One became an authentic hero, who like most real heroes, gets, if anything, too little attention. The other is a bum, who continues to betray all of us. Yesterday, a lot of journalists had to spend time on the bum, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a convicted felon who has been dragged back into court because he hasn’t been paying back money he was ordered to pay.
Kilpatrick, you may remember, charmed and beguiled the voters of poor Detroit into electing him twice. He also seduced some of the city’s top business leaders into bankrolling him.
They put up the money that enabled him to beat a decent, honest man, three years ago. Last year it turned out that Kilpatrick, whose high-living ways were notorious, had lied under oath to cover up an affair. Worse, he pressured his poor city to pay nearly $9 million to the cops he had unjustly fired for investigating him.
Eventually he resigned and did a little time.
The court ordered him to pay back a million of the money he cost the city. But he hasn’t made his full payments, even though a high-paying job was found for him and the business leaders he charmed gave him a $240,000 loan. He and his wife spent more than a million dollars last year. He just doesn’t like paying what he owes.
Fortunately for me, yesterday I got to sit on a stage with a man as large as Kwame, but who is worth his weight in gold. Joe Dumars, the Detroit Pistons’ President of Basketball Operations.
Macomb Community College has been doing a series on the role of sports in society, and asked me to interview Dumars before a large crowd. The man is pure class. Quiet integrity and brains. When his playing days were almost done, Pistons owner Bill Davidson did something unheard of in sports. He asked him to run the team. Not to coach it, to run the entire business operation.
That was ten years ago. Dumars hs been doing it ever since, with class and success. He also has his own foundation and does a vast amount of charitable work that barely gets noticed.
Along the way, Joe D has pulled many an arrogant young hotshot aside and told him what it takes to be a real man.
Dumars was the youngest of seven kids. His dad drove a produce truck, and taught his kids to treat people with humility. Later, when Joe was making seven million dollars a year, he’d go home to see his parents. His mother would make him put the garbage out, and his dad would send him to the store. Kwame Kilpatrick was the son of politicians, who treated him like a little prince.
Yesterday, I found myself wondering if we’d all be better off today if Joe D had been Kwame K’s big brother. I doubt that Joe Dumars has ever thought of running for anything. But if he ever wanted to run my state, that would be just fine with me.
For those interested in Joe Dumars, there is a fascinating story about him, in the July 1, 1985 New Yorker. It was a story in the Talk of the Town section of the magazine, in which a reporter had gone to cover the general social scene at the NBA draft held annually in Manhattan. And while the basketball press' attention had been focused on the top picks (Patrick Ewing, and Benoit Benjamin), the New Yorker focused on the little-known hot-shooting guard from McNeese State, Joe Dumars, and his family.
I'd love to post the digital version (available to subscribers) here but it is copyrighted. I actually remember reading the story, 24 years ago, in the print edition before anybody had a home computer. Jack might want to look it up, which is easy to do at the New Yorker's online archives.
The story is one of the most amazingly prescient things one could ever imagine -- the story is of the internal strength of the Dumars family, and their foundation of personal character. How true it all turned out to be. And remarkably, it was all written before Joe Dumars ever signed an NBA contract, or played a single game for the Pistons.
I'm very sorry that I couldn't have alerted Jack to this tiny but amazing part of the Joe Dumars story before this recent interview.
Posted by: Anonymous | October 30, 2009 at 03:52 PM
It never fells the tired saga of good negro vs bad negro...When will it ever end .....
Posted by: Thrasher | October 31, 2009 at 01:04 AM
What can you do to encourage the youth to rise up against this assaut against their home?
Posted by: Staci | November 03, 2009 at 12:40 AM