Athletics

Respected sports journalist visits campus for 'Covering Sports, Covering Race'

Marc Spears of Yahoo! Sports and a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, will be featured during a free public session titled "Covering Sports, Covering Race" on Feb. 24, in Freeman Auditorium at the HUB-Robeson Center. Credit: Photo Provided. All Rights Reserved.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Stories of racial tension have been prominent in the national news over the past year, and sports has not been immune — from the Missouri football boycott, to calls for LeBron James to sit out games in protest of the death of Tamir Rice, to the ongoing campaign to change the nickname of Washington’s NFL football team.

A journalist who is an industry leader on the interplay between race and sports, Marc Spears of Yahoo! Sports, will be featured in a session discussing “Covering Sports, Covering Race” at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 24, in Freeman Auditorium at the HUB-Robeson Center.

The free public session is sponsored by the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism as part of a yearlong, University-wide roundtable series on race and sports.

Spears has been a sports writer for nearly 21 years, including 17 NBA seasons. He has covered the NBA, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, major college football and basketball, and Major League Baseball during his career. The former college basketball player has more than 300,000 followers on Twitter, is an NBA analyst for radio stations in San Francisco and Salt Lake City, and is a regular on television and radio shows nationwide. 

The San Jose, California, native is also chair of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Sports Task Force, which includes African-American sports journalists from the United States and Canada. He also co-produced an award-winning documentary called “Katrina Cop In The Superdome.”

“We really appreciate Marc taking the time, especially midseason, to join us and challenge us on this topic,” said John Affleck, the Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society and director of the Curley Center, who will moderate the session. “As a nation, our struggle to become the fair and equal society we aspire to be has been perhaps most obvious when it comes to race — and sports is an arena where race relations play out in real time, every day.”

Last Updated June 2, 2021