The Heritage by Howard Bryant

Author:Howard Bryant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

THE BYGONE ERA

If stick to sports would later become the reactionary response designed to put players on the defensive, in the 1990s, it was a place players weren’t only comfortable with but proud of. In 1997, Michael Jordan had won his fifth NBA title and solidified his public image as the master pitchman and buzzer beater. Charles Barkley neared retirement, but his signature statement had been a 1993 Nike spot where he declared he was not a role model. “Just because I can dunk a basketball,” he says to end the ad, “doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.” It was the perfect anti-Heritage counterprogramming for Nike, balancing Jordan’s smooth apolitical “Be Like Mike” persona with Barkley’s smoldering repudiation. Both Barkley and Jordan took different approaches to reach the same place: don’t ask anything of me.

On the morning of August 9, 1997, four years before the World Trade Center attacks, NYPD officers responded to a call at the Rendez-Vous night club in Queens after the patrons spilled on to the street after the club closed. Police arrived to control the crowd and arrested Abner Louima, a thirty-year-old Haitian immigrant and another man, Patrick Antoine. The arresting officer, Justin Volpe, claimed Louima had punched him. Louima and Antoine were taken into custody. On the drive to the precinct, police beat both of them with fists and nightsticks. Upon arrival, Volpe and another officer, Charles Schwarz, took Louima into the public men’s room, which was filthy, with walls covered in hardened feces. According to one report:

What allegedly happened to Abner Louima represented an almost unimaginable display of psychosexual criminality. . . . If the allegations are correct, there was an indication that [Volpe] entered the bathroom with specific intent. . . . Inside the bathroom, according to the source, Volpe seized a wooden handle, screamed “Fucking Haitian” at Louima, and slammed him up against the wall. According to Louima, “They threw me to the ground and start beating me up. And then one of them—there was two of them—one pick up something on the floor. I don’t know what it is, but it looked like a plunger to me, and just, you know, push it on my ass, and then it came out with shit and blood. . . . They put it in my mouth. He said that’s my shit.”

“He was rubbing shit all over Louima’s ass, and he had his head shoved up against the wall,” the investigator said. . . . It was at that moment that Volpe is alleged to have shoved the handle into Louima’s mouth.

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