A critical play of Super Bowl LIX happened off the field.
With the game out of reach, DeVonta Smith, star wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles, walked over to quarterback Jalen Hurts on the sideline.
The Eagles had just delivered a 40-22 beatdown to the Kansas City Chiefs, blocking a historic three-peat and bringing the franchise’s second championship to the City of Brotherly Love.
“I love you, boy,” Smith said. “I appreciate you, man.”
Fighting tears, Smith looked away.
Hurts held him there. “It’s been a ride, huh? It’s been a ride, man. You deserve it, bruh.”
Their bond goes back to the University of Alabama, tested over four seasons in Philadelphia. Under pressure and scrutiny, they held together long enough to arrive here, in the Superdome, at this viral moment.
Fans flooded the clip’s comment section. Most had no idea what these two men had actually been through, but the emotion on display was felt through the screen.
“Smitty couldn’t look Jalen in his eyes when he was saying all he was saying because he would have completely lost it,” wrote @Swooshman_3. “It’s a deep love and respect for a man to be that emotionally vulnerable in front of another man. Them boys have indeed endured a long ride that ended in a championship. Truly a beautiful thing developing in Philly.”
Freedom of expression
In America, sports is a multi-billion-dollar entertainment machine. For Black men, it has long been something more complicated, where opportunity collides with big-time risk.
The games themselves can tax not only the body, but the mind with stereotypes that stick Black men with dehumanizing labels: deviant, violent, expendable. But research shows that sports offer one of the few public spaces where Black men can be expressive.
“Whether spiritual or community gatherings, moving our bodies has always been integral in how we connect with one another,” says Dr. Joseph N. Cooper, the inaugural Dr. J. Keith Motley Endowed Chair of Sport Leadership and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
American slavery, Cooper explains, severely limited opportunities for what he calls “liberatory action.” Movement became an emblem of freedom, from racing to dancing to boxing and all forms of athletic competition. The field and the arena served as outlets for what couldn’t be expressed anywhere else.
“In the classroom, if a Black boy moves and jumps, he’s deviant and disruptive,” Cooper says. “But in a sports setting, that behavior is actually encouraged. It’s one of the few spaces where there’s positive affirmation, a strong racial identity associated with the activity, and the possibility of economic mobility.”
This is also a space where failure is unavoidable. Players miss shots, drop passes, lose games, suffer injuries. It’s impossible to play the game without falling short. Bonds are built through persistence, enduring adversity together.
And yet, in a culture that teaches men to mask their emotions, vulnerability doesn’t get much playing time.
“Tragedies happen, but I remember on our teams, there was always this quasi-vulnerability,” says Dr. A. Lamont Williams, an assistant professor of sport administration at the University of Cincinnati. “If the homie passes away, or so and so had a divorce, for that moment, we’re brothers, put your arms around each other. I had to perform the process: wear armbands, long live whoever on the kicks. Unfortunately, sports doesn’t always lend the time for vulnerabilities. Then it’s gone.”
Those limits are reinforced by hazing, homophobia and rigid definitions of manhood, Cooper adds. Some coaches exploit players, he says, while behaviors that fall outside of traditional masculine norms remain stigmatized.
“If a Black man presents himself in a more feminine way in sporting spaces, that’s not widely accepted,” Cooper says. “One type of masculinity we should aspire to moves beyond the idea that you must be over other people, or anybody who doesn’t have that is not worthy of manhood.”
While researching for his book on Black male college athletes, Cooper found a recurring pattern he calls “athletic identity foreclosure.” This means a person’s value diminishes relative to what their body can produce. It is a perishable skill.
“Once you’re no longer performing, whether because of injury or age, then your identity diminishes,” he says. “Holistic underdevelopment leads to a figurative death.”
Moving goalposts
Holistic development begins (or stalls) long before the pros.
Many Black boys get involved in sports at a young age. Recruiters scout high schools. At big Division I programs, Black men dominate revenue sports, even while making up a small fraction of the student body, says Kenan Sayers, a graduate student at Michigan State University pursuing a dual PhD in psychology and kinesiology.
In sports, the team can become another family, working toward a common goal. From childhood to elite levels, connections can offer structure, safety and a sense of belonging in hostile environments, Sayers says.
But the fact is, very few make it to the professional level.
Studying the link between exercise, mental health and athlete wellbeing, Sayers points to research showing that many Black athletes are not encouraged to pursue career-building opportunities beyond sports, despite having the resources available to them. The priority is performance, not preparation for life after the game. A situation compounded by the burden of stereotypes.
“At large PWIs, many people have only encountered minoritized groups via TV and have the overall view of Black men as violent and unintelligent,” Sayers says. “That puts a strain on Black athletes as students.”
While their bodies generate money and prestige, their intellectual and emotional development often gets sidelined. Support doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be built into the culture. Sayers emphasizes the need for programs that develop Black male student-athletes academically, socially and emotionally, highlighting models developed by Cooper that show what’s possible when institutions commit to holistic development.
That said, even when Black men thrive on the field, the world outside is a different arena, Cooper adds, where the rules are hardly clear.
“Once you know the rules of the game, when you’re in sport, there’s a level of understanding that comes with being in this space,” Cooper says. “So many of the societal rules are just very blurry. Am I a citizen that can walk across the street without being harassed by a cop or not? Can I go in a grocery store without a white woman saying I’m a harassing her or not?”
In contrast, sports set clear guidelines.
“If I run a 440, we understand that,” he says. “It’s 100 yards to get to the end zone. If I shoot this ball and it goes in the basket, it counts. There are clearer guidelines for what constitutes the goal. Whereas in society, they keep moving the goalpost. Anti-Black misandry is real. The goal is for us to not be great, for us to not multiply, for us to not love each other.”
Competition off the field
Lamont Williams didn’t know his father until he was 12. It was hard for him to understand how to trust other Black men. He played basketball, American football, ran track. He built bonds through the pressure of trying to connect.
He remembers one specific basketball game. It was older kids, around 16, against the younger kids. Williams was with the younger group and they kept losing.
“I threw a fit and I was dang near in tears,” he says. “The older kids said, ‘Didn’t your Pops teach you this behavior isn’t okay? You can’t be out here throwing a fit.’ And I was like, yo, I don’t even know who my dad is. How are you going to ask me about my dad? I had to fall on my face a lot. I had to learn how to engage. That trust wasn’t mended.”
Three concussions in his senior year of high school ended his athletic pursuit in 2010. From there, Williams had to transition from scoring touchdowns to mentoring and teaching. It was a tough shift because his competitive spirit never left.
In some ways, it’s healthy in the iron-sharpens-iron sense, but in more nuanced spaces, he says, “you have to figure out how to take that same animal and evolve it. It’s almost like Pokémon.”
In academia, Williams found himself in an unspoken competition with other Black men. He had to get comfortable with uncomfortable conversations. These weren’t rivals fighting for a starting position, he realized. They could collaborate, support each other, build together.
“The practice was facing those things,” he says. “How can we support each other and make sure it’s us? We’re not actually competing because we don’t need to. It’s about having intentional conversations, honest and vulnerable conversations, sometimes going back and forth, you scream or cry. Every time we say bye, we say, ‘I love you.’”
Being from the Midwest and having traveled to various countries, Williams constantly looks for ways to connect with Black men around the globe.
“The love is definitely the hardest part to flesh out,” he says, “because everybody’s definition of love is different. But it’s important for Black men to focus on not re-traumatizing. Love is part of the process of me learning the person in front of me. That helps me love them deeper. We can heal together, but on the backend, you create an ecosystem that says, “I love you. I appreciate you.”
Brotherly Love is a six-part digital series about the emotional and social lives of Black men through the science of love.
Funding for this series was provided by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, as part of its “Spreading Love Through the Media” initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, Acton Family Giving, and Unlikely Collaborators.
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Russell Nichols is a speculative fiction writer, poet, playwright and endangered journalist. Raised in Richmond, California, he got rid of all his stuff in 2011 to live out of a backpack with his wife, vagabonding around the world ever since. Look for him at russellnichols.com.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
