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It Isn't Shani Davis That's Selfish

by Christopher McIntosh
02/22/2006

"I'm just throwing this out there," Davis said, but "it would have been nice if after I won the 1,000-meter race, he could have been a good teammate and shook my hand, just like I shook his hand - and HUGGED him - after he won the 5,000 meters."

The press conference, after an otherwise nondescript 1500 meter speedskating event, had journalists rolling out the Ali-Frazier comparisons.

Huh? What happened? How did we get here?

In the lead up to the mens' speedskating events, there was one main story line. Chad Hedrick and his quest to match Eric Heiden's legendary five gold medal performance.

There was only one potential problem for the media darling. Chad wasn't entered in the five individual events that Heiden had won, but four individual events and an event (team pursuit) that was not even an Olympic discipline until last Wednesday. The event features three skaters and the fastest time recorded by the slowest skater is the important one. Shani Davis was originally pushed into the event by the US Speedskating Federation, but begged off, declaring that it would hinder his preparation for the 1000 meter event. The 1000 was Shani's best event, and the one where his chance at gold was the greatest.

Chad Hedrick - the smiling Texan, brash, arrogant, and American as apple pie - told everyone in earshot that if Davis skated the US would be virtually guaranteed to win. Furthermore, anyone should want to be on the ice as much as possible to do their best for the USA as it was an "honor" just to be there.

Prior to the Olympics, Chad had declared his intention to win as many medals as possible and that he, since he was a world all-around champion, had big shoes to fill.

Texas-sized shoes. And as we all know, don't mess with Texas.

Chad is undeniably charismatic. He's cocksure, his training methods typically involve a beer chaser, and he's got an electric smile. In short, he's everything NBC wants in a protagonist. He put enormous pressure on himself by announcing his intent to do something historic and never met a media person he couldn't charm.

After one race, he was, by all accounts, on track to do exactly what he'd set out to do. He won the 5000, but in the team pursuit, the US faltered. Davis refused to participate and the US couldn't do better than sixth.

Hedrick was bitter. He questioned Davis' patriotism, sarcastically responding to questions about his "teammate" and generally acted as if he, along with the rest of America, had been slighted.

And the media bought it, hook, line and sinker. Hedrick has an enormous personality. He had enormous goals. And those goals were thwarted by the refusal of his main rival, a rival who was also a teammate, to participate in a national team event. Shani had done Hedrick, US speedskating, and the United States wrong, and acted entirely in opposition to the Olympic spirit.

Bob Costas made critical remarks. Jay Mariotti - writing about a hometown boy in his hometown paper (Chicago Sun-Times) - called Davis one of the most selfish Chicago athletes since Frank Thomas and Sammy Sosa. News of Davis' feuds with the US speedskating federation became front and center in discussion of Hedrick's quest. Word came out that his mother was a thorn in the side of officials and was a woman who played the race card early and often. It also came out that Davis neither stayed with nor trained with the rest of the team.

It seemed like a clear-cut case of just another athlete acting selfishly, and Davis' apparent disdain for the media only seemed to confirm the matter. Even after Davis won the gold medal in the 1000 meters, donning a White Sox cap for his victory lap and generally looking relieved, he gave reporters the cold shoulder. Responding to Melissa Stark's obligatory questions about how he felt, he gave answers so short and curt that she pointedly asked him if he was angry.

His answer was "No." And then he moved on, seemingly confirming everything we'd been told about him.

One more thing bears mentioning. Chad Hedrick's white. Shani Davis, black. And that's exactly how the coverage read. The case was a simple one - open and shut.

Black and white.

Was he angry? I can't know that.

But I am.

I have no unique knowledge about the situation. The closest thing I can point to is that we've probably been to the same restaurants and run on the same track - he grew up in Hyde Park and was running laps at the University of Chicago by the age of six. I've been to Evanston, making the journey over to I90/94 that takes one through some of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago - neighborhoods that have turned Hyde Park into an island. And that's it.

But this only makes me more angry. Everything I'm about to report I've found with nothing more than a DSL connection and an open mind.

Was Davis being selfish when he refused to participate in the team pursuit? He has trained his entire life to win an Olympic gold medal in speedskating. He literally outran gang members to get home so that he could go north to the rink at the Evanston speedskating club. And the only reason he was living there instead of the relatively safer Hyde Park was because his mom moved them so the commute was shorter. One of the reasons he was getting chased? He came to school wearing the sweatshirt of one of his idols - Bonnie Blair. That's like wearing a Mia Hamm jersey to school - how many schoolboys do you think have the stones or the presence of mind to do that?

Look at it from Davis' perspective for a second. Hedrick is considered the Paris Hilton of the sport because of his frequent forays deep into the night while on the World Cup circuit. Chad wasn't even a speedskater until he saw his friend Derek Parra win a gold medal in 2002 - while he was playing blackjack in Las Vegas. Hedrick was a world champion inline skater who made the switch specifically to win a gold - about three years ago. Derek Parra, who made a similar switch, refers to Hedrick as the exception, because his training habits are legendarily lax. Does anyone hear echoes of Bode Miller?

But the American media immediately made Hedrick the story, the face of the sport, not Davis. Hedrick, not the guy who was gunning for a gold medal since he was six, and oh, by the way, the first individual gold medal by a black athlete ever.

Here are some things you might not know about Davis.

He, not Chad Hedrick, is the reigning world all-around champion.

He, not Chad Hedrick, has qualified for the Olympics in two different sports. This is not like a gymnast competing in a different event. What he's done is like a luger competing in the ski jump. No less an authority than Apollo Ohno has compared it to a Summer Olympian competing in both road cycling and track cycling. To make it even more impressive, Shani is 6 foot 2, which puts him at a massive disadvantage in the tight turns of short track due to his higher center of gravity and long stride. Despite countless attempts by the speedskating federation and coaches to get him to specialize, he has staunchly refused. In 2002, Davis was an Olympian in short track. He was favored to do the same this year but somehow missed qualifying by one place.

When asked if he wished things were different, because he was clearly one of the top 5 short track skaters in the US, he took full responsibility for his failure and stated plainly, "Wishing is for suckers."

From Davis' perspective, Hedrick is a dilettante, a crossover athlete, and an arrogant one at that. He declares prior to the Olympics his desire to break an individual record for individual greatness because of the "big shoes" he has to fill. When asked about the same issue Davis compliments Hedrick, but says that he just wants to take it one day at a time.

And then he's the one who's called selfish.

Davis trains alone and apart from the team. He has acknowledged rifts with the rest of the speedskating federation. He refused to renege on a sponsorship deal with a Dutch bank that conflicted with the USSF's sponsorship deals. Ipso facto, he's all about the money, right? Wrong. The deal stemmed from a time where the USSF lacked a sponsor and actively allowed the skaters to negotiate their own deals with sponsors, but with the unstated understanding that those deals would be null and void once the USSF secured another sponsor. Davis got his deal, but when the USSF found a replacement sponsor, he refused to back out.

Speedskating is huge in the Netherlands. It's like the NBA - think Hasselhof in Germany and then multiply it by ten. It's so big, Dutch TV has done a documentary on Davis and his mother. So Davis refused to budge, arguing that it was unfair - especially considering that this deal could be a long term one. He has taken the case to an arbitrator where it is currently pending judgment. The USSF has refused to fund his travel and expenses in response.

Selfish, right? Two other athletes have done the same thing - one of which is none other than Chad Hedrick. Hedrick owns five roller rinks and is also refusing USSF money, but he has not chosen to take it to an arbitrator. He'd rather just let it go and do whatever it is he wants. The only difference between what he's doing and what Davis is doing is that Davis is principled enough to take a stand and fight.

There's also the perception that his mother - and by extension him - are at odds with the USSF. And they might be right. In 2002 he was known primarily because the USSF investigated an allegation that a qualifying race was fixed to get him on the short track team. He was never even alleged to have known about it or participated. But his name was dragged through the mud. Those aren't the type of things you just forget, especially if you're a stand up guy.

The aforementioned documentary caught his mother yelling at him and calling him a loser after he failed to qualify in short track. He gave it right back to her and told her in essence, you're not helping things by calling me names, so shut it. Does he run from discussions of this? Quite the contrary, he embraces it and talks openly about how productive his relationship with his mother has been in pushing him forward - but still we, the media, somehow know better, and she is portrayed as a Dickens' character.

Hedrick's father? He's been quoted saying psychologically devastating things to Hedrick after races, playing bad cop to his wife's good cop. Ask Chad and he says the same thing - only a loved one can hit you hard enough to get you truly motivated. And that's important when you're already ahead of the competition.

Oh, there's one last thing.

If Hedrick wins the team pursuit, he gets a shot at something he's wanted for about three years and it means exactly nothing if he doesn't follow through and win three more gold medals.

If Davis wins, he becomes the first black athlete to win an individual gold medal in Winter Games history.

Read that again.

The first black athlete in history. Doing something he's dreamed of since he was 6. Something his mom scrimped and saved and sacrificed for. Something he's worked for, enduring the laughter, the strange looks, and the isolation that comes with being a racial anomaly. In his predominantly low-income, 95% minority grammar school, he was laughed at for doing a white sport that involved ice and tights. At the rink, in the relatively affluent Evanston, he was one of the few black faces (other than his coach) he could see.

The 1000 was his best shot. Speedskating is not like other sports. It's not even like its Summer equivalent, track and field. There are no preliminaries and no second chances. Every four years (if you qualify) you get one shot. You against the clock. In a sport where the difference between immortality and honorable mention is less than 2 tenths of a second. If anything is off, anything at all, you get no second chance. No do-over. That's it for another four years. Lose a World Cup race and there's the next stop on the circuit. Lose an Olympic race and 20 years worth of training might have just gone for naught.

He's trained by himself apart from and sometimes at odds with the USSF for years. And now that organization wants him to play nice and possibly risk the best shot at his lifetime goal on an event that wasn't even an event until last week?

What would you do?

More to the point, what do you think Hedrick would do?

Weeks before the Olympics, Davis was back at his hometown skating club running practices for the kids. He has repeatedly stated that he loves kids and that he eventually wants to teach. He's a professional athlete, but he's taking classes at Northern Michigan University so he can work with kids after his career is over. When asked about issues of race, he indicated that the status of minority children and their experience growing up is the issue he would raise if given the chance to meet MLK or Malcolm X.

You think being the first black athlete to win individual gold didn't mean something to him?

This is a man who was getting hate mail on his website, only days before the 1000, liberally sprinkled with that word we like to think has been excised from our collective vocabulary. He's filed suit against the city of Chicago because not once, but twice, because has he been hassled and harassed by cops for no reason other than being black in the wrong place at the wrong time - including having his underwear pulled out and a flashlight pointed down to see if there was "contraband." And all this occurred while walking with a filmmaker and a high school outreach director for the ACLU. An internationally known professional athlete, a filmmaker, and a director for the ACLU. And in the eyes of these cops, just another...

He's lived a life on the fringe, being the wrong color, involved in the wrong sport, famous on the wrong continent, and now has been wrongly accused of being selfish at precisely the point in his life he'd fought and worked and saved and sacrificed for, for decades.

But now he's won. He's accomplished what he's waited decades for. But this, like other events in his life has been tainted by controversy and tarnished by misunderstanding.

And one of the very people responsible for stirring up this controversy and turning this into something he can't control is putting a microphone in his face and demanding to know how he feels.

How would you respond? He can't pull a Jessup and thunder forth about how wrong they've been, how they've tried to ruin his moment, how they've backed the wrong horse. But neither can he ignore them. He knows just how important what he's done is. He measures his life at least partially by the effect it has on kids and he knows that he's done something that no one else can claim - not just winning the gold, but breaking a barrier that in today's day and age seems inexplicable. A color barrier? Today? Can't be.

Try and take into account that the people asking the questions are also the people at least partially responsible for his feelings of ambivalence at a moment where he should feel nothing but unadulterated joy. They, not him, are the ones who made this Davis versus Hedrick, Davis versus the US team, Davis versus the world, when throughout the entire two decades he's been training in his sport, it's been about one thing and one thing only - Davis versus Davis.

Are you angry, Shani?

I don't know about him, but I am.

What did we expect him to do afterwards? It was his medal to lose, and if he lost, it would add ammunition to the claim that he deliberately sabotaged a "teammate."

Ask anyone who's competed at a high enough level and if they're honest, they'll admit that after the euphoria hits, you feel a loss. What do you do after you've achieved your goal? It's like the dog that chases cars - what would it do if it actually got ahold of that bumper?

Unfortunately for Shani, it looked like we even took that euphoria from him.

I wanted him to answer Ms. Stark directly. I didn't want him to avoid the question. Shani is by most accounts a warm and engaging, thoughtful and intelligent man. And I'd like to hear him answer that question truthfully, like Jermaine O'Neal did when asked about the raising of the minimum age for NBA players.

I wanted him to yank the mike from her and pull a move straight out of the Boondocks.

"Am I angry? I don't even know where to begin. I'm the world champ. I work with kids. I study in my spare time to become a teacher. I've been doing this since I was old enough to read and wanted nothing more than to win a gold medal for my country. Racially, I've grown up on the outside looking in, in more areas than you could possibly know. In my hometown - a town I just gave the nod to by donning a snow white-on-white White Sox cap - I'm called selfish by the local media and made fun of by the boys I went to school with because I wear tights and do white things. To the cops back home, I'm just another black man. If I make race an issue - which is impossible to do because it's already an issue - I'm somehow the bad guy because I'm playing the race card. If I deny it, I deny the obvious truth that I'm damned proud of being the first black athlete to win gold."

"Am I angry? You've focused all your attention on a former inline speedskater who decided to get a gold medal because he wanted to go big game hunting during a bender at a Vegas blackjack table who saw a former inline rival on TV and got jealous. A man who I've beaten out everywhere over the course of this entire year. A man who is arrogant and brash and unthinking and seeks out individual glory by winning 5 gold medals in one Olympics but somehow I'm the one being selfish by not participating in a gimmick event that never existed before and is never practiced on the circuit."

"You've decided that I'm somehow surly and a malcontent and don't get along with anyone, but you refuse to talk to my boys on the short track team - including your beloved Apollo Ohno - to see if that's really the case. I've done things that no one and I mean no one in speedskating has ever done. My mother packed up and moved to Rogers Park for me. She paid late fees on the rent - for me. She busted my ass to work hard - for me. And now that it's all paid off all you can see is just another angry black woman ready to play the race card. You see a single black woman who berates her son, but you don't see the depth, the complexity, or the meaning of our relationship. I've logged onto my personal web site only to see words that never, ever see the light of day pointedly directed at me and it's mostly because of the way you've portrayed me as just another…interested only in what's best for me. Am I angry? How would you know? How could you? Did you even stop to ask?"

"More importantly, did you ever stop to listen?"

But Mr. Davis, you haven't answered the question, are you angry?

"I won. I'm pleased. As for the rest of it... I could answer your question, but I don't think you'd hear me even if I tried."

I can't speak for him. And I won't try to.

I do wish I could hear his answers to those questions - but I think if you watch, if you listen, if you're open to it, he's already said more than he needs to say.

Davis won silver today in the 1500. An Italian came out of nowhere and was lifted by the crowd to victory. It was beautiful.

Davis got it. He took the podium with a man who had just skated the race of his life when given a once in a lifetime opportunity. And he absolutely loved it. He fed off the Italian's joy and acted like the "big kid" he's always claimed to be.

He enjoyed the moment - even though he didn't win. Chad Hedrick? He stared straight ahead with a smile as frozen as the ice he'd failed to conquer. That famed last lap speed he - the world record holder - declared he could rely on to assure victory? He came into it within striking distance of the gold, and then faded so badly he crossed the line shaking his head in defeat.

I wish I could hear Davis' real thoughts on the matter. But I think he's already spoken volumes if only you're careful enough to listen.

And besides, wishing is for suckers.