Do What You Love

By Gabe Corder

Senior Kinesiology major

SPH Student Ambassador

Editor's note: This is the first in the series of blog posts from the School of Public Health (SPH) Student Ambassadors. The Ambassadors are a diverse group of undergraduate students from SPH, ranging in major and academic year. They are passionate about public health and engage in activities designed to attract new students to the SPH. This semester they will be offering an SPH student perspective on health-related events going on across campus. Each student will contribute to the Healthy Turtle blog this semester and provide a window into what's important to SPH undergraduate students.

Preface: In celebration of Black History Month, the Department of Kinesiology, in collaboration with the Department of Athletics, the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism, and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, hosted a special presentation by Clifton Brown. His talk described the experience of being a sports writer from an African American’s perspective and discussed how journalism has changed over his more than 30-year career. 

Clifton Brown with professor Curlee Raven Holton, Interim Executive Director of the David C. Driskell Center.

At an event sponsored by the Department of Kinesiology and many campus co-sponsors, I watched a talk by Clifton Brown, a black sports writer who currently works for Sporting News.com.

This presentation was meant to discuss aspects of being a black sports writer in today’s society in honor of Black History Month. Mr. Brown discussed the difficulties he faced while rising in the ranks of American sports writers, and that was very interesting to hear. As a white male, discrimination is something that I have never had to deal with.

Clifton Brown addresses the audience on the changes
he has witnessed in journalism throughout his career.

Mr. Brown began his career in Boca Raton, Florida where he was the only black man in the office and he overheard his white boss use the “n-word”. I will never know what that must have felt like. But Mr. Brown did not let that instance hold him back, and I believe he used it as motivation to get where he is today.

Mr. Brown progressed in the ranks of the sports journalism world and eventually found himself working for the New York Times. He worked many odd assignments and covered sports from the middle school level to NASCAR, neither of which initially interested him, yet he continued with his passion.

Over the years, Mr. Brown has witnessed many young journalists stop pursuing journalism because of these struggles, yet he never gave up. He gave wise words of advice to the undergraduate students in attendance when he said, “Know what you want to do, do it, and love it."

Clifton Brown imparts a few words of wisdom on University of Maryland athletes.

I have tried to take that to heart from the beginning of my time at the University of Maryland, and specifically after my switch to being a Kinesiology major. I love what I am studying and I am excited about my future. There have been roadblocks, albeit not racial or anything of that nature, but that has not deterred me from my desire to succeed eventually as a physical therapist.