ToughJ.Riggins
Hall of Famer
My Cousin told me about an article that we here at
Castefootball would find quite disturbing. It was in NJ's biggest paper; the Star Ledger. It is by your typical leftist Jewish journalist. I posted the article below. It is by a columnist named Sid Dorfman. The whole article is glorifying and fawning over the black athlete. The author also eludes in the article to his obvious belief of blacks being a more athletic race when he says Princeton needed black athletes to get the best of the Ivy League competition.
His supposed thesis that it is some great injustice that African Americans only make up 8.4 percent of Major League Baseball is seriously flawed. The article even reluctantly admits that it isn't racism that has caused the decline in American blacks in todays game so why does something have to be done about this like the article states.
I'll pick apart the arguments in this article right now:
African Americans make up about 12.8 percent of the U.S population and with the influx of Latin American and Asian international players it is obvious that it would effect the numbers of any group of Americans in Major League baseball. Many of the Latin American players like Sammy Sosa, Pedro Martinez etc. have black ancestry as well which weakens his point. I am also willing to bet that far less then 70 percent of Major League baseball is Caucasian American which is the percentage of Caucasians in the American population. Why not an article in the drop of white Americans in the game?...From a liberal Jewish columnist... of course not.
I am also willing to bet that even with a drop of African American players in Major League Baseball that the systems in place make it far easier for American blacks to make it into Major League Baseball than American whites. There are even government subsidized inner city baseball camps to help the black baseball player in many American cities. The powers that be in the media and sports elite, with their overall fawning of the black athlete, would make it easier for a black player with marginal major league talent to get a shot in the pros than a white man.
I am so sick of the American media glorifying the black athlete and scoffing at the white athlete. It seems that every year that even in Hollywood there is another movie of the like of "Remember the Titans" or a movie like the recent one about how hard it is to be a black swimmer etc. It is really sickening and their is no end in sight.
The article states that blacks prefer basketball and football and as we know they are grossly overrepresented in those sports and it is not simply by merits. A fair minded white might actually see blacks snubbing baseball as a victory for the white man in sports. This is because even with the caste system it is a sport where the white man is not an endangered species.
Here is the article:
MLB needs to fade back to black
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Have a masterpiece of irony this morning: there is a reported shortage of African-American players in major-league baseball today. A recent poll put the figure at 8.4 percent, and the NCAA has asked commissioner Bud Selig to do something about it.
There was a time when black athletes were hurting for just a chance to play in the majors. But the racist white leagues first stonewalled them, and then became reluctant to let them in even after Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey had broken down the barrier.
Now, Leonard Coleman finds himself in a familiar place, hoping to get black athletes interested again in America's pastime.
Leonard was the National League president between 1994 and 1999, the highest-ranking African-American in baseball then as well as a prominent community leader in and out of New Jersey. As president, he discovered that black kids preferred basketball and football.
Not that he didn't understand. Coleman, himself, had been a baseball and football star at Montclair High.
"It isn't prejudice or racism today," he said. "My goodness, we have a rainbow of color out there, players of every complexion."
But black players have been overtaken by nonwhites from Latin America, who now form 28 percent of the majors.
I told him I could understand basketball, but football? Isn't that the game which provides the ecstasy of competition and the agony of growing old in pain, if not to an early demise. When you play football, there's a pretty good chance you'll be hurting later in life.
"There's no accounting for that," Coleman said. "Even athletes who play baseball are drawn to the other sports. Black kids still would like to emulate Bo Jackson, their hero. There has never been a more versatile athlete than Bo."
The remarkable Jackson was the first pro athlete to play in the All-Star game of two different sports.
"I think if he had made baseball his primary sport," Coleman said, "he would have hit 500 homers before he was finished. But he also played football, for the Los Angeles Raiders, and wouldn't you know, he injured a hip and that finished him in both sports."
Jackson had the hip replaced in 1992. Football spares no one.
"I used to sleep with a baseball glove next to my face," recalls Coleman, "and I was a good player, too, (he sure was), but I couldn't resist playing football in high school and at Princeton.
"It's easier to play basketball and stay reasonably free of injuries later in life. There was a time when the players came to baseball. Today, baseball must come to the players. What we need are programs to get more black kids interested in playing the game."
At least one such program does exist.
"We introduced something we called reviving baseball in inner city (RBI) years ago," Coleman said. "It started in Los Angeles and today there are 150 programs. Thing is, we need twice as many."
Baseball, he says, also needs more excitement than it generates today. Once it was the No. 1 sport in the country. Today, it's football. I don't know where basketball stands, but probably it's also more popular than baseball.
The concern over a diminished black population in the game is another source of irony, given that the career home run record-holder is Hank Aaron and that the man poised to replace him is Barry Bonds. Obviously, the black community has much to celebrate here.
Princeton was viewed as a racist institution when Coleman attended there, and he played a role in changing that.
Until 1968, Princeton used blacks on its varsity football team "only by accident." At the end of his sophomore year, Coleman said he and four other blacks protested to the administration about the "racial insensitivity of the coaches" and the little opportunity they got to play. The protest turned into a boycott. Coleman likely was the best player on the team, but he was being judged as an African-American, not as a skillful pass-catcher. Today, he would have been a hot commodity in the NFL Draft.
But at Princeton, the administration answered the protests by refusing to invite the black athletes back for another season. Essentially, they were fired.
Change, however, did come. In 1973, a new athletic director, Royce Flippin, and a new coach, Bob Casciola, took over, two years after Coleman had graduated. Flippin, like Coleman, a former Montclair High and Princeton star, and Casciola, both white, lifted black athletes to the same level of all others.
When that happened, it became a spectacular defeat for a racist, bigoted group called the Concerned Alumni for Princeton, which despised the notion of blacks playing for Princeton, even if it would have meant an edge over archrivals Harvard and Yale, which also were resolutely all white.
The Concerned Alumni, who were unhappy with women and minorities, are long gone now from their great academic institution, scattered around the country and probably still nursing their hatred for what Princeton athletics look like today.
But Princeton looks pretty good now.
Sid Dorfman appears regularly
in The Star-Ledger.
Edited by: ToughJ.Riggins
Castefootball would find quite disturbing. It was in NJ's biggest paper; the Star Ledger. It is by your typical leftist Jewish journalist. I posted the article below. It is by a columnist named Sid Dorfman. The whole article is glorifying and fawning over the black athlete. The author also eludes in the article to his obvious belief of blacks being a more athletic race when he says Princeton needed black athletes to get the best of the Ivy League competition.
His supposed thesis that it is some great injustice that African Americans only make up 8.4 percent of Major League Baseball is seriously flawed. The article even reluctantly admits that it isn't racism that has caused the decline in American blacks in todays game so why does something have to be done about this like the article states.
I'll pick apart the arguments in this article right now:
African Americans make up about 12.8 percent of the U.S population and with the influx of Latin American and Asian international players it is obvious that it would effect the numbers of any group of Americans in Major League baseball. Many of the Latin American players like Sammy Sosa, Pedro Martinez etc. have black ancestry as well which weakens his point. I am also willing to bet that far less then 70 percent of Major League baseball is Caucasian American which is the percentage of Caucasians in the American population. Why not an article in the drop of white Americans in the game?...From a liberal Jewish columnist... of course not.
I am also willing to bet that even with a drop of African American players in Major League Baseball that the systems in place make it far easier for American blacks to make it into Major League Baseball than American whites. There are even government subsidized inner city baseball camps to help the black baseball player in many American cities. The powers that be in the media and sports elite, with their overall fawning of the black athlete, would make it easier for a black player with marginal major league talent to get a shot in the pros than a white man.
I am so sick of the American media glorifying the black athlete and scoffing at the white athlete. It seems that every year that even in Hollywood there is another movie of the like of "Remember the Titans" or a movie like the recent one about how hard it is to be a black swimmer etc. It is really sickening and their is no end in sight.
The article states that blacks prefer basketball and football and as we know they are grossly overrepresented in those sports and it is not simply by merits. A fair minded white might actually see blacks snubbing baseball as a victory for the white man in sports. This is because even with the caste system it is a sport where the white man is not an endangered species.
Here is the article:
MLB needs to fade back to black
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Have a masterpiece of irony this morning: there is a reported shortage of African-American players in major-league baseball today. A recent poll put the figure at 8.4 percent, and the NCAA has asked commissioner Bud Selig to do something about it.
There was a time when black athletes were hurting for just a chance to play in the majors. But the racist white leagues first stonewalled them, and then became reluctant to let them in even after Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey had broken down the barrier.
Now, Leonard Coleman finds himself in a familiar place, hoping to get black athletes interested again in America's pastime.
Leonard was the National League president between 1994 and 1999, the highest-ranking African-American in baseball then as well as a prominent community leader in and out of New Jersey. As president, he discovered that black kids preferred basketball and football.
Not that he didn't understand. Coleman, himself, had been a baseball and football star at Montclair High.
"It isn't prejudice or racism today," he said. "My goodness, we have a rainbow of color out there, players of every complexion."
But black players have been overtaken by nonwhites from Latin America, who now form 28 percent of the majors.
I told him I could understand basketball, but football? Isn't that the game which provides the ecstasy of competition and the agony of growing old in pain, if not to an early demise. When you play football, there's a pretty good chance you'll be hurting later in life.
"There's no accounting for that," Coleman said. "Even athletes who play baseball are drawn to the other sports. Black kids still would like to emulate Bo Jackson, their hero. There has never been a more versatile athlete than Bo."
The remarkable Jackson was the first pro athlete to play in the All-Star game of two different sports.
"I think if he had made baseball his primary sport," Coleman said, "he would have hit 500 homers before he was finished. But he also played football, for the Los Angeles Raiders, and wouldn't you know, he injured a hip and that finished him in both sports."
Jackson had the hip replaced in 1992. Football spares no one.
"I used to sleep with a baseball glove next to my face," recalls Coleman, "and I was a good player, too, (he sure was), but I couldn't resist playing football in high school and at Princeton.
"It's easier to play basketball and stay reasonably free of injuries later in life. There was a time when the players came to baseball. Today, baseball must come to the players. What we need are programs to get more black kids interested in playing the game."
At least one such program does exist.
"We introduced something we called reviving baseball in inner city (RBI) years ago," Coleman said. "It started in Los Angeles and today there are 150 programs. Thing is, we need twice as many."
Baseball, he says, also needs more excitement than it generates today. Once it was the No. 1 sport in the country. Today, it's football. I don't know where basketball stands, but probably it's also more popular than baseball.
The concern over a diminished black population in the game is another source of irony, given that the career home run record-holder is Hank Aaron and that the man poised to replace him is Barry Bonds. Obviously, the black community has much to celebrate here.
Princeton was viewed as a racist institution when Coleman attended there, and he played a role in changing that.
Until 1968, Princeton used blacks on its varsity football team "only by accident." At the end of his sophomore year, Coleman said he and four other blacks protested to the administration about the "racial insensitivity of the coaches" and the little opportunity they got to play. The protest turned into a boycott. Coleman likely was the best player on the team, but he was being judged as an African-American, not as a skillful pass-catcher. Today, he would have been a hot commodity in the NFL Draft.
But at Princeton, the administration answered the protests by refusing to invite the black athletes back for another season. Essentially, they were fired.
Change, however, did come. In 1973, a new athletic director, Royce Flippin, and a new coach, Bob Casciola, took over, two years after Coleman had graduated. Flippin, like Coleman, a former Montclair High and Princeton star, and Casciola, both white, lifted black athletes to the same level of all others.
When that happened, it became a spectacular defeat for a racist, bigoted group called the Concerned Alumni for Princeton, which despised the notion of blacks playing for Princeton, even if it would have meant an edge over archrivals Harvard and Yale, which also were resolutely all white.
The Concerned Alumni, who were unhappy with women and minorities, are long gone now from their great academic institution, scattered around the country and probably still nursing their hatred for what Princeton athletics look like today.
But Princeton looks pretty good now.
Sid Dorfman appears regularly
in The Star-Ledger.
Edited by: ToughJ.Riggins
