'500,000 Black Boys Compete for 7 Full Time Jobs': Nuri Muhammad Stuns Cam Newton With Mind Boggling Stats About Competitive Sports

Cam Newton has one of the greatest football stories in recent memory. After winning a state championship in high school, he was left for dead at Florida behind Tim Tebow. He transferred to Auburn as a senior and earned a Heisman Trophy and a National Championship. He then went No. 1 overall to the Carolina Panthers, won Offensive Rookie of the Year, then went 15-1 on his way to an MVP and a Super Bowl appearance in 2015.

Newton is one of many success stories of young black men in pro sports, especially the NFL and NBA. However, there are a very finite number of spots in both of these leagues, especially considering there are no other major pro leagues for American football anywhere in the world, unlike for hoopers.

Cam Newton recently had Nation of Islam student minister Nuri Muhammad, who works out of Muhammad Mosque No. 74 in Indianapolis, on his Funky Friday podcast. Muhammad spoke about the limited opportunities for those looking for a career as an athlete. Muhammad used the NBA’s D-League and a speech Magic Johnson made to illustrate how the system in place is not built for these young black athletes to have success in anything but athletics.

“Remember the D-League? They call it the G-League now, for the NBA? That developmental league they were bringing the young soldiers through to get them prepared for the NBA. The first year or second year, Magic Johnson was their speaker. Listen to what he said: he said, ‘I wanna teach you brothers how to take the brain you built in basketball and use it for business.’ I don’t think he’s been invited back, but he should be there every time.”

Muhammad went on to argue that one of the greatest “impediments” for the success of Black Americans is the fact that, in his view, athletics are more celebrated than academics in Black culture. He also noted a difference he feels in the motivation behind putting young black and young white people into sports.

According to Muhammad, white people put their kids into sports to extract the principles from it, while Black people put their kids in sports in the hopes that they will become a pro athlete. When young white athletes fail to make it in the pros, they take the sacrifice and the discipline, and the work ethic they learned to another profession. Young Black athletes “have their minds wrapped up 100 percent,” and if they don’t make it, “now you’ve got a brother with a broken spirit.”

“Right now, brother Cam, there’s 500,000 black boys playing high school basketball. Only 17,000 of them will actually make it to college to play basketball. And out of them 17,000, only 44 of them will make it to the NBA. And out of the 44 that make it to the NBA, only seven of them will get a starting position. And the average career, of the one who did get a starting position, is only 5-7 years. So there’s a half a million Black boys, competing for seven full-time jobs that ain’t gonna last for seven years. That’s backwards.”

Muhammad noted that a large factor in this dichotomy is the way the school system is “failing” young Black children. He said that children are generally only learning about white greatness. That’s an issue, because to Muhammad and many others, the most powerful thing for a child is to see someone who looks like them achieving something great.

Muhammad is an author as well as a NOI student minister. He has written seven books, including four, such as Before You Say I Do, that are Amazon Books bestsellers. He has also appeared on many shows to share his views on life and Black excellence. These include The Breakfast Club, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Vlad TV, Ebro in the Morning on Hot 97, and more.