Equal Opportunity to Try Is All I Ask For Me and Everyone Else

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Right from birth, my chances of making it to the NFL were doomed. Nature saddled me with a body that couldn’t acquire—regardless of how hard I trained or how many PEDs I took—the speed, strength, and toughness necessary to play football at an elite level.

But just because nature frowned on me didn’t mean I was denied the opportunity to try. I had just as much right as John Elway, Dan Marino, and Jim Kelly—three contemporaries of mine who had hall-of-fame NFL careers—to see how far my love of football could take me.

Equal Opportunity Is a Chimera

There is no equal opportunity in sports. Kids in Minnesota have far more opportunities to play ice hockey than kids in Arizona. Kids with rich parents are more likely to attend a sports academy and receive individual coaching than kids with poor parents. And kids born into communities that value sports highly are more likely to play sports than kids born into communities that don’t. The real enemy of equal opportunity in sports, however, isn’t the environment, it’s nature. Who makes it to the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL is largely determined at birth. If you were born a female, you ain’t making it to any of these leagues. If you were born a male with DNA that limits you to pedestrian size, speed, and coordination, you ain’t making it to any of them either. Only males blessed by nature physically and manically passionate about either football, basketball, baseball, or hockey have a shot.

Equal Opportunity to Try Is All You Can Legitimately Expect

No one is decrying the lack of equal opportunity in sports. Likewise, no one is claiming that professional sports in America are rigged. And the reasons for this are simple: there are no arbitrary and capricious rules stopping anyone from playing any sport, there are no arbitrary and capricious rules stopping anyone from competing for a roster spot on any team, and there are no arbitrary and capricious rules stopping anyone from winning a roster spot on any team. If there’s a 22-year-old gal out there who can bench press 500 pounds and push around 300-pound defensive linemen with ease, you can rest assured that 32 NFL teams will be pestering her night and day to sign a multi-million-dollar contract.

How we do sports is how we should do any competitive endeavor. The process matters. The racial, ethnic, gender, and other surface characteristics of the winners and losers don’t. As long as everyone is allowed to compete, and as long as everyone is judged by the same rules and standards, justice prevails. Once we try to tailor the results; that is, once we try to account for the fickleness of nature, character, and luck and guarantee the “underprivileged” a certain number of “victories,” injustice prevails. And to show why this is so, I’m going to focus on another one of my youthful shortcomings—academics.

Back in 1979, I took the SAT and got a composite score of 1100. I was competent in math and dismal in Engish. My math score was literally 200 points higher than my verbal score (650 versus 450). And it’s important to note that I didn’t apply myself in school. I spent way more time honing my athletic skills and watching television than honing my mind.

But suppose things were different. If I had tiger parents rather than normal parents, and if I had friends who valued reading books more than lifting weights, I have no doubt that my composite SAT score would have been much higher. Truth be told, I had Ivy-League potential and the only thing that kept me from realizing that potential was the lame-ass academic environment I grew up in.

And what if Italian-Americans back then were extremely chauvinistic and politically powerful enough to make sure that Italian-Americans were equally represented in America’s most selective colleges? Would it have been fair if Harvard had an Italian-American quota and it made room for me and my supposed potential by denying admission to some non-Italian-American kid with a 1400 or 1500 SAT score?

Hell freakin’ no. I had all the calories, time, and means I needed to do something with my academic life. I didn’t grow up malnourished, I didn’t grow up working dust till dawn in a Nike factory, and I didn’t grow up in a family that was so poor it couldn’t buy me books. The only thing I lacked was the drive. And why should some innocent kid who did have the drive be punished because my family, friends, and community embraced a culture that didn’t put a premium on academic success?

All America owed me was an equal opportunity to try. And that’s what America gave me.

The Personal Finance Angle

When I got the idea to compose a post about the distinction between “equal opportunity” and “the equal opportunity to try,” I thought there was a clear connection to privilege envy syndrome. In other words, I thought those who were more passionate about equal opportunity would be more likely to suffer from privilege envy syndrome. But the more I thought about it, the less likely this seemed to be. In fact, some of the most passionate supporters of equal opportunity that I know are anything but impotent, excuse-making losers.

So as far as the personal finance angle goes, this post is an unmitigated failure.

Damn!

No one ever told me this blogging stuff was going to be so freakin’ hard.

Final Thoughts

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? I say you honor justice by making sure the process is free of arbitrary and capricious rules. You don’t honor justice by giving preferential treatment to some and crapping on others. Jackie Robinson, for instance, didn’t need four strikes in order to compete in major-league baseball. He just needed an end to the color barrier. But you might think otherwise. You might think the government has an obligation to fix what Thomas Sowell calls “cosmic injustice.” Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Peace.