This was
Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder's take on this, in comments made on January 16, 1988:
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[TD]The black is a better athlete to begin with because he's been bred to be that way, because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs and he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trade … the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid …[SUP]
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Per Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Snyder
There are a number of politically incorrect jokes, with a similar theme:
Q: Why doesn't anyone from Mexico win Olympic medals?
A: Because anyone from Mexico who could run, jump, or swim would be living in the United States.
Q: Why do black men run fast?
A: Because, from an early age, they're taught to run like hell, whenever they hear a gun shot.
Q: Why are there so few Jewish athletes?
A: Because Jewish children dream of owning a sports team, not playing for one.
With black athletes, as with black entertainers, or black organized criminals, sports is seen as a way to become rich and famous, where there may be few other opportunities in the business world, if they can't succeed, based on intelligence or education. Many will try, a few will succeed, most will fail. If there's only room for one, the stronger or the luckier one will succeed, and the other contenders will disappear. Elite athletes win the lottery, and the others own a losing ticket.
Most, but not all, elite athletes are not also elite thinkers, regardless of their race. Hockey players are frequently below average in intellectual development, mostly because they spend a disproportionate amount of time training their bodies, rather than their minds, from before puberty. When they're high school age, they're playing junior hockey at night, instead of doing homework, and they frequently receive brain trauma, from being hit in the head. Many baseball players are uneducated guys who happen to be good at hitting or throwing a fastball. They're not good at other things, because they spend most of their time being very good at doing one thing.
The guys who have superior athletic skills but inferior intellectual skills are the same guys that make a hundred million dollars, and file for bankruptcy a few years later.
Many white athletes see high school and college athletics as a means to an end, rather than as an end, in itself. They play high school sports, to get teenage pussy, when they're teenagers. They play college sports to receive a free education. They use their reputation from being a college sports star, to obtain a high paying job, with few work responsibilities; their 'work' is golfing and having drinks with clients, who want to drink or play golf with a former college athlete, they used to watch on television.
This is a big reason why the basketball team at
Duke generally does very well, and has a lot of white players, but those white players rarely become good pro players; they weren't playing college basketball to become pro basketball players. At
Kentucky, however, the emphasis is on making a high school player 'pro ready' in a single year, so different types of student athletes are recruited.
The last basketball player drafted #1 in the NBA Draft, who complete his senior year of College, was
Tim Duncan, from
Wake Forest in 1997. Duncan could have been drafted #1 the previous year, but he made and kept a promise to his dying mother that he would complete his college education. As far as his 'game' is concerned, Tim is quite possibly the 'whitest black man' in NBA history, but he has multiple championship rings with the
San Antonio Spurs.
The Spurs were fortunate to get him; an injury to star center
David Robinson in 1996 caused the Spurs to go 20-62 in 1996-97, after winning 59 of 82 games the previous year, and in 1997-98, they had Robinson back, plus Duncan, when they won 56 of 82 games, in Duncan's rookie season. You'll have a hard time finding a kid in a housing project wearing a Tim Duncan game shirt, however; he's too
old school to be cool. He doesn't make highlight reel dunks.
What's noteworthy about
Boing's contribution is that
Tim Duncan was originally an elite
swimmer, before he started playing basketball. He has the body type that's successful for both sports. He dreamed of competing in the 1992 Olympic swimming events. In 1989,
Hurricane Hugo destroyed the pool where trained, near his home in
The US Virgin Islands, so he took up basketball instead, because he no longer had a place to swim.
That story sounds like bullshit, but it's all on Tim's
Wikipedia bio page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Duncan
