I got caught up in the cultural rapture of the black football nerd king. Photo by Tim Warner/Getty Images
As the “little drink and sandwich man” for the card games of my grandmother and elegantly hypermasculine black uncles, I had a base of sports knowledge instilled in me at a young age. So the sentence “Russell Wilson was to the Seahawks what Fran Tarkenton was to the Minnesota Vikings of the 1970s; a game manager and scrambler so good at finding open wide receivers in broken plays the team created offensive schemes around it” comes too easily off my tongue for me to make that many statements about “sports ball.”