team made up of grown men between the ages of 22 and 40 who come mostly from the Harold Ickes housing projects in Chicago. They are one of the best 16-inch softball teams in the nation.

What if I told you -- as if you haven't already guessed -- that this team is all-black; and in a sport that has historically been dominated by whites, they've excelled to the point that they have threatened the game's status quo?

What if I told you that no black team has ever won the national 16-inch softball title? And that as good as the Young Guns are, they probably never will win an American Softball Association national championship because they are black?

Even in 2008, the segregation they encounter is enough to fill a chapter in "Voices of Freedom."

Stories of a white umpire calling them n------ before they step into the batter's box. ("You had two choices," the manager said. "You either hit him or you got in the box. Now if you hit him, it's over. So we just got in the box.")

...and how runs are often and purposely taken away to prevent them from winning. ("It's hard to take a hit away from someone," the manager said, "but then they reminded me of the hit they took away, when he got that double, that hit that decided that game.")

... and how whenever there are two black teams that reach the national level, they always seem to be put in the same bracket -- even though the brackets are supposed to be a random draw -- so that they never get the chance to meet each other in the finals. ("It got so bad last year," the manager said, "that I didn't think there would be any black teams playing in the nationals, and that would have been bad.")

... and how once in 2003, after winning one of the most prestigious tournaments (the Alsip Elite) in Illinois as the only black team, they weren't allowed to defend their championship because the organizers decided it was better to cancel the tournament than give them the opportunity to win it again. ("We aren't just making this up," the manager said.)

Now hold your breath. What if I told you that the real reason the team will never win the national title has nothing to do with all that? What if I told you the honest reason is because their own people -- black people -- sold them out, and continue to sell them out?

Here's a history lesson: Before the Young Guns, there was a team called Safari. It was run in the '70s by a softball legend named Claude Rhodes. Speak to people in the softball community about Rhodes, and you'd think they were talking about Rube Foster, the great Negro League pitcher and manager. The reverence, the greatness. In 2000, they named a softball tournament after him, the Claude Rhodes Memorial Tournament.

His team, Safari, is still the only black team to ever come close to winning a national SAS championship. It came in second place back in the mid-'70s. Twice.

The Young Guns have won the Claude Rhodes Memorial Tournament four times. Out of respect to the man's legend and legacy to the game, they take pride in participating in it. But every year, their eyes are on a bigger prize: the one Rhodes got closer to getting than any other brotha.

What if I told you that when I met with the manager of the Young Guns, Sherman Nelson, he held no resentment toward the injustice that often comes his squad's way? What if I told you that he said he expects it; that even when the black players and teams in the league wanted to boycott, he couldn't do it because the game -- playing the game at this level -- meant too much to him; and that he said the importance of a black team winning a national title is more important than taking a stand on being continuously and overtly treated unfairly?

"If the only way I can beat you is to go over and create my own little world and separate myself from you," Nelson said, "then why am I in it in the first place? I can't let them defeat me like that. I can't give them that satisfaction. Never could I give in to that."

What if I told you that in Nelson's 72-year-old mind and soul _- a soul that is trapped inside a body that played softball until he was 53 and has won a Chicago-area Manager of the Year award three times -- the true disappointment comes from within his own race? It comes from the crabs-in-the-barrel, we-are-our-worst-enemy syndrome that has plagued black America since slavery, and that other black teams have put in full effect on his team.

When asked why he doesn't "staff" a team like the white teams often do by taking the best players from other squads and putting them together under a new name for a season to better their chances of winning a national softball title, Nelson just shook his head. He talked about the "hate" we display toward one another in the name of competition; in the name of black managers not being able to agree on who would manage such a team; in the name of black teams not being able to agree on a team name. It takes a nation of black softball players to hold us back.

The true struggle, he said, that is killing any black team's chances of making history in the game of "white" softball is the lack of -- maybe even nonexistent -- financial support he and the other three or four black teams that play at the possible national championship level receive. Especially from black businesses.

"When we go to some of these tournaments, these white teams are fully sponsored," Nelson said. "I mean Coca-Cola, Miller, etc. Some of these teams are sponsored so heavy they pay their players. I've been the coach of the Young Guns for eight years and I've had only two sponsors. One was for two years [from a small black-owned neighborhood restaurant] and the other was for one year for $700, and I had to chase them down for a whole year to get that money."

He called getting money to support a black softball team "an exercise in futility."

Still, what if I told you that once this story comes out, there is a chance that the Young Guns, the Gladiators, Dog Pound and Steel Gold (other area black softball teams that have a shot at being the first to win the national title) might realize that being the best "black" softball team, the team that wins the annual national black championship, is not as important as a collective effort to dream-team a crown to represent the race?

That every time "first" and "black" are mentioned together in the same sentence, it's a reminder that there are still barriers to break, still mountains to move, still history to be made.

But at the root of this is the sadness that even in athletics -- even in an under-publicized sport such as slow-pitch 16-inch softball that is rarely played or respected outside of Illinois -- it is not always what the opposite race does to us that stifles our history.As Sherman asked, using his personal softball paradox as a metaphor: "When are we going to put aside our selfish desires for a common goal?"

What if I told you that this isn't a story about a softball championship at all? That it's really about so much more.To the Young Guns and what they represent, we speak your name. We speak your name.





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