His name is Myron Rolle. He’s a bad brother with a football in his hands. He’s an even badder brother with a stack of books in his hand.

Rolle was an outstanding defensive back for the Florida State Seminoles. He was eligible for the 2009 National Football League draft, projected to go as a first-round pick and expected to sign a contract worth millions of dollars. But Rolle did something distinctly uncommon for today’s black athletes looking for professional careers in football or basketball.

He decided to forego the NFL draft, and accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in England instead. Rolle will study for his master's in medical anthropology at Oxford for one year, then enter the NFL draft in 2010. He hopes his studies at Oxford help him achieve his ultimate goal.

And his ultimate goal is not to be an All-Pro NFL defensive back. Rolle’s thinking far past his playing days. He eventually wants to become a neurosurgeon, and open his own free health clinic to serve poor people. Is it any wonder that former NFL great Jim Brown has called Rolle a throwback to the “socially conscious athlete of the 1960s”?

Brown made that quote in the documentary in a nearly 11-minute documentary called “The Marketing of Scholar-Athlete Myron Rolle.” It can be viewed this week at WSJ.com if you have a notion to take a look.

I urge you to indulge that notion. If you don’t have the notion, get it. This documentary is worth viewing, especially by those black boys who have hopes – often unrealistic – of playing either pro football or basketball. And Brown’s comments are especially cogent and timely.

“The overemphasis on athletics has basically hurt the African-American culture tremendously,” Brown says in the documentary. “Some of our young people, that’s all they want to be.”

Brown’s point is supported, in part, by Sports Illustrated reporter Scott Price, who wrote a piece several years ago called “Whatever Happened to the White Athlete?” For his story, Price’s editors conducted a survey that found 57 percent of the black boys who took part hoped for a career in either the NFL or the National Basketball Association.

That figure may be accurate. Some may feel it’s too high. I think it may be too low. True, I only have anecdotal evidence to bolster my position. But I’m often called upon to visit schools when they have career days. I start my talk to students by asking their career plans. Invariably, almost every black boy in the class will say he wants to be either a professional football or basketball player.

It’s an obsession that is problematic for the race, as Brown has indicated. I’ve written as much and got the most resistance from some white guy who e-mailed me constantly to claim how wrong I was. This fella was so persistent that I finally had to ask him: “Your dog in this fight would be what, exactly?”

Now I can simply tell him, don’t argue with me. If you want to argue with someone, argue with Jim Brown. And I wish you luck with that.

I also have Rolle’s own testimony to bolster my point. I’ve written frequently about the tendency of some younger blacks to accuse their peers who make good grades of “acting white.” Some black folks claim I’m wrong, but there’s a study by that notoriously liberal institution called Harvard University to prove my point.

In 2005, Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. and grad student Paul Torelli conducted research that concluded “African-American students in schools with high interracial contact may feel greater social pressure to sacrifice their grades in order to .....

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