Olympic gold medal swimmer and NC State grad Cullen Jones appears in one of the segments on tonight's (10 p.m.) September premiere of HBO's "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel."
"The Swim Gap" explores the relationship between race and swimming in the U.S., and Jones' mission to bring down the number of African-Americans who don't know how to swim. That gap is significant -- black children drown at a rate more than three times greater than whites and as many as 75 percent of African-Americans don't know how to swim.
Jones, who trains in Charlotte, and his mother discuss his own near-drowning at five, and visit their New Jersey hometown, where the lone public pool is underused. In fact, the gold medalist didn't even know the town of Irvington had one.
Intelligently reported by Mary Carillo, the segment gives the issue historical context, examining why blacks don't swim. Let's just say the recent case of the children in Philadelphia and the swim club is an echo of one of the root causes. Yep, the Al Campanis buoyancy remark and the hair issue are discussed too.
And the story is given poignancy by the inclusion of a mother whose son drowned.
The episode's other excellent segments are a report on concussions in high school football, a look at the decline of sports reporting in daily newspapers (gulp!), and an update of the show's 2007 investigation of dogfighting, post-Michael Vick.
Assistant Features Editor Adrienne Johnson Martin would like to have her life turned into an animated cartoon. 
