Home | Away

Football Saturday

It’s not like I have a vested interest in this or anything, but for the life of me I can’t see what in the world is wrong with these remarks about “the black athlete.” For that matter, I don’t see anything wrong with Air Force coach Fisher DeBerry remarking on the fact that a lot of fast football players are black.  He said it inelegantly, to be sure:

Afro-American kids can run very well. That doesn’t mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can’t run, but it’s very obvious to me that they run extremely well.

“Other descents” is, I believe, a freshly coined term, not heretofore employed by sociologists or anthropologists.  It makes DeBerry sound like he’s sayin’ his team needs to git some of them fleet-o-foot Afro-Americans, is what it does.  And DeBerry has courted controversy before, most notoriously when he put up a banner in the Air Force locker room that read, “I am a Christian first and last. . . .  I am a member of Team Jesus Christ.” (Just when the Air Force was facing charges that it was actively discriminating against non-Christians in the service, too!  What a maroon.  A Christian maroon, at that.) Still, the fact remains that black players tend to occupy the speed positions, and have done so for quite some time.  Oh, sure, there have been some dominant white running backs—John Riggins comes to mind, and before him, the great Bronco Nagurski.  Let’s not forget the Galloping Ghost, Red Grange!  And there have been some great white players in the defensive secondary, even after the development of the forward pass.  Last but not least, it’s clearly not the case that all black athletes are fast.  But to say that black athletes have “changed the whole tempo of the game” and “have just done a great job as athletes and as people in turning the game around,” as JoePa did, is not merely to say the obvious; it’s to say the obvious in the form of a compliment.  It’s a little like saying that professional basketball is a different sport now than when George Mikan dominated the court, and that it’s a good thing too.

Contrast this nonce controversy with that of two years ago, when Rush Limbaugh resigned from ESPN after saying

I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well.  There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.

The problem with that remark isn’t that Limbaugh pointed out that McNabb is black; McNabb is black.  Rather, the problem is that Limbaugh claimed McNabb was overrated because he was black.  Quite apart from what that says about Limbaugh’s bizarre beliefs about the NFL and the media—and I believe King Kaufman nailed this at the time—there’s the fact that the remark doesn’t even make sense in football terms.  Think about it this way: in 2003, when Limbaugh shot his mouth off about that “little social concern in the NFL,” there were ten black starting quarterbacks.  They ran the gamut of the talent spectrum from star players like McNabb, Daunte Culpepper, Michael Vick, and Steve McNair, who really do carry their teams and are basically a new kind of player, the mobile 240-pound QB who can run for 100 yards a game, to mediocre guys like Aaron Brooks and Jeff Blake, to marginal players like Quincy Carter and Shaun King.  The idea that the NFL would pick just one of these guys, and have “a little social concern” to hype him and promote him because of his color, was really rather strange in 2003—the kind of remark you’d expect from a rank amateur who has no business being a sports commentator on ESPN.  Now, if Rush had made his remark fifteen years earlier, that would have been another story: in Super Bowl XXII, the Washington Redskins, with unheralded Doug Williams at the helm, beat the heavily favored Broncos after a stupefying 35-point second quarter in which Williams made the Redskins’ Broncos’ secondary look like the local high school JV, throwing for a record-setting four touchdowns.  Was there, in 1988, some excitement about that performance specifically because Williams was black?  Damn right there was—Williams was the first black QB in the Super Bowl, still the last black QB to win a Super Bowl, and he wound up as the MVP of the game, no less.  I had black friends—and white friends (some of my best friends are white!)—who were indeed thrilled that “a brother” had done all that.  To make things even sweeter, Williams had toiled in obscurity with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for years, and some people were glad for him just because he’d done time with a team where you could expect to lose twelve games and get sacked hard fifty times every year.  So yes, back in 1988 there really was “a little social concern,” a desire that “a black quarterback do well.”

And let’s put that “social concern” in social context.  Before that Super Bowl, if you go back to the mid-1970s—as I do—you find only one black starting QB, James Harris of the Rams (who had become pro football’s first black quarterback in 1969 with the Buffalo Bills).  There was also Joe Gilliam, a Steelers backup who saw little action behind Terry Bradshaw; only much later, in 1984, did Warren Moon arrive on the scene, and even he, for all his talent, spent six years in the wilderness of Canadian football before being signed in the NFL.  Back then, you really could hear whispers that black players didn’t have the intelligence or the leadership skills to be quarterbacks, and sometimes the remarks were louder than whispers.  In fact, when Fran Tarkenton hosted Saturday Night Live in 1977, he did a skit with Garrett Morris in which Morris asked him why there was only one black QB in the league, and Tarkenton replied (I’m paraphrasing) that black players weren’t smart enough to play the position (to which Morris said, with astonishment, that he’d never realized that before) and that no sane player would play center and turn his back on a black guy on every play (to which Morris replied, hey, me neither, man—I’ve got a wife and kids).  That was almost thirty years ago, back when SNL had some cojones and was willing to address race-and-sports slurs head-on.  But I haven’t heard that kind of slur in years, not from anyone who knows anything about the game.  Nor have I heard any whispers—let alone comments on ESPN, with the exception of Limbaugh’s—that certain black quarterbacks are overrated because of their race.  That’s not because the league put out new guidelines one day for how to discuss race in the NFL; it’s simply because there are now a significant number of black quarterbacks, some of whom are among the league’s elite and some of whom aren’t, and they’ve made the case for their skills on the field.  And that’s why Rush’s remarks merited all the criticism they got.

I make this point—using some of these words—in my forthcoming book, Liberal Arts:  Classroom Politics and “Bias” in American Higher Education. (Yep, it has a brand new title!  This is the one we’re going with.) Why do I talk about Rush Limbaugh and football in Liberal Arts?  You’ll just have to find out.  But the important thing, for now, is this: matters of race in sports should not be utterly off limits for discussion.  More important, we should distinguish innocuous remarks about race, such as observations that black players dominate the speed positions, from weird and uninformed remarks about race, such as suggestions that one black quarterback out of ten is being deliberately overrated by his league and the sports media because he is black.  Otherwise, if we demonize people who note that black players dominate the speed positions and have changed the tempo of the game, we let real ignoramuses like Limbaugh off the hook, and they can go on pretending that they’re bravely challenging political correctness rather than merely talking out their nether orifices.

There!  I’m glad that’s all cleared up now.  If there are any other long-festering questions about sports you’d like me to clear up this weekend, just let me know.

Posted by on 11/05 at 01:26 PM

  1. Separating issues is crucial to any kind of civic discussion. You do that very well.

    Thanks for linking to King Kaufmann, who for my money is the best person writing on sports at the moment.

    I hope your Nittany Lions get all the breaks today and knock off the Badgers.

    Has anyone ever studied the effects of playing on integrated sports teams on the racial attitudes and competencies of white kids?

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  04:29 PM

  2. Here’s why I found this coach’s remark a bit offputting. IIRC he was indicating that his team lost, because the other team had more black guys, and they’re naturally fast.  Like “well it’s easy for *them*.” It’s a compliment, but it feels backhanded to me.  He didn’t say they were a great team, very talented, and so fast.  He didn’t say what Michael said, that the game has changed for the better since the talent pool has expanded.  He didn’t even say how impressed he is with the speed and ability of black players today. 

    I don’t think he was being racist.  I think he was being a bit dopey and careless.  People have to know that when they are making public comments about race they need to be particularly careful to make sure they are crystal clear about what the mean (just as Michael was crystal clear in this post).

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  05:01 PM

  3. Far be it for me to give support to Rush, but you know as well as I do that there is more than meets the proverbial picture here. I have no doubt that most black kids can outrun whites on the average; the question is whether any of them be paid millions of dollars a year for this “skill.”

    Back when someone such as John Elway was still around--Stanford Econ. honors student as well an excellent athlete--most fans probably felt the dude deserved his few million per annum; Elways are rather in short supply at this point.  And if you are involved in education you see the wrong side of sports: the countless black males who have hustled their way through high school without developing any math or writing skills to speak of. Perhaps they attain some local notoriety, and then after a few years at Cal State Homieville go on to hustle a coach job (still without any real intellectual skills) and start the cycle all over, while those of us who did do all the writing and science and math classes spend years grovelling in substitute or adjunct hell. Pro sports is another absurdity of the present consumer culture, and its effects are mostly detrimental.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/05  at  06:01 PM

  4. whoa...proverbial eye that is. ‘Scuzi hasty and spectacle-less edit.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/05  at  06:02 PM

  5. No problem, Mister Toad, but we already know you hate sports (and our culture’s overvaluation of them).  Believe me, I think the people who do the writing, the science, and the math deserve far better than they get—some bling, some respect, a couple of ESPN-size cable channels, and all the pressure of being role models to millions of children.  All I’m saying here is that it’s all right to point out that black athletes are black athletes.

    And thanks for the good wishes, Pat.  I’m typing this at halftime, with guarded optimism.

    Emma Anne, I agree that there was something backhanded about Fisher DeBerry’s remark.  I heard in it, also, a weird kind of lament:  well, you know the Air Force is a pretty white place, so we’re just not going to be competitive at some positions. But there was nothing at all backhanded about Joe Paterno’s, and even still it was fodder for ESPN’s Around the Horn yesterday.  This seems to me an attempt to gin up a controversy for the sake of the commentariat.  Perhaps, to make a friendly amendment to Mister Toad’s point, our society could make do with a couple fewer sports commentators? 

    Posted by Michael  on  11/05  at  06:20 PM

  6. If there are any other long-festering questions about sports you’d like me to clear up this weekend, just let me know.

    Why do the Leafs still fold like a cheap deck chair at playoff time, even though we don’t have Harold Ballard to kick around any more?

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  06:39 PM

  7. Paterno’s comments were not rascist, not Limbaughesque, but they were weird. And discomfiting. And maybe it’s good to be discomfited occasionally about race in sports. That’s often Kaufman’s point.

    In the meantime, can I just say that college football is like a rose petal on a sunny saturday afternoon unfurling in the rain.

    Posted by Bob Davis  on  11/05  at  07:08 PM

  8. Why didn’t Lou Brock slide in Game 5 of the ‘68 Series?

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  07:31 PM

  9. we already know you hate sports (and our culture’s overvaluation of them)

    No, that’s not entirely true. I am quite a fan of sport matches as in Karpov vs Kasparov, or indeed of women’s volleyball (especially when done nude). wink Or tennis, however snooty. A Philipousis serve: now that is sport--skill, as well as coordination and finesse--and not merely brute strength. Baseball too, especially pitching, requires some skills that I don’t think thugball or hoopsball does.  And to be honest I got more respect for pugilists than for thugball. Boxing as a business might be hopelessly corrupt, but that is the real sheet.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/05  at  07:33 PM

  10. There’s a thread that runs from classic SNL and its parent, National Lampoon, through the Rush Limbaugh show and the right-wing banner of political correctness. But it is based on a misreading of skits like the Garrett Morris “Black Perspectives” series.

    (there was another one with Cicely Tyson, the punchline of which was that black women are the unfortunate victims of prejudice that should be directed solely at shiftless black males. Another funny sketch was when Celtic legend Bill Russell hosted, and they did a spoof of the awesome 70s series The White Shadow. Of course the obvious twist was that the coach (Russell) was black and the players white, but the funny part was that the coach was the delinquent with the drug problems, etc. Russell could barely keep a straight face for the sketch.)

    Anyway, part of the joke was the part that influenced Limbaugh, i.e., there was this tepid “have a nice day” kumbaya schoolmarmish liberal hegemony in the 70s. But the main reason the SNL sketches were funny, rather than disgusting, is that we perceived that the people who created and performed the material were too hip to really be racists; certainly too hip to harbor the kind of resentment that Limbaugh’s listeners feel.

    Limbaugh must have viewed that material as a license to be racially insensitive. But the SNL sketches totally depend on the viewer’s belief that the creators/performers aren’t really racists. And that’s what’s finally so lame about Limbaugh: not just that he has an ill-informed and paranoid worldview, but that he didn’t get the very joke he stole.

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  07:42 PM

  11. Michael, is there some reason you left Byron Leftwich out of your rundown on the current crop of pro-quaterbacks??  Damn kid one a bowl game in college w/ a broken foot.

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  07:43 PM

  12. I can’t agree with Mister Toad that football is merely a matter of brute strength.  On the contrary, I find it to be a fascinating game because of the different levels of strategy and tactics.  There’s the overall shape of the game, this drive, the three minutes to the half, this play as called, this play as it develops after the quarterback has to change receivers, etc. , all going on at the same time and interacting with each other.

    Football is being very good to me this year also, as one of my alma maters is ranked number one and the Broncos are looking better and better.

    On subject:  I think Joe Patermo’s comments were fine.  If we are discomfited, it’s because it’s a discomfiting subject.  When people start talking about race, one tends to be on pins and needles *in case* they say something icky or off.

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  07:48 PM

  13. As a sports fan who likes to think she’s reasonably progressive, one of the things I found fascinating about the Limbaugh-McNabb flap was the extent to which Limbaugh apologists who weren’t sports fans would go to argue that it was at least a defensible point that McNabb was over-rated. At the time of course, he was having a bad opening to his season, but it was pretty clearly an aberration in terms of his earlier (and later) career. It was quite straightforward to compare him and Tom Brady in terms of performance and google-hits (a rough measure of hype) and factor out Brady’s Super Bowl victories. But, no, it was still possible to argue that McNabb was over-hyped further leap to the inference that he was over-hyped because of his race rather than, perhaps, because he played in Philadelphia and not Tampa Bay or New Orleans.

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  08:00 PM

  14. and now for something completely different--the larch?  No. 
    The good folks over at Cosmic Variance seem to have offered a challenge to Michael.

    “… to write up my talk for publication in a special issue of Poetics Today, which I have finally done. So here it is: From Experience to Metaphor, by Way of Imagination (pdf file). Feel free to comment away, keeping in mind that this is not in any sense my area of expertise. (So, does this mean that writing articles for Poetics Today is a good way to advance one’s physics career? No, not really. Let’s say it’s a higher good.)

    Now I want to see Michael Bérubé start publishing in Physical Review Letters.”

    Maybe those fine physicists will help get you past the double blind peer review process while they are at it.

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  08:04 PM

  15. Actually the pro or college jocks are bad enough, what’s worse are the college fans, the Biff and Bunny fratboys and sorority sluts doing the Boola Boola jive. (I apologize if that’s a bit cynical or misanthropic, Mr. Mike, but you opened it up for rantings). Football appeals to Rush Limbaugh types--it’s sort of the whole middle-management/biz major outlook. Like business, Pro sports are part of the real religion of USA--consumerism; and of course physicality and strength (as well as the implied sexuality), not cognitive skills, create the appeal; it’s also good training for soldier readiness. Anatoly Karpov to me is a far more respectable human being than say Deion Sanders ever will be.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/05  at  08:14 PM

  16. of course we (football fans) will see your Deion Sanders, and raise you one Bobby Fischer. Don’t know if anyone in football is as bad as him.

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  08:20 PM

  17. Oh yeah Bob was bad, as in baddd asss. I’d like to see Deion take on Petrosian or Spassky.

    Maybe Deion vs. Irwin:

    “Yo, my fine nubian brotha, so what the f**k’s up wit the horsey again?

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/05  at  08:26 PM

  18. I’d like to see Deion take on Petrosian or Spassky.

    At what?  The Sicilian Opening, or covering Jerry Rice?

    Me, I’d like to see Norm Chow versus Petrosian or Spassky.

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  09:35 PM

  19. I’m sure others will want to comment on Mister Toad’s clever use of Ebonics; I’m going to object to his lumping together of “thugball” and “hoopsball.”

    I used to watch a lot of football, but can no longer stand to watch a game in which nearly half the “athletes” on the field are over 300 pounds and have stomachs hanging over their belts. Players who have specialized not just to offense and defense, but to particular downs and situations. Players who are, for the most part, components of a machine designed and built by coaches.

    Basketball, on the other hand, has real athletes who play both ways, are in near-constant motion, and--at the pro level, if not college--control the flow of the game. You may not like how they dress, how they speak when interviewed, or how they behave in their personal lives, but this is not how they should be judged. Do you go to an art museum and rate the paintings on the basis of the personal and intellectual qualities of the artists?

    As for the money in sports: nobody wants to pay to see me calculate stresses, even though I’m as quick and devastating at it as Iverson is with a crossover. I accept that until you all get enlightened to my artistry, I shall remain underpaid.

    Posted by Dr. Drang  on  11/06  at  12:08 AM

  20. I’d suggest the vague, nameless discomfort some commenters acknowledge arises from the fact that any observation by a white person about the physical characteristics of Black people--whether accurate or not, flattering or insulting, in the context of sports or entertainment or fashion or sex or anything else--is irremediably tainted by the legacy of the auction block. This is unfair, as a constraint on what can be said without causing unintended offense; it fails to take account of decent, humane motives; and it contributes to the sense a lot of well-meaning white folk have that the whole subject of race is a minefield they daren’t enter. Yet those, I think, are the historical breaks. The late Pat Parker’s poem “For the White Person who Wants to Know How to be my Friend” begins:

    “The first thing you do is to forget that I’m Black.
    Second, you must never forget that I’m Black.”

    Racism is fertile in impossibililties…

    Posted by  on  11/06  at  02:31 AM

  21. Is Coldplay overpaid?  Mick Jagger?  Eugene Levy, John Grisham, the cast of CSI? Certainly, if we value the work of teachers, nurses, police and firefighters.  But nobody’s up in arms about the former being paid exorbitant sums for frivolous pursuits.  Nobody gripes about what NASCAR drivers are paid, despite the fact that being attractive to advertisers is now as big a part of the job description as driving ability. 

    In 1995, with individual earning well in the $millions in many cases, baseball’s total salary expenditures were a smaller percentage of the owner’s take than they were in 1950, when players averaged about $8000 a season.  It’s television money.  Should the lion’s share go to the owners so the players’ salaries are more in line with what people think is reasonable?

    Edgerrin James grew up loading vegetables on a truck in the Florida sun just to eat.  Terrell Owens may be a headcase of a personality, but what he overcame just to get there most of his critics couldn’t have survived for a week.  If our priorities are screwed up it sure isn’t the fault of the black athlete.

    Posted by  on  11/06  at  03:10 AM

  22. Michael,
    How about this:  Do you think that, if he hadn’t gotten sick, Mario would have broken the Great One’s major records?

    Posted by  on  11/06  at  03:19 AM

  23. DaveH:  very possibly.  I mean, 160 points in 60 games in 1992-93, after coming back from the first bout of Hodgkins?  Good lord!  Super Mario might even have broken the Great One’s records while playing in the era of the grab and the trap.

    Doghouse and rootlesscosmo, thanks for keeping this a reality-based blog.  And Dr. Drang, I’m already convinced you’re underpaid.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/06  at  10:05 AM

  24. Pro sports exploits people, man; so does Ho-wood product, es verdad, but most kids--especially black urban kids--are not being “encultured” by Exile on Main Street or SCTV reruns but by Iverson and Bryant (as in Kobe not Bear). The current generation of gangstas-in-training might profit from a few etiquette lessons courtesy of Dr. Keith Richards: “The Burmese, gents, is generally to be preferred to that dreadful Mexican goo”.

    And I ain’t saying I am down with Dixie but you gotta admit the NASCAR boys have some dread gear. 

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/06  at  12:21 PM

  25. VIG: Blacks make better receivers than quarterbacks.

    TROY: Stop speaking right now, Conrad.

    DOC: Warren Moon is an excellent quarterback.

    VIG: The Oilers have gone nowhere behind Warren Moon.

    DOC: Randall Cunningham.

    TROY: Don’t get down in the mud with him, Doc.

    VIG: The Eagles will never get to the Super Bowl with him.

    DOC: Doug Williams took the Redskins to the Super Bowl and won, OK?

    TROY: We can all agree there are many excellent black quarterbacks.

    P.S. Warren Moon would have all NFL passing marks (yards, TDs) if it weren’t for the late 70s bias against black quarterbacks. Go Oilers!

    Posted by norbizness  on  11/06  at  02:54 PM

  26. And now we have the denigration (what is with the root of that word) of liberal intellectuals--(and why wan’t Berube listed in this paragraph?)

    “After Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines issued their poll last month of the top intellectuals in the world I broached to Noam Chomsky the notion that CounterPunch might compile an alternative list. The plan was to dismiss FP/Prospect readers’ pick of mostly lumpen non-thinkers in favor of real intellectuals like Levi-Strauss, or Baudrillard, or Laura Nader or Barbara Fields, or the Anderson Bros or Boris Kagarlitsky.

    Chomsky who featured in the poll as top intellectual, (with twice as many votes as the runner-up, Umberto Eco, to the evident consternation of much of the north-eastern US press which has mostly kept silent on the matter) wrote back in good humor, ridiculing the idea of such lists and putting forward as candidates his granddaughter in Nicaragua, or his granddaughter’s cat. The subject soon grew wearisome and I went back to important matters such as how to keep the temperature in my pit under 80 degrees F, vital in the correct preparation of cold-smoked Coho salmon caught in Gray’s Harbor, WA.

    But the pre-eminence of a genuinely radical thinker like Chomsky plainly irked New Labour types at the British daily, The Guardian. So they sent off an interviewer to do a razor job on the professor of linguistics at MIT.”

    http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11052005.html

    btw: on a football role model note-- If you grew up admiring Jerry Rice would you be a Marvin Harrison; and if you admired Michael Irvin would you now be a Terrell Owens or Randy Moss??? Is that the fear of the NBA commissioner in terms of future ballers being more like Artest, Sprewell, and Iverson and less like MacGrady or Duncan???

    Posted by  on  11/06  at  03:39 PM

  27. I am shocked and appalled--not by dummies like DeBerry or Rush Limbaugh, but by your designation of Aaron Brooks as a mediocre guy.  To malign a fellow Cavalier in such a public forum is unconscionable!  I, sir, will always do my best to defend Virginia’s finest, even if our finest turn out to be truly mediocre (see: Matt Schaub).  Cut me and I bleed Orange!  And Blue!  (But mostly Orange!)

    Posted by  on  11/06  at  07:35 PM

  28. I’m less comfortable with the coach’s comments--his syntax, inelegant as it is, seems really important.  Michael wrote, “I don’t see anything wrong with Air Force coach Fisher DeBerry remarking on the fact that a lot of fast football players are black,” while the coach asserted that “Afro-American kids can run very well.” To me, it sounds like the coach is essentializing all “Afro-American kids” as fast runners--as if being a black American gives one a genetic leg up in the lottery of inborn athletic skills.  Saying that “Afro-Americans” as a general category “can run very well” isn’t the same thing as saying that many fast football players happen to be black; the first is a generalization about race, the second, a statement about fast football players.  Michael, what are your thoughts (if any) about the essentialisms going on here?

    Posted by  on  11/07  at  10:51 AM

  29. Yes, you konked the nail on its proverbial Kopf. He’s going deep, deep, he shoots, he snores! AS Marv “Marquis” Alpert said, Yes! The thrill of victory, the agony of Retreat. No Larm; no Fowl. Punt! The mustard’s off the hot dawg, and this one’s in the refridgerator, schports fans.

    Sports exploits the black kids more than anyone. What Coach Fly Boy really meant (sub-contextualization, as it were) was dem pickininnies sure run fast (but not read french, or spin integrals, fly F-187s, etc.)

    F- 187 ?

    Posted by Coach Toad  on  11/07  at  12:24 PM

  30. M, you’re right that DeBerry suggested that all “Afro-American” kids can run fast.  That’s why I thought his remarks were clumsy—“inelegant,” in other words.  Then again, he also said, in so many words, that the Air Force doesn’t have enough black recruits.  Now, maybe he meant the team needs to git some of them fleet-o-foot Afro-Americans, but I think his apology was sincere, and that he meant no such thing—he’d merely put his foot in his mouth in a kind of regrettable old-white-guy way.  Or maybe I was just reading him overgenerously, in the light of Paterno’s more innocuous remarks.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/07  at  01:16 PM

  31. "Paterno’s more innocuous remarks”?  Was what he said really that “innocuous”? 

    I think it’s pretty important to understand the context within which Paterno said what he said.  According to ESPN.com, he was responding to a question about the increase in scoring in the Big Ten this season.  Isn’t a bit irresponsible to suggest that scoring in the Big Ten is up because there’s more black kids in the conference? 

    First of all, is this even true?  Are there more black kids in the conference?  Or, are there more black kids in the skill positions?  I don’t know, but isn’t it just a bit irresponsible to just sort’ve haphazardly link race to scoring in such an essentialist manner, when surely there are several other reasons for why scoring might be up besides race?

    I take no real issue in Joe Pa complimenting black athletes for their athleticism, I agree that the Air-Force coach was probably just clumsy with his prose, and I don’t mean to imply that Joe Pa is some closeted-racist or anything, but I just find the context of his statements to be much more important than what he actually said.

    -e

    Posted by emil  on  11/07  at  01:55 PM

  32. Eric S,
    And did you know that this “mediocre” Aaron Brooks has the most come-from-behind 4th Quarter drives of any current starting quarterback?

    Of course, he may also have the most fumbles, but, whatever. As a die-hard Saints fan I can say that the Saints have a lot worse problems than Aaron Brooks, even if he does sometimes dress in ridiculous suits and call himself “one of the greatest quarterbacks in history”.

    That owner, for one. And the defense.

    Posted by  on  11/07  at  05:59 PM

  33. Er, quibble. ”Williams made the Redskins’ secondary...”

    Williams played for the Redskins.  He demolished the Broncos’ secondary, to the point where I left the LAX Marriott hotel (where I had been watching the game with my parents) at halftime and went back to the condo in Century City where I was staying, as it was clearly evident that the game was over.

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  11/07  at  06:29 PM

  34. Williams played for the Redskins.  He demolished the Broncos’ secondary

    And it takes 33 comments for someone to point out to me a mistake this boneheaded?  What’s the matter with you folks?  Damn, it’s getting so you can’t rely on anyone to clean up your prose anymore.

    Sorry about that.  I meant Broncos.  I knew Williams was playing for the Washington Truly Offensive Nicknames.

    And emil, hmmm.  You have a point there.

    Posted by  on  11/07  at  07:59 PM

  35. I read the first 32 looking to see if it had been previously pointed out, if that’s any consolation (probably not).

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  11/07  at  08:59 PM

  36. Never considered of this gracious point thank you a lot. I practiced this to my feed and appears to be working. Wonder how numerous airted connections I experience around from concerned in familiar bloggers blogs that give notice luv simply are pointing to my provender.

    Posted by Everton Tickets  on  09/10  at  03:34 AM

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below:


Next entry: The "sky" is "falling"

Previous entry: Bear facts: a brief followup

<< Back to main