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(only a small piece of a very interesting read)
CL: Last year, Sports Illustrated featured a cover story of "What Ever Happened to the White Athlete?" Do you know what has happened to the white athlete?
HE: Well, the white athlete over the last fifty years has simply been displaced by a pool of largely untapped athletic talent, generated by a lack of alternative highprestige occupational opportunities for masses of young black males, and increasing females. I think that once this untapped pool of talent had access to three or four sports it was inevitable that ultimately blacks would end up representing disproportionately high numbers. That is what happen to the white athlete in basketball, football, track, not field, boxing and to a certain extent in baseball.
But in ninety-five percent of American sports the white athlete is there in numbers and dominant. The white athlete is there in swimming. The white athlete is there in diving. The white athlete is there in water polo. The white athlete is there in golf. The white athlete is there in tennis. The white athlete is there in badminton. The white athlete is there in auto racing. The white athlete is there in horse racing. The white athlete is there in soccer, walking, gymnastics, and all the winter sports in dominant numbers. What happened to the white athlete? The white athlete is there, except in those three, four, or five sports where blacks have had access.
The other thing that has happened is that blacks have changed the nature of some sports. Black culture, isolated from white society, from slavery right up to integration, developed styles of playing basketball, football, baseball, and boxing, that whites had to learn to accommodate to or get out of the sport. So if you'd brought in a point guard, who dribbled the ball through his legs, and passed the ball behind this back, you better have a guy to guard him. Otherwise you were at a severe disadvantage. What this generally meant was going into the black community to get someone who had played that kind of ball. Finally, whites have access to the full spectrum of sports, and the full spectrum of highprestige occupational positions. They are not channeled into sports in disproportionately high numbers, and that white talent for sports is spread out across all occupations, and across all sports. Well, blacks don't typically have those same opportunities.
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