My passion for sports began when I was a child learning how to ride my first bike, throwing a baseball for the first time and feeling my dad’s excitement while watching Monday night football. Sports bring people together. Sports bring together people who are different in every imaginable way yet share one passion: basketball, hockey, motorsports, cross country, volleyball, golf, and so many other sports. They are an equalizer of sorts, one of the rare arenas in life where performance wins over age, race, sex, ethnicity, and so on.

Stereotypes are very real to those who think according to them, even though they may be based on limited or biased information. Due to stereotypes, one might assume that all the best basketball players are black, gifted soccer players are Brazilian, stellar gymnasts are trained in Russia and awesome swimmers reside in Australia. Although we may find some truth in these statements, it may only be part of the equation.

In the streets of the United States, for example, black youth can easily see what they need to do to achieve athletic success. They are clear cut: practice, work hard, play by the rules and the results will speak for themselves. On the other hand, in a corporate environment, the rules may less clear, the competition may be objectionable and the results immeasurable without someone’s opinion. African American males succeeding in sports has nothing to do with a predisposition or athletic genepool and more to do with what African American males see as attainable. The very fact that they believe they can become a professional athlete is why many to rise to that level.

Some think blacks lack intellect. Add that mindset with a substandard educational system and you will find lack of success in business and academics. The results are low percentages of African American males in the corporate environment and beyond.

Now let’s take a look at an NFL playbook, which typically contains over 1,500 pages easy. Ask an athlete to study this entire playbook in a four to six week training camp. After studying the book, the athlete will have to make on the spot decisions in a matter of 2-3 seconds or less. From my experience playing football, I know that sometimes a wrong decision at the wrong time could cost you your job, which in turn would cost at the very least hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet athletes execute these decisions under a tremendous amount of pressure — based on playbooks they learned in just four to six weeks. Talk about a stressful work environment!

A poor predisposition to learn in an academic environment is not the basis for such a small percentage of African Americans in the business world. The cause is simply a lack of examples and the same opportunity in the corporate infrastructure. Just like Brazilian futbol players, Russian gymnasts and the like, their athletic success has more to do with what they think they can achieve. Given good odds, they think they can succeed if they put their heart, body and soul into a chosen sport.

The route to victory is believing that if I put my mind to it, I can do it.

It is not simply the educational system failing African American youth or lack of intelligence in black children, but the choices available to these young people once attain the required skills. Uh oh… no, I’m not trying to say there’s an agenda to keep black people out of corporate America, but rather, I am talking about having a more focused approach that would extend opportunities within corporate America.

We all have used the phrase, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” So if there are low numbers of women in high level management positions and lowpercentages of ethic minorities in the corporate world, doesn’t it make sense that there are probably low percentages of opportunities for them in those areas? Most people hire not only who has the necessary skillset, but who they relate to, who they like and who they feel they can trust.

This is the reason success in corporate America is so complicated and rather ambiguous. When you look at the ethnic makeup, lack of women in high level positions, smaller percentages of Latinos and African Americans at all levels, success becomes more complicated for these groups. Not unattainable, but complicated.

I am a big proponent of individual sports that do away with or minimize the need for referees or outside influences, such as swimming, golf, tennis, track and field, motocross and bicycling. With the recent issues coming out about biased NBA referees and the like, it is evident that referees can affect a game and/or make a player ineffective. In team sports such as baseball, basketball and football, someone in charge must say you have the ability to play and give you an opportunity on the field. This, too, can become a very biased and unclear process that at times won’t make sense. In individual sports skill, hard work, peak performance training, persistence and dedication are always rewarded because failure only arises when you choose to quit.

This is the reason I love sports — or specifically, swimming, because with all things being equal, performance is always rewarded.