Comments to Steve Sailer:
* Because liberals view higher education institutions as socializing/indoctrination centers that churn out people with the correct beliefs and people who are properly socialized and who won’t turn to anti-social activities like crime.
* The real tragedy is that so many grown men have nothing better to do with their free time than to sit and watch a bunch of other guys throw a ball around.
Think about all the money that we piss away on sports, professional and otherwise. Taxpayer subsidies for NFL stadiums alone run into – what? – the tens of billions of dollars. Then you have to factor in the billions given to the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL, among others.
(Many stadiums are declared obsolete only a decade or two after their construction.)
But the masses need their bread and circuses, don’t they? Male aggression needs to be channeled into useless sideshows, lest it be harnessed into a worthy social cause. If the drunken white fans woke up one morning and realized that they’d better off directing their hatred for their team’s rivals toward, say, the globalized elite who are screwing us all, then the powers that be would have something to worry about.
That will never happen, though.
* Sports occupies such a large portion of White male attention because every other avenue — entertainment, politics, arts, etc. has been profoundly feminized and made as hostile to ordinary White men as a fabulous gay Broadway production. Or the View.
There is a lot of hubris, in that older White males tend to see themselves as rescuers of not very bright but talented athletically younger Black males. No one can be “rescued” — people with gifts either apply them or not.
Clearly, for example, Vince Young was not cut out to be an NFL player, because despite his physical gifts he lacked the discipline and enjoyment of the game. Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, and Russell Wilson spend hours in film rooms just breaking down defenses with coaches, and probably spend hours talking about it during meals, etc. They do it because they love the game — they can’t get enough of it.
To be a professional athlete even in the NBA requires a floor of minimum discipline, attentiveness, staying out of the worst of trouble, and grinding through ugly road trips given an 82 game schedule. And some people despite physical gifts lack the ability to simply grind things out. That is not a tragedy, just a disappointment.
A LOT of what is wrong with the current zeitgeist, the anti-White male attitude, comes from Black male dominance in football, basketball, and the fading of baseball as the national pastime.
* Big-time sports in the USA is a nexus of so many primal instincts, fervent hopes, and half-acknowledged prejudices that it’s hard to know how to start thinking about it.
In one sense, the Frazier story is indeed a tragedy, in that it’s all about the American equivalent of Achilles or Odysseus. The ancient Greeks had great warriors steeped in the pursuit of arête; we’ve got college hoops stars.
But in other ways college athlete narratives go well beyond heroic tales. Frazier and his cohort of black, inner-city sports stars are exemplars in the heretical Christian progressive redemption narrative that drives so much of western culture. They are lost souls, atoned for by the good intentions of coaches, boosters, and fans, and then redeemed and raised up to both potential fame and fortune, and, as Anon and Olorin have noted, to equal place with their benefactors, i.e. as ‘college graduates’.
College and pro sports therefore provide the perfect vector this redemption narrative to be spread out to a far wider proportion of the American people. It’s not only for hard lefties and SJWs; lots of good red-blooded conservative sports fans can partake as well.
* Well of course organized sports is bread and circuses for the masses, the elites love it because it causes lower class whites to misdirect their tribal nature and nationalistic loyalties to some bulls**t game played by thug blacks. Rather than noticing the systematic screwing they are getting at the hands of the elites.
It’s the modern day Soma drug. The last thing elites want is a white working and middle-class looking out for their country and their own well being. As generally that leads to revolutions and rebellions.
It’s really sad when you look at the white men who really buy into organized sports, they are complete wastes. They don’t even get how pathetic they look and act. They end up worshiping black men who if it were not for organized sports would be beating the s**t out of white men like them and raping their women. And guess what? They often engage in fights and scuffles in bars and others establishments but it’s kept out of the papers. They still end up raping women but thanks to six and seven figure payoffs by the teams, women don’t file charges.
* I suspect back-up quarterbacks who stick it out tend to have a fairly realistic sense of the future. My son’s quarterback classmate in high school went to USC where he dutifully backed up various future NFL quarterbacks. By the time his four years of NCAA eligibility were up, he already had his Masters in Real Estate Development and a good job lined up with some alumni.
* “Keith changed our program,” Brown said at the time. “We’ve never been successful in recruiting inner-city kids.”
It’s worth taking a moment to think about Brown’s phrasing. I’m guessing very few people would be confused as to what Brown means by “inner city kids.” However, had he substituted the word “black” for “inner city,” he would have been in for a world of pain, because whereas everyone knows “inner city kids” are essential to a successful college basketball program, the racial composition of the team can’t possibly have anything to do with its potential for success.
I’d never heard of Keith Frazier before so I Googled his hometown: Irving, Texas. Not really most people’s idea of the inner city. I’ve never been there, but apparently Irving is a part of something called the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The metropolitan airport is there.
Irving is predominantly non-hispanic white and hispanic. Blacks make up 10% of the population, in other words, less than the black national average. But would an Angloish-looking hispanic kid, or for that matter an Asian kid (8% of the population) from Irving be described as inner city?
Everyone knows what Larry Brown means by “inner city,” but it could be worth one’s job to point it out.
* In college, the easy way to win is to break the recruiting rules. But that means it helps to move on, like Pete Carroll moved on from USC to the Seattle Seahawks before the NCAA hammer came down on USC.
On the other hand, some long term college coaches managed to institutionalize rule bending. For example, Wooden outsourced to a booster named Sam Gilbert the shadier side of keeping players happy (although back then the stakes were lower and so were the payoffs — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, probably the most valuable recruit in college basketball history, has funny stories about the summer jobs he had in college to scrape by). Dean Smith of North Carolina responded to the rise of Duke by ginning up the Afro Studies Department system for keeping black jocks eligible.
* ro coaches/managers generally have a more straightforward job since the leagues have very carefully rules about how players get assigned.
The most radical approach was that of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner — a personality not wholly unlike that of Donald Trump in his nonstop media feuds — in the 1970s and 1980s who frequently fired and rehired Yankees managers. Billy Martin served five different tenures under Steinbrenner from 1975-1988. Bob Lemon, Dick Howser, and Gene Michael served two separate terms each.
It was extremely exhausting to read about in the sports section. It seemed particularly bizarre to an L.A. Dodgers fan like myself who had 2 managers over 43 seasons — Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda. Vin Scully plans to retire this coming October after his 67th season as a Dodger radio announcer. (Los Angelenos love ancient sports announcers like Scully, who has been with the Dodgers since 1950, and the late Chick Hearn of the Lakers).
But, Bill James has said that he thinks Steinbrenner’s system of constant hiring and firing of managers made sense. For example, Billy Martin tended to light a fire under his teams, but also burn them out. For example, Martin famously jumpstarted the 1980 Oakland A’s by having their young starters pitch huge numbers of innings, but they were never the same afterwards.
* There’s also a class angle to “inner city kids.”
For example, Stephen Curry, who will likely win his second NBA MVP award after this season, is not an inner city kid. He is the son of a 16 year NBA player, Del Curry. Steph went to posh Davidson College, where he appears to have fit in nicely. He likely would have been welcome at SMU before Larry Brown’s arrival.
It’s possible for a few colleges to stock their teams from black suburban middle class kids. Duke long did that with guys like Grant Hill (whose father knew George W. Bush at Yale) and Shane Battier.
In contrast, LeBron James, to pick a successful example, is an inner city kid from Akron. His mom is, what, only 16 or 17 years older than him?
Michael Jordan would have fallen in-between, a lower middle class kid.
* If you go back to the Dream Team, the most ghetto guy on the team was Chris Mullen. It was either working class kids like Ewing, Jordan and Magic or Southern rural guys like Barkley or Malone. There is something of a history of Black America in the class background of NBA stars. In the 1970′s, a lot of ghetto guys came into the league and burnt out on coke. In the 80′s, the inner-city went to crap to such a degree that none of the stars came from really poor backgrounds. In the 90′s, we got much better in getting the stars out of the ghetto early, but we never really got the ghetto out of the stars and a lot of them burnt out early. By the 2000′s, the inner city was recovering and scouting got so good that potential stars were identified in 3rd grade and they are almost like robots.
Larry Brown is the only person to win an NCAA championship and NBA championship, so its not only recruiting violations (btw, Pete Carroll did the same, UCLA crybaby, and he was never even accused of recruiting violations). OTOH, Brown is one of two American coaches to lose an Olympics and the only one who lost in the pro-era.
* Next Town Brown.
It really is an amazing career. All-American under Frank McGuire at UNC, part of the NYC pipeline that started up the ACC as a power, although Everett Case at NC State really had started it all. Larry actually played high school ball out on Long Beach, lived in Lido Beach.
Carolina got put on probation while he was there, so he played under Dean Smith at the end of his college career, but never had Dean’s shiny reputation.
MVP of the first ABA all-star game. He and Doug Moe led Oakland to an early ABA title.
As a kid my first memory of him was coaching the Carolina Cougars. Great team, fast paced, led by fellow UNC alumnus from Brooklyn, Billy “Kangaroo Kid” Cunningham. Larry wore loud, multi-colored checked jackets with bell-bottoms.
Then he coached the great Denver Nuggets teams with more of his preferred ACC guys like the great David Thompson from NC State and Bobby Jones from UNC. Dan Issel rounded it out so he’d throw in an SEC guy now and then. They had the best regulate season record but lost to Dr. J’s Nets in the ABA, but the Nuggets kept winning under Larry when they made the NBA transition.
Then he takes UCLA to their first title game since Wooden retired.
Off to an awful Nets team that he turned into a playoff team. More ACC guys like Buck Williams, Albert King, Mike Gminski and Mike O’Koren. And also Darryl Dawkins, Chocolate Thunder, who didn’t like Brown. Said he played favorites with his ACC guys. Although DD shoukd look at his stats and realize Buck Williams was 3 inches shorter and gave up 50 pounds to him but out-rebounded him by 4-5 a game.
He leaves the Nets right before the playoffs for a vacant Kansas job.
Kansas has had 8 coaches in 118 years. Their first coach is Dr. James Naismith, who invented the game. Their third coach is Phog Allen, the legend, who coached Dean Smith AND Adolph Rupp, at one time 1 and 2 in college coaching wins. He leads them to the 1952 title. Dean was a reserve on that team.
In 1957 Kansas goes to the finals with Wilt, but loses to an undefeated North Carolina.
Ted Owens coached Kansas for many years and had some good teams, made two Final Fours, coached Jo Jo White etc, but Kansas wasn’t the annual powerhouse then. They had to go through cycles like most teams, and when Owens led 3 losing teams in 4 years and lost 9 straight to Kansas State and lost to Wichita State the year they made the tournament in that stretch, he became the only Kansas coach ever fired.
So Brown comes in. He hires Ed Manning to be his assistant. Ed had played for him on the Cougars. Ed’s son Danny spurns the local ACC teams and goes to Kansas. Kansas makes two Final Fours and wins the 1988 NCAAs. Then Larry high tails it right ahead of probation.
But Larry re-established Kansas. Roy Williams comes from UNC to keep the UNC-Kansas pipeline going, wins 19 his first year then gets Kansas into every NCAA tourney thereafter until he goes back to UNC. Now Kansas is an annual beast under Bill Self, a former Larry assistant. And John Calipari also was an assistant to Larry at Kansas.
Larry goes to, you got it Reg, his 4th old ABA team, the Spurs of the NBA. They are awful at first but he leads them to 2 50 + win seasons with a young David Robinson. His assistants included a young Greg Popovich. Pretty illustrious coaching tree but he is like Belichik to Brown’s Bill Parcells.
Next I think it’s the Sixers? Gets Allen Iverson to practice long enough to make an NBA finals. Then the Pistons and finally an NBA title.
Then a disaster with the Knicks under fellow UNC New Yorker Donnie Walsh.
Then, yup, a so-so run in Charlotte.
And somehow he has turned SMU into a damn good team. Somehow? Oh yeah, more probation.
I think Larry had always wanted that UNC job. He loved Dean. Said it would hurt him more when Dean said Larry I think you can do that better than when MCGuire would call him a stupid Jew.
Carolina rightfully probably thought he was too ethically loose. Of course now Carolina has the cloud of a close to 20 year scandal of a no class’s Af-Am department paper class that was graded by a secretary which allegedly kept athletes eligible. Of course, who knows but that some players but a lot of effort in their paper in The Life of Sojourner Truth.
Anyway it tars everyone, including academic first team all-American Marcus Paige, recruited after this practice ended. On senior night the other day he commented that it annoyed his teammates that he corrected their grammar.
Carolina alumni are proud of him, but would be prouder if he finally can lead his senior class to at least an elite 8. Only two classes since 1966 at UNC haven’t made it at least that far. Which was two years before Dean Smith recruited Charlie Scott as the first black player in the ACC below the Mason Dixon line. I had to add that qualifier since Maryland had a couple before but no one remembers that.
Anyway, Larry is part of a great tradition, at times sordid, but great. And even Darryl Dawkins said he helped him develop his left hand.
* So…people who like to blow off steam, spend time with old friends via the common interest of a favorite team, or just simply enjoy the excitement of sports should refrain as long as there are elites taking advantage of the masses.
And do what? Post sanctimonious blog comments telling hard-working adults how they should spend their down-time?
OK–How about this: You’re a grown man who comments on blogs. Many people might claim that you should find something better to do with your free time.
Cuz, really, Stan, at least the sports fan has fun. He’s laughing, he’s bonding with his kids. If he’s younger, he’s forging memories with his buddies. He’s checking out the girls during the time-outs and when the game ends, he’ll head out on town and more fun (and possibly even some trouble) awaits. All in all, young and old alike are having a good time.
But not Stan. He doesn’t have time for a good time. He can’t because we live in this unusual time, where the elites take advantage of the masses. There is no time for relaxation. No time for fun. There’s definitely no laughs. No friends. No diversion. Nope, it’s just Stan and his computer making the world a better place.
Hey Stan, while you’re making the world a better place, I want you to do me a favor: Follow this link to Wikipedia and read about “Narcotizing Dysfunction”:
* I’ve stood next to both Larry Brown and his coaching brother, Herb Brown. Neither man was more than 5’8″, at most – short by point guard standards, even of the 1960′s.
However, Larry knows his X’s and O’s. The Pistons definitely improved once he took the reins before the NBA championship season of 2004.
I think what great NBA coaches do best is to identify the extremely talented ( yet under-producing) players on other teams, and then somehow get them by hook or crook onto their own rosters.
Larry Brown’s behind the scenes maneuvering to get the mercurial Rasheed Wallace – a fellow UNC Tar Heel- at power forward was the stroke of genius that put the Pistons over the top. Rasheed was incredible for two years under Larry Brown, and un-coachable for everyone else.
* I have a couple of friends who played baseball at college with a big-time football program. They described to me the army of handlers available to them in order to do everything from homework to course selection to crisis management.
The tutors weren’t supposed to actually give them answers or direct them what to write on their assignments, so they used this kind of Socratic kabuki to provide a fig leaf of plausible deniability that they were openly doing the athletes’ coursework for them.
OK, so if the answer is a whole number between 1 and 3, what is it?
And these were the baseball players, most of whom weren’t on scholarship. They were bright, white, and paying their own freight. Imagine what the football and basketball players had.
* I haven’t followed the details of the AfAm Studies Dept debacle at UNC because the leftist destruction of that once great university is almost enough to cause me to root for Dook today. I would only be paying attention in an effort to bolster what I already know to be true.
It would not surprise me to know that Dean knew about it. On the other hand, when the football coach was sacrificed a few years ago, I was surprised to learn that the academic dept had some time ago taken control of the athletic studies programs away from the athletic dept. What was unsurprising was that they were still able to blame the athletics side for being responsible.
Dean was certainly known for running a clean program. Another poster mentioned the famous JR vs Ferry SAT score debate. But, Dean was also a big Democrat booster, and while the local media would always bitch about even the hint of Coach K supporting a Republican candidate, they won’t offer an unkind word about Dean. Don’t you know that Dean (entirely unselfishly, I have no doubt) broke the color barrier in the ACC by recruiting Charlie Scott??? So, who knows what he may have known.
Dean was also notoriously demanding as a coach; at practices running his players to exhaustion, and having very little tolerance for injury, just as two examples. Since another poster mentioned George Lynch, I know from a friend who was on the JV team at the time, that Lynch was the only guy on that NCAA championship team that Dean couldn’t break in running. Dude could apparently run all day long(***). That reminds me that I took a racket ball class with Derrick Phelps who was so ridiculously athletic that he was easily beating the instructor, at a game he had (as far as I know) never played before, in almost no time at all. The season after winning it all, our hopes were dashed by an injured Phelps going out against Boston College, wherein he was added to the list of players who’s injuries as a result of dirty plays would ruin a potential national championship for a UNC team (cf. Kenny Smith and Kendal Marshall).
(*** George Lynch was a stud despite being several months premature and just a few pounds at birth. Looked like he was beat on the second or third play of the game against Juwan Howard but then smacked his sh-t off the backboard from behind (which in my memory was a tone-setting play). Lynch was the guy who, when a ball was floating naked in the air between him and one or more opponents, always seemed to just reach out and demand possession of it. Just a stud. Oh, and I guess he played on that Philly finals team under Larry Brown).
* “As a parent saving for college, find it infuriating people like Brown and Dick Vitale advocate paying college athletes in addition to already giving them a shot at a free education. And I say that as a parent who has a son who may benefit from a college football scholarship.Here’s a half million dollars of education and room and board, and that’s not enough.”
Actually, for an 85 IQ but athletically top .1% or .01% athlete, it is indeed not enough. More accurately, it’s like giving a Ferrari to a tribe in Africa with no gasoline, no paved roads, no tools, no mechanical skills, and no clue what it is. The “education” is worthless to them because they can’t utilize it, except to get a gummint or AA sinecure for a minority with a degree.
What it does do to them is to burn their time. If you are an athlete at this level, you have a finite number of hours of play, and a finite number of years to use them in. Instead of giving their full attention to the only thing they will ever do in life that will honestly earn them more than a subsistence income, they are having to pretend to be students, and they aren’t very good at it, it stresses them, and it teaches them that you have to scheme, connive and dodge to get along.
By forcing basketball and football to build out a farm club system, these athletes can focus on what they do best and be paid for it. If the leagues were morally sound, they’d require contractually each athlete have a professionally managed sequestered account into which a percentage of their pay had to go so they could live the rest of their lives without going on welfare.
Meanwhile, it frees up “slots” at colleges for real students. Those athletes that really could benefit from education will be easily able to afford it if they go pro for even a couple of years when their playing days are done. It keeps these powerful adolescents off campus for their wildest years, too, meaning coeds don’t get turned out.
