Dr. Gary F. Green II grew up in a football family in San Antonio, Texas, the namesake son of Gary Green Sr., who played for years in the NFL. He was recruited to play at the University of Kansas, saw the inside of the recruiting apparatus at major programs across the country, and eventually traded the field for the seminary, the classroom, and now a published book that reframes everything most people think they know about Black athleticism.
Green joined host Charles Hallman on Blacklight on Sports to discuss his book, “Playing the Game: Embodied Brilliance Beyond the Moral Limits of Race and Sport,” his work as a faculty member at United Theological Seminary, and why he believes Black athletes have always been geniuses that the dominant culture simply refused to name as such.
The Book and Its Argument
Green said the book grew directly out of his own experience as a young Black man in Texas, where he was seen through two competing but equally dehumanizing lenses: fear and fetish.
“As a young Black man in Texas, I was being followed around in department stores, pulled over, that type of stuff,” he said. “But also because I was an athlete, being seen through this lens of beast, where my worth is associated with what I can do on the field. Either way, not having the freedom to just be human.”
The book’s central argument is that what the public has been trained to interpret as raw physical spectacle in Black male athletes is actually intelligence. Specifically, an embodied intelligence rooted in ancestral knowledge that has allowed Black people to navigate, resist, and survive oppressive systems across generations.
“What people are witnessing is not just some beastly physical specimen talent,” he said. “It’s actually intelligence that we have not learned to talk about.”
And underneath that intelligence, Green said, is something theological.
“Not only is this intelligence, but these Black folks that y’all are calling beasts and assuming are inhuman are actually divine,” he said.
Three Athletes, Three Layers
Green structured the book around three athletes, each representing a different layer of how white supremacy inscribes itself on Black male bodies and how those athletes disrupted that inscription through their brilliance.
Marshawn Lynch represents the cultural surface, the ways Black men are criminalized simply for being themselves in public. Green pointed to Lynch’s famous media protest, where he sat through press conferences saying only “I’m just here so I don’t get fined,” as an act of creative resistance that mirrors the same intelligence Lynch displayed on the field.
“He disrupts the cultural dimensions of assuming that a Black man who shows up like him must be a thug,” Green said. “He’s actually very intelligent and he’s doing this on purpose.”
Steph Curry represents the embodied and economic logic of white supremacy. Curry did not fit the “bigger, faster, blacker” recruiting logic that governs how Black athletes are evaluated and marketed. He was told he was not enough of anything to be a top NBA draft pick. What followed was one of the most transformative careers in basketball history.
“He’s actually changed the logic of the way the NBA is played,” Green said. “You don’t change the logic of something unless you have exhibited a kind of intelligence that puts so much pressure on the way the thing exists that it has to change.”
Deion Sanders represents the psychospiritual dimension. Sanders, Green argues, modeled what it looks like for a Black man to refuse to shrink himself in the face of white culture’s demand that he do so, and in doing so, gave other Black people permission to do the same.
“What it does is it authorizes other Black men and other Black people to say, maybe I don’t have to shrink myself either,” he said. “Maybe it’s not so bad that I’m feeling myself.”
On Serena Williams
Though the published book focuses on Black male athletes, Green said an incoming essay will bring Black women more fully into the conversation. He described Serena Williams as the clearest example of how the “beast” narrative converges on Black women’s bodies in uniquely compounded ways, targeting both her race and her femininity simultaneously.
“There was ways that Serena Williams was being called a beast even while being called the strong Black woman or the angry Black woman anytime she spoke up for herself,” he said. “There’s different complexities when we start to think about how this narrative converges on Black women’s bodies that we don’t even get to talk about if we’re just talking about Black men’s bodies.”
From the Field to the Seminary
Green’s path from Division I football to pastoral theology was not a straight line. Injuries late in his career at Kansas opened the door to asking what else might be possible. He grew up in the Black church in the South and initially perceived a call to ministry, completing an M.Div. and serving as an associate pastor before his curiosity pushed him further.
“There were things that just weren’t adding up,” he said. “I got really curious and hungry to continue to study and to learn and really get underneath some of these questions.”
A PhD followed, and with it a shift from thinking about teaching in a single doctrinal tradition to teaching more broadly across spiritual communities. He now serves on the faculty at United Theological Seminary, teaching pastoral theology and social transformation with a focus on Black spiritualities. He also directs the institution’s Racial Intelligence Systems program, which he described as a reconditioning process built to outlast any single faculty member.
“One of the ways I’ve designed the initiative is that it’s woven into the life of the institution,” he said. “In the mode of an athlete, if I’m training for something, you know what kind of reps it takes to make it second nature.”
On the Language of Academia
One of the episode’s most memorable exchanges came when Green reflected on discovering that the conversations he had been having his whole life were just as sophisticated as anything in academia. They just used different language.
“The conversations I was having in high school at the barbershop are just as sophisticated,” he said. “It’s just a different language game.”
He credited his PhD advisers for encouraging him to write in his own voice rather than adopting the convoluted language he associated with academic elitism. That choice shaped the book’s accessibility.
Hallman agreed, telling listeners the book reads clearly and does not require any particular academic background to engage with. He said the conversation between Green and former Vikings fullback CJ Ham at a previous panel event on these same themes was equally powerful, particularly because it unfolded in front of a mostly white audience that had come expecting to hear about football and left with something much deeper.
Pearls of Wisdom
Green closed with a message aimed directly at Black readers.
“You’re already brilliant,” he said. “You’ve been embodying brilliance probably all your life and didn’t even know it because the language systems that we are made to play in don’t give us permission to think of ourselves as brilliant.”
He said that same ancestral intelligence that has carried Black people through slavery, Jim Crow, and the war on drugs is present and active today, including in every Black athlete moving crowds with what the world insists on calling just physical talent.
“That is precisely what it is,” he said. “Learn how your mind functions and how your body moves as an expression of a creative intelligence, as opposed to thinking that we’re something we’re not.”
A second book is in progress. Green said it will deal more directly with the traditions of root work and conjure, and what he describes as the gap between what Black spiritual ancestors understood centuries ago and what neuroscientists are only now beginning to confirm.
“Playing the Game: Embodied Brilliance Beyond the Moral Limits of Race and Sport” is available now.