Poor Darryl Strawberry. It’s a sad point in life when you have to pander to the same audience that ridiculed you, in an effort to win their affection. But once again —like Michael Vick, Tiki Barber, Jim Brown and Ray Lewis— he’s doing the shuck and the jive for White folks.
On Tuesday, the former New York Mets and New York Yankees player was on a Fox Business segment talking about being a pastor, praying for humanity and being a model negro.
“We have a problem in America and we need to come together as people —not color— but people,” he began when speaking of the state of the country.
Strawberry was then asked by Erin Elmore, a self-described Trump surrogate, what his thoughts were on Colin Kaepernick. “What would you tell these athletes today who are playing politics with their job, when their job is sports,” her loaded questioned was posed.
And of course Strawberry replied, “I would tell them, really leave the politics alone as far as your job. You go out and do your job and play sports because you only really have [a] one-time window open to play sports and have an impact and sports is going to pass away, but what legacy will you leave in life? And that’s the most important thing.”
Surprised? No.
Strawberry has a tumultuous baseball career that involved drug use, lawsuits, solicitation and break probation. In recent years he’s turned his life around and is now a born again Christian with a church and treatment center. And that’s all good.
But being an athlete does not pigeonhole you into only focusing on the sport. As multifaceted humans, Kaepernick has a right to have issues that are important to him —and as a Black man, what’s more important than the livelihood of other Black men?
With that said, the next time Strawberry decides to give his two cents on people staying in their place, he should strongly consider his journey to “enlightenment.”
Oh, and if you were wondering, Strawberry got the co-sign from the Fox hosts. Good for him.