MOVING THE CHAINS: HOW SPORTS AND ADVERTISING ARE CHANGING THE VIEW OF BLACK FATHERHOOD
Written by Kyle Turner: Culture Editor
Let me know if you’ve heard this statistic before:
According to the 2016 U.S. Census ⅓ of all black minors in the U.S. live with a single parent.
Often cited as the catalyst for all that plagues the black community, the absentee dad is typically where our society’s mind drifts when we hear this kind of data. However, beneath these stats lies the a very real bucking of this trend. Productive and supportive father-son relationships are becoming more and more common and a recurring connection is sports. We wanted to examine some examples of a new fatherhood standard being shown to us by well-known advertisers and perhaps start a conversation about why and how this standard is changing and what role, if any, brands play in bolstering these images.
Let’s start with Thanksgiving 2018. While your family dines and enjoys a competitive football game, a commercial fills the screen. In it, we see Kyrie Irving and his Dad, Drederick, playing 1 on 1 basketball on the parquet floors of the TD Garden in Boston. Kyrie’s voice echoes over the images as he shares the story of his upbringing, one without his mom who passed away when he was four. One that reveals how a 16 year old Kyrie bested his dad in the driveway of their home in New Jersey. This is just a commercial, but it’s also an intimate exploration of Kyrie’s true life experiences with his father. The commercial ends with a superimposed Nike logo.
In a recent Gillette ad, Terry Griffin, NFL players Shaquill and Shaquem Griffin’s dad, showed the spirit of true fatherhood in pushing both his sons to achieve above standard, but specifically not allowing Shaquem to see himself as “less than,” consistently treating and teaching both he and his brother with the same love and intensity. This is despite Shaquem being born with amniotic band syndrome, a rare disease that ultimately resulted in amputation of Shaquem’s left hand at the age of 4. So maybe that challenge would affect Shaquem’s ability to play a game he grew to love? Not so much. Terry hand-built contraptions for Shaquem to lift weights, throwing balls as hard as he could at Shaquem until he learned how to catch them. While Shaquem and Shaquill grew in a nurturing 2 parent home, his dad created a sense of self respect and drive that often gets overlooked in a father’s parental contributions.
The last example is one featuring one of the most prominent sports dads of the last two decades. The Nike ad, using a real home movie, features a nine year old Serena Williams being closely watched and encouraged by her father Richard. The ad starts with Richard, hands on his knees, giving instructions to his young progeny. The enthusiastic Serena then throws a tennis ball in the air and looks set to serve it. The clip then cuts to more recent footage while still featuring the motivational audio from her father, who tells her to play "like you're at the US Open."
While the stories we see on TV and in commercials of Kyrie and Drederick, Shaquem and Terry, and Serena and Richard may feel unique, they’re not. Nevertheless, the weight placed on the effects of these paternal relationships by brands like NIke and Gillette does feel new. Often times, advertising contextualizes the zeitgeist in ways that are at once digestible to the general population and reaffirming to the audience they may be featuring. For Kyrie, the relationship he has with his father clearly had a profound impact on his game. Perhaps this is why you see that competitiveness apparent during his games. For Serena, the focus Richard Williams put in her game is palpable. These ads serve as good reminders of how critical dads often are in the journey of these athletes. Moreover, they challenge the perception that black men don’t take their roles seriously.
Participation in sports can seem stereotypical for black kids and families. Nonetheless, we see both in the stories of athletes past and in the commercial representation of present athletes (Prince Fielder, Steph Curry, Lebron James, Cam Newton, and others) that sports can often serve as an unequivocal contributor to parental bonding. This generation, our generation, has leveraged the uniqueness of our upbringing and experiences to define our own identity within fatherhood and are winning with our families and children and brands are starting to take notice. This is an important and necessary shift and will hopefully persist well into our children’s futures.
