The Hustle (32 page)

After Eric found it hard to settle in at Deloitte & Touche, a corporate accounting firm, he moved on to work for the city. “I think it's a little tougher as an African American in a corporate culture,” he says. “It's not impossible. A lot of things have to line up for you and you have to have a certain type of personality.” Eric jokes he's thought about going back to get an M.B.A. or law degree “to keep up a little bit” with his wife, a professor. Overall, though, he says he's found his meaning outside of the workplace. “I have my family and my friends and that's what I need. Work is just what it is, it's just a way to pay for things. I'm not all super career-oriented, like my wife. I just, you know, I got bills to pay, so this is what I gotta do.”

Of all my teammates, Chris is the most outspoken on trying to find a healthy masculinity—he wants to enjoy competition without letting it turn into a desire to puff himself up by beating other people. A few years ago, he left his job brokering health insurance plans and joined a start-up founded by another Lakeside grad. The firm has developed “wellness” software that companies pay to access. Employees go online and enter personal information about health issues such as how much they exercise, their mental well-being, and nutrition (the data on each individual are not shared with the employer). The software then comes up with programs that guide people toward leading healthier lives in general, or progress toward specific goals, such as quitting smoking. The payoff for companies is lower health insurance costs. Chris has found the new job invigorating—though there is more financial instability at the start-up, he deeply believes in the mission of helping people find ways to live healthier lives. As a company principal, he has a personal involvement in the firm's planning and success.

One afternoon, when we are in Oregon for a wedding, my wife and I stop in and surprise Maitland at the winery where he works. He takes us on an extensive tour through the vineyard and the production area, precisely explaining the winemaking process. It's clear that when it comes to wine, Maitland is exacting in how he wants the product to come out.

We end up in Mait's basement office, where he works at a desk laid out with the beakers, flasks, and chemistry tools he uses to monitor the composition of his wines. Mait quietly jokes with the two other winemakers who share the space. The job, I see, gives Mait the opportunity to follow something through from start to finish, make a tangible product, and work within a group of like-minded people who all have the same goal. It is, in a way, a corrective to some of his earlier experiences, such as the pressure he felt to compete in high school basketball. “You know, when I manage people on the job, I'm more concerned that we work as a team, and there's no winner and loser other than everybody,” Mait says. “I don't need to prove to anybody that I know anything at all.”

As we entered early adulthood in the 1990s, what had been seen as the traditional economic path to manhood for many—get a job and work at it until you retired—was no longer a possibility for most people. When my mom was a girl in the 1950s, for example, my grandfather came home every day from his job as an engineer at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation at five. He went upstairs and changed out of his shirt and tie into his leisure clothes. He then came back downstairs and read the paper until six, which was when my grandmother was expected to have dinner on the table. The gender roles in the family were very clear—for example, my grandfather mowed the lawn on the weekends while my grandmother pulled weeds. One was men's work, one was women's. When my grandmother talked about getting a part-time job, my grandfather would have none of it—he already earned enough, so why would she need to work?

For middle-class people, this had been the model for decades—men went off to the office or factory, worked as part of a team within a formalized structure (the corporation or the state), played their part, and came home to the women and children. This had been the pattern since industrialization in the mid- and late 1800s, when youth sports leagues such as the YMCA and the AAU had been established. With men leaving farms to work in offices and factories, the idea of Muscular Christianity was that boys needed organized structures in which they could develop physically and enter into competition to avoid becoming too feminized. The skills learned on the field—stamina, discipline, sacrificing for the good of the team—were supposed to translate later into success in the working world. This was still the model when we were boys, and Coach McClain picked up on its tenets, drilling into us that we needed to think about the good of the group, not our own individual statistics. Anyone who began to showboat to the detriment of the team would be rewarded with a seat on the bench.

By 1986, though, it also was clear that individual stardom could pay off very well, even if you ditched the team. That April, Michael Jordan, then in his second year in the NBA and playing guard for the mediocre Chicago Bulls, scored an astounding sixty-three points against Larry Bird's Boston Celtics in a playoff game. At our next practice, Tyrell and Will Jr. relived Jordan's exploits, imitating his moves as the rest of us formed an appreciative peanut gallery. “Bird didn't know what to do!” Tyrell said, making us all laugh by miming a flat-footed and confused Larry Bird getting juked by Jordan. (Despite Jordan's bravura performance, the Bulls were still swept by the Celtics in the series, three games to zero.)

At that point, Jordan was simply a preternaturally talented basketball player, not a global brand. The seeds had been planted, though—before his rookie year, Nike paid Jordan an unprecedented $500,000 to endorse its shoes. With their bold black-and-red design and maverick image—the sneakers had been banned by the NBA for violating its uniform regulations—Air Jordans were snapped up by both suburban white kids and black kids from the city. Nike (another Pacific Northwest company) offshored production to countries such as Vietnam, China, Mexico, and Indonesia, where workers earned dollars a day making sneakers that sold for more than $100 in the United States. Nike's payout to Jordan soon rose to $20 million annually; by 2008, the Air Jordan line was banking more than $800 million a year in sales.

Outspoken sports stars such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali, and Jackie Robinson had all come up in an age when blacks were routinely excluded from the economic riches their labor produced, and corporations were hardly throwing money at them to endorse their products. Michael Jordan, on the other hand, got a cut. In addition to Nike, he did ads for McDonald's, Hanes, Gatorade, Coca-Cola, MCI, and Chevrolet, among others. With so much money at stake, Jordan studiously avoided making any political statements in a vein similar to his predecessors—he was, in fact, sometimes said to have “transcended” race. In an age where images of athletic virtuosity could be beamed everywhere, Jordan rose above not only his teammates—whom he once called his “supporting cast”—but also his sport. As one of the most famous people in the world, his shoes and apparel sold to people who knew little to nothing about basketball or Chicago—I once saw a billboard of Jordan soaring for a dunk next to the central plaza in Dakar, Senegal, not exactly a hotbed of basketball. The lesson was that the rewards went to the superstar floating over the court, not the teammates below rebounding for him.

This tension between the ideals of working as a team and the demands of the individual star wasn't lost on Willie McClain Sr. A passionate believer in using basketball as a vehicle through which to connect to young men and teach them life skills, McClain continued to coach at both public and private high schools in Seattle after our team disbanded. In 2001 he traveled to Las Vegas as an assistant coach with a team of local high school basketball all-stars who were set to play in a tournament completely funded by Nike. McClain was there to teach defense, but he found that the stars of the team weren't interested in what he had to say. There were about two hundred college coaches at the tournament to recruit. Though the coaches weren't allowed to approach players, they could speak to them if spoken to. So when sought-after players went to the bathroom, college coaches would follow them in and stand at neighboring urinals, just to give the players the opportunity to start a conversation. McClain left the tournament disillusioned. “It was just a meat factory,” he says. “It doesn't give kids a sense of anything but money. There was no value system.”

In the late 1960s, my grandfather took a position as a corporate vice president for ARCO, leaving Hanford to work in New York and then Los Angeles. A staunch Republican, Catholic, and member of the Elks Club, he was blindsided when he was laid off in a corporate restructuring in the 1970s. Then in his midfifties, he swallowed his ego and returned to Eastern Washington, where he went back to work at Hanford at a much reduced salary. He was probably lucky to have a job. As the 1980s arrived, corporate restructuring and downsizing increased pace. Between 1979 and 1995, about 43 million American jobs were eliminated. Although the economy was creating new employment, by the mid-1990s only an estimated 35 percent of those jobs paid as well as the ones that were lost. The reconfiguring of corporate America was joined by the movement of women into the workforce as well as vocal calls by minorities such as African Americans for inclusion. This shifting economic landscape ushered in what was labeled in the media a “crisis in masculinity,” or, as
Newsweek
put it, “white male paranoia.”

The feeling was vividly expressed by the 1993 movie
Falling Down
, in which Michael Douglas plays a laid-off Los Angeles defense industry worker known for most of the film by his vanity license plate, D-FENS. When his car breaks down in a traffic jam on the freeway, D-FENS abandons it. In an effort to retake his place at the head of the family he's lost, he begins to walk toward Venice Beach, where his ex-wife and daughter live. As he passes through the multiethnic L.A. that lives on ground level in sight of the skyscrapers downtown, he goes on an increasingly violent rampage, trashing a Korean-owned grocery store and tangling with Mexican gangbangers (adding to the mix, he also kills the neo-Nazi owner of an army supply store and destroys the golf cart of two white golfers on a private course). At the end of the movie, before he is shot by the detective who's been tracking him, D-FENS says, “I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles? I help to protect America. You should be rewarded for that. But instead they give it to the plastic surgeons. You know, they lied to me.”

The uncertainty of white males of their place in the economic and social hierarchy also seeped into music. The iconic grunge musician Kurt Cobain grew up one hundred miles southwest of Seattle in Aberdeen, a rough, economically depressed logging town that had seen unemployment balloon in the 1970s and 1980s as the local timber mills shut down. For a few years at the end of the 1980s, Cobain lived in Olympia, sixty miles south of Seattle and then the scene of the nascent Riot Grrrl movement, where he was introduced to feminist, progay, and anticorporate ideas. This mixed with his experiences of divorce, poverty, and family dysfunction to create a music that set his acerbic rage to punk-influenced melodies. Nirvana's 1991 album
Nevermind
struck a cultural nerve, selling more than 10 million copies.

The other dominant pop music of the early 1990s, gangsta rap, had its own masculinity issues. It packaged the worst aspects of poverty-riddled, postindustrial urban America—violence, misogyny, and the glorification of crime—and sold them around the globe. The iconic and enormously talent gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur charted a contradictory path between adeptly cataloging the ills of the ghetto—joblessness, the poor treatment of women, lack of educational opportunities—and glorifying the hyper masculine, relentlessly violent “Thug Life,” a notion he believed in enough to have tattooed across his stomach. As the son of a mother who was a dedicated and active Black Panther, Tupac grew up steeped in the nationalistic, communitarian ideology of the movement at the time it was falling apart—many of the Panthers around Tupac, such as his godfather, were thrown in prison for street crimes; others, including his mother, became strung out on drugs. Tupac never resolved the pull between black nationalism and the individualist ethos of the new era. As he rapped on the song “Only God Can Judge Me”: “Black Power is what we scream as we dream in a paranoid state/and our fate is a lifetime of hate.”

Two mammoth demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s captured the anxiety over men's roles. Though one was for black men and the other mostly attended by white men, both harked back to much older movements. In October 1995, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, organized the Million Man March, which attracted somewhere around that number of black men to the city. It had been a hundred years since Booker T. Washington's famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech, in which Washington had called for blacks to focus on improving themselves rather than asking whites for political and civil rights. As the leader of the conservative, black nationalist Nation of Islam, Farrakhan preached a message intellectually descended from Washington, focusing on black self-improvement and personal responsibility. He called for “atonement,” asking each man in attendance to apologize for his mistakes and pledge that he would “strive to improve myself spiritually, morally, mentally, socially, politically, and economically for the benefit of myself, my family, and my people.”

In 1997, another million men assembled on the Mall for a gathering called by the Promise Keepers, an organization of evangelical Christian men with an ideological lineage back to Muscular Christianity ( just as Muscular Christianity was led by coaches such as James Naismith, Promise Keepers was founded by Bill McCartney, the coach of the University of Colorado football team). Concerned that men were not involved enough with their kids, the core message of the group was that fathers needed to return and take their places back as the heads of their families. The Promise Keepers emphasized physical vigor and making a space for men to gather without women. Once rejuvenated, they could lead as “godly men.”