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Sport: Of Mandingo and Jimmy the Greek

5 minute read
Jack E. White

“On the plantations, a strong black man was mated with a strong black woman. ((Blacks)) were simply bred for physical qualities.”

Those are not the words of Jimmy (“the Greek”) Snyder, the football speculator cashiered by CBS Sports for enunciating a virtually identical sentiment in a Martin Luther King Day interview. Rather they were spoken by black Olympic Gold Medalist Lee Evans, a militant protester against white racism during the 1960s. Evans was quoted in a 1971 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED article on the purported physiological differences between blacks and whites. In that story, among many other things, experts claimed that what Coach Al Campanis more recently declared was true: blacks are less buoyant. If there are significant genetic differences between blacks and whites, the ability to spew psuedohistorical nonsense about racial distinctions is one trait both races have in common and in abundance.

The notion that systematic efforts to improve the prowess of slaves by selective breeding have something to do with black athletic achievements is one of the most persistent and pernicious myths in America’s overflowing collection of racist ideas. Historians as diverse as Ulrich B. Phillips, a staunch defender of the Confederacy, and Eugene Genovese, a Marxist, have convincingly shown that there was no widespread deliberate mating of slaves. This preposterous theory has nevertheless wormed its way into the collective consciousness through such classic works of pulp fiction as Mandingo. It is probably no coincidence that Kyle Onstott, creator of that lurid depiction of the couplings between and within the races on a fictional slave-rearing plantation, was also the author of The New Art of Breeding Better Dogs.

A century of efforts to quantify physiological differences between the races has yielded plenty of anthropological mumbo jumbo. In the early days of Darwinism, some European scholars suggested that the major races had each descended from a different species of ape: Caucasians from chimpanzees, the most intelligent nonhuman primates; Orientals from orangutans; and Negroes from gorillas, the biggest and blackest of all.

More recently, attention has focused on blacks’ supposedly longer lower legs and skinnier calves, which are said to give blacks an advantage over whites in jumping and sprinting. Most evolutionists dismiss attempts to link race and individual excellence as silly. “The differences between the races are very small,” says Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, “just tiny compared to the variation within races.” When specialists compared the legs of Jesse Owens and Frank Wykoff, the leading black and white sprinters of the 1930s, they discovered that Owens’ calf muscles more closely resembled the presumed white model, while Wykoff’s were in the black mold.

How then could the Greek, who at $500,000 a year presumably knew how to keep his football out of his mouth, say something so stupid? The explanation really lies in his subsequent warning that “if blacks take over coaching like everybody wants them to, there is not going to be anything left for the white people.” Seldom does a public figure so plainly state what many whites seem to feel when blacks break into previously all-white enclaves: more for them is less for us.

Resentment of black advancement in athletics is especially fervent because sport epitomizes the ideal of male perfection. Many white men find it disturbing that a black might best fulfill that ideal (and might collect the accompanying glamour and money). Thus, after Jack Johnson captured the heavyweight championship in 1908, the urgent search began for a “great white hope” to reclaim the crown. Some 60 years later, when no white fighter could manage to win the title in the ring, whites took solace in a cinematic champ, Rocky. The current pro football season cast up another unsettling black breakthrough. Black quarterbacks for the first time started on three pro teams: Randall Cunningham for the Philadelphia Eagles, Warren Moon for the Houston Oilers and Douglas Williams for the Super Bowl-bound Washington Redskins.

In an earlier era, a black athlete, no matter how gifted, could not realistically hope to become a star pro quarterback. Coaches believed that blacks genetically did not have enough intellect to call plays. Also: white players would not accept the leadership of a black field general. And of course: blacks won’t measure up in clutch situations — a view revived by the Greek in his statement that the Redskins’ Williams might “choke” under pressure. As black Basketball Player Isiah Thomas pointed out last year during a storm of opprobrium about his views on Larry Bird, sportswriters are always dubbing black stars gifted or natural athletes while labeling white standouts brainy and hardworking.

No doubt years of daily hoops and playground stratagems could produce “natural” stars in the whitest suburbs too. The aspirations of ghetto youngsters, though, are distorted by another potent myth — one that ironically will be strengthened by the success of Cunningham, Moon and Williams — that professional sports can be a way out of poverty for a significant number of young black men. Only one of every 1,000 high school football players ever makes it to the pros — hardly good odds, as the Greek might put it. Those searching for a better life would be well advised to pour the energy they now focus on improving their slam dunks into hitting the books. Excluding, of course, Mandingo.

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