- Racism Boston & Sports

Welcome back to the Bill Bradley Collective, where this week your hosts examine the complicated history of Boston sports and race. The focus centers on the Red Sox and Celtics franchises, but not before acknowledging one team’s ethos of “white slot receiver/failed white college quarterback” need not even apply. From Tom Yawkey’s steadfast refusal to employ top black ballplayers to an oft-described mercurial pitcher’s racially prescient comments decades later and the subsequent dealing of a black superstar in recent times the Sox racial history is surely an unbalanced one. Like their north-end based brethren, the Celtics history is convoluted; a franchise that embraced Bill Russell and an unprecedented black starting five also felt the need to surround a diverse core with a largely white, undeserving supporting cast in later similarly fruitful years to appease a white demographic. We close with a tribute to a just-passed boxing mega-star, aptly-Massachusetts based with a truly marvelous legacy left behind. But first we rant, as Zak leads off with a well-deserved evisceration of a once-upon-a-time Democratic effigy turned widely accused sex criminal,; Ed reconciles his hostility for a villainous GOP Senator in the wake of his pro-labor sentiment towards Alabama-based Amazon factory workers; finally Andrew recaps the Big East tournament and specifically the long and complicated week had by the conquering head coach.