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December 24, 1999/15 Tevet 5760, Vol. 52, No.17
'Jewish athlete' won't be oxymoron in 21st century
TAMI BICKLEY
Staff Writer
To some Americans, the thought of entering the new millennium brings with it considerable fear - mass terrorism, panic, planes falling from the sky. But to Jewish sports fans, the turn of the century brings hope.
If we look beyond end-of-the-world Y2K hype, we may be able to catch a glimpse of the light being shed at this very moment upon some talented Jewish athletes, namely, two. For they have already begun to hurdle the obscurity of Jews in sports over the past century, and outrun the stigma of how their religion is viewed in the sports world. And there is now reason to believe that the words "Jewish" and "athlete" used together in the same sentence will no longer cause eyebrows to be raised in doubt.
Shawn Green is a budding baseball superstar, an outfielder who recently signed a six-year, $84 million contract. Tamir Goodman is a high school basketball prodigy whose talent has been widely recognized. Both athletes have created ripples of national attention.
Green is no longer the well-kept secret he was while playing in Toronto. He recently signed with the Dodgers in Los Angeles - the city with the second largest Jewish population in the nation. It's also the city that once cheered for Sandy Koufax, arguably the greatest Jewish athlete in history.
Green has admitted that he was not much of a practicing Jew until recently, when he experienced a religious awakening, brought on by media attention to his Jewish roots. He began to examine those roots himself, he said, and soon found himself in a synagogue during High Holidays. Green is being embraced by Jews like never before.
In Los Angeles, Green is being hailed as the first Jewish role model on the Dodgers since Koufax. His agent, Jeff Moorad, has claimed that he is besieged with correspondence from synagogues and Jewish organizations all over Southern California. One synagogue even offered to give Green free Hebrew lessons.
Whether or not Green decides to spend his off-season studying Torah, the mere fact that he acknowledges he is a Jew, and a Jewish baseball player at that, sends a signal to the Jewish community that not only is it possible to be a good athlete and be Jewish, but that it's commendable to concede one's athletic duties on certain days of the year - days when a baseball cap should be replaced with a yarmulke (skull cap).
Goodman, an observant Orthodox Jew, always wears a yarmulke, even while on the court at his yeshiva high school in Pikesville, M.D., Talmudical Academy of Baltimore. And it is in part because of this small but significant gesture, that Goodman's name has been tossed around in the Jewish and secular media alike. Of course, his talent, save for his playing lag last summer, hasn't hurt, either.
But lately, Goodman's situation has become a little stickier. A basketball scholarship that would have allowed him to attend and play for the University of Maryland has been relinquished. And now, the 17-year-old dubbed "Jewish Jordan" is busy trying to put the disappointment behind himself.
Next fall, Goodman will enter a much less demanding environment than Maryland at his new school of choice, Towson State in Towson, Md.
The small-school appeal of Towson will offer an environment far-different from that of Maryland, where the expectations Goodman would have faced may have been too much for a college freshman to handle. Attending Towson will mean fewer hassles for a Jew who won't play on certain days of the week, who won't dine out at non-kosher restaurants with his teammates, and who wears a yarmulke. On this smaller stage, Goodman may have a better chance to succeed and to live up to his nickname.
We could use a new Jewish NBA player. As of last week, there are no Jewish NBA players left, since the Minnesota Timberwolves released 40-year-old Danny Schayes, a former Phoenix Sun, who was the oldest player in the NBA.
But Green and Goodman offer a world of potential, just when the times are changing.
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