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Black Lincolnite tired of being mistaken for Nebraska Cornhusker football player

LINCOLN -- If football season never ends in Nebraska, that only makes matters worse for James Greene, a local black man fed up with being confused with Husker football players.

Or their relatives. Or their friends.

“I don’t even really like football,” said Greene, 28. “I’m from Connecticut.”

Greene said that, since moving to Nebraska’s capital city to take a job as a history teacher at Lincoln High School, scarcely a day has passed when someone hasn’t asked him about strategy or criticized his play the previous Saturday.

“It’s ridiculous, really,” Greene said. “I mean, I looked it up -- there are almost 7,000 African-Americans residents in Lincoln. Not all that many, sure, but we can’t all be related to Lance Hopkins or D.J. Honeywell or the Bullock triplets. At first I thought ‘Blackshirts’ was some sort of a racial slur people kept bellowing from pickup trucks.”

It took some time for Greene to understand just why people were forever gawking at him.

“I’d catch people whispering about me at restaurants or sort of following me around in the frozen food aisle,” he said. “I kept thinking, ‘Cripes, have they never seen a black man before?’”

Then, sometime in August, a small boy approached Greene while he ate a sandwich at Subway.

Greene recalled: “This kid says to me, all fast, the way kids do, ‘My name is Trevor, can I have your autograph? My dad says you can’t throw and you can’t call an audible and that you’ll never be as good Eric Crouch or Scott Frost, but, yo, you’re still my favorite player.”

Greene said he ended up signing the boy’s napkin in a scribble because he didn’t have the heart to tell him he wasn’t NU quarterback Jammal Lord -- not that he even knew who Lord was.

“There’s more to life than sports,” Greene said. “In college I wrote a thesis about Hume and Locke, I used to dish on Kerouac over lattes. I have a master’s degree. I never understood the need to sit around drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, belching, eating pretzels and watching people hit each other.”

After asking Greene if he was related to former NU I-back Ahman Green (“No, but I have a cousin named Allen,” Greene shrugged) a new colleague warned Greene the teacher that, in Nebraska anyway, he should keep his negative opinions about football to himself.

“He turned rather chilly and asked me if I was related to Ernie Chambers -- who I presume is a running back or something,” Greene said, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “Anyway, at least the guy quit calling me ‘J-Dog’ and ‘my man’ and offering to ‘give me five, up high, down low and on the side.’”

Greene said he can seldom escape Husker fans: “At the gym people watch me on the bench press and shake their heads in this odd, disapproving way, yet they still march up to me and ask if I can ‘hook them up with tickets.’”

After a recent Friday night performance at the Lied Center for Performing Arts, Greene said he decided to try a Greek eatery on O Street. But before he could reach the restaurant’s door, he was “accosted” by “four white frat-boy types.”

“They fairly surrounded me, their breath smelling of alcohol, asking me if I was satisfied being named assistant head coach, whether I was leaving and if I thought Bo Dukes had a shot to start,” Greene said. “I told them, ‘no, yes, not a chance.’

“One of them, probably underage -- I don’t know, frat boys all look alike to me -- even tried to hug me. Can you believe that? He said his dad cried every time he saw a tape of the Orange Bowl. I have no idea what he meant. But, honestly, I was quite alarmed by the whole experience.”

Greene said that, rather than move back to Connecticut, he’s decided to stick it out here. For now.

“I’m a little concerned that if the Cornhuskers don’t do well, people will continue to curse me for not having break-away speed,” he said. “However, I like my school and I’m not one to give up easily. As a joke I’ve decided to ask anyone that looks vaguely Italian if they’re related to this new coach I keep reading about, Mr. Panini.

“You see, I’ve decided to read the sports section a little more -- just so I can keep up with what my students were interested in. Alas, I’m not sure I’m connecting yet. When I asked if my class if it thought the Big Red could excel in the NCAA basketball tournament, they stared back at me blankly, like they had no idea what I was talking about.”

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