Actually, it’s not a race issue, no matter how much we might try to make it out to be – it’s an African issue and that’s not the same thing as I suspect, being an inner city school, there a number of other black players at Neuman, none of which Gallagher is attacking. The original question is whether the African players – not the black players – but just the African players – are the ages that they claim to be, and there may be at least some legitimacy to that question (though probably just a little).
I write from personal experience. My siblings have adopted several Asian and African children. We have come to wonder in the last year or so if the Africans are older than what we were told at the time of adoption – they are larger and more athletic than their classmates, for example; though being siblings, an early growth spurt could just run in their biological family. But our African children do seem just generally older, further along in their growth/development – more mature – than their classmates and their American cousins.
In other parts of the world, records aren’t kept as strictly as they are here (our kids came from huts with dirt floors – literally) and it isn’t inconceivable that someone might change a person’s birth date for various reasons, including “adoptability”…or athletic eligibility. While everyone seems to be going gaga over Mo’ne Davis, let’s not forget an earlier Little League World Series hero from a decade earlier, Danny Almonte. It happens.
That doesn’t mean it did happen. But if Gallagher – and this is a very limited and specific defense – is looking at two kids, and just two kids, and they just don’t look like they’re sixteen or seventeen, it may be reasonable to ask that question, without it being a racial issue. How Gallagher handled this is a different matter, and frankly, unacceptable; but from reading the entire article, there’s nothing to indicate that this is a general racial issue, so let’s not make it one.