Thursday, March 24, 2011

What a BYU Final Four Apperance Means

We write a lot about sports here. We do this because, quite simply, sports offered the primary mechanism for the acceptance of Black integration into mainstream American life to occur.

BYU - in white - plays a team that looks like the Hoosiers starting five
Black athletic heroes in football did more to integrate the South then anything Martin Luther King Jr. every could have said. Those were the words of beloved University of Alabama football head coach Bear Bryant.

It became a universal belief that having too many white players on a football or basketball team was a liability; that only by recruiting Black athletes could a championship-caliber team materialize.

Sure, whites can play quarterback and offensive line in football, but positions like tailback, receiver and defensive back became reserved real estate for the Black athlete.

In college and professional basketball, many people believe that the only white person on the court should be a referee (though in some cases, this white representation is a problem). One writer from Sports Illustrated went so far as to say that any championship where Black people were barred from participation should scarcely be called a national title.

He insinuates that only Black people make sports legitimate. Basketball, football and track represent the only sports where Black people are dominant, though in Black Run America (BRA) any sport that doesn't have sufficient Black participation is not considered a viable sport.

Basketball and football are the big two and for a simple reason: people have been conditioned to believe that the Black athlete is superior.

On the playing field, evidence would support this supposition to be true. An Orlando Sentinel study showed that recent Sweet Sixteen teams had a paucity of white players. Auburn's 2010 championship football team had five white starters out of 22.  In the classroom, however, Black football and basketball players perform at a level of regrettably low merit:
“That disparity is troublesome. Among the Sweet 16, white male basketball student-athletes graduate at 97 percent versus only 57 percent of African-American male basketball student-athletes. White female basketball student-athletes graduate at 97 percent, while 90 percent of African-American female basketball student-athletes graduate. The men’s 40 percentage point disparity among the men is 13 percentage points greater than last year. The women’s seven percentage point disparity is two percentage points higher than last year."

White athletes keep the graduation of major college football and basketball programs respectable, while many believe that the Black athletes that represent lily-white universities as hired help keep their sports teams respectable.

Teams that play white athletes are routinely picked on, from the Air Force Falcons in football to the Duke Blue Devils in basketball. The programmed and conditioned belief in Black superiority in football and basketball is reinforced nightly on ESPN Sports Center where individual achievement supersedes the team aspect of sports.

Colleges coaches make a living off of exploiting Black athletic talent, where the rare, true student-athlete like Myron Rolle is glorified to unimaginable heights. The real academic abilities of Black athletes are represented in their horrible graduation rates and worse, in the Wonderlic scores of potential $10 million slaves.

The rare college coach who recruits a team of primarily white basketball players or dares to go after a white running back, receiver or corner back will have opposing coaches tell Black recruits that he is somehow a racist. Playing white players in positions that years of consuming ports through television has conditioned the average viewer of Black superiority is a no-win situation.

College coaches like Bob Huggins of West Virginia (formerly of Cincinnati) make huge salaries of the exploitation of Black athletes who have no business in school; coaches like Jim Tressel make huge salaries while covering up the illegal behavior of Black athletes who have no business in school.

Look at the hatred of Duke (article courtesy of OneSTDV). It's okay to hate Duke, simply because they play an overwhelmingly number of white players in a sport that is dominated by Black players:
The day after last year's classic championship game between Duke and Butler, ESPN's Rob Parker and Skip Bayless spoke about the unusual number of white players in the game, which boasted (gasp!) five white starters. The Hated vs. The Hoosiers had more than lived up to its billing in showcasing two teams playing tough, smart basketball in a closely fought battle that came down to the last shot as Duke squeaked out a 61-59 victory. It was widely acclaimed as one of the best title games of all time. The nation's First Fan, President Obama, was inspired to call both teams in their locker rooms to congratulate them. But in the context of this discussion of the game's "whiteness," Parker labeled this one-for-the-ages final as being one of the worst NCAA championships ever. Not content with that statement, he added that if Butler -- the mid-major team with two Academic All-Americans that had captured the hearts of every non-Duke fan along with at least one Duke fan in yours truly -- had won the game, they would have been the worst championship team ever.

His synopsis seemed a pretty clear code for racial preference: Parker didn't like how these white guys played the game.
Parker is an obnoxious Black reporter for ESPN, whose opinion of the classic 2010 National Title game didn't match that of Duke's Coach Mike Kryzewski. He said it seemed "pure":
Except that the Blue Devils had not won a national title since 2001 and had not been to the Final Four in six years. The senior class of Scheyer, forward Lance Thomas and 7'1" center Brian Zoubek had lost as freshmen to Virginia Commonwealth in the first round of the NCAA tournament; as sophomores to West Virginia in the second round; and as juniors, by an embarrassing 23 points, to Villanova in the Sweet 16. "People were down on us," says Scheyer. "We weren't where a normal Duke team should be."

But the struggle had served them. Scheyer was toughened by defeat and criticism. Zoubek had missed big chunks of his sophomore and junior years because of two surgeries on his left foot, and with six weeks left in his career he was suddenly playing with unexpected hunger. Duke lost three games in 22 days during January but only one the rest of the season. The Blue Devils came to Indianapolis with three seniors and two juniors in the starting lineup, something straight out of 1975. Butler, meanwhile, played a rotation that included three sophomores, three juniors and one senior, but among those seven only Hayward, who plays forward but has guard skills and a big vertical leap, was considered likely to play in the NBA the next year. Or ever.

"When the teams were out there," says Krzyzewski, "nobody watching was thinking, This pro and that pro. Where will they go in the draft? It was just about these kids at Butler and those kids at Duke. The word people kept using with me was pure. It just seemed pure."
Professional athletics don't matter anymore. Yes, they generate unbelievable revenue (well, maybe not the NBA), but the players have guaranteed contracts and many play for the money which they inevitably lose after retiring from the game. 

Which brings us to the purity of BYU. A Black basketball voluntarily turned himself in this season, because he violated the "Honor Code"; this code reminds us of what once was the code for all of America before the integration. Ruinous pathologies in the Black community trickled into the mainstream, making Brigham Young University's Honor Code seem outdated and an archaic reminder of America's chaste past.

But it's a past that exists as a stark reminder to today's quickly eroding morality. An ESPN writer once wrote that winning at basketball was a Black or white decision at BYU:
Behind the visiting bench at Arizona State, there walked a proud BYU alumnus, a black basketball player wearing his letterman's jacket and inspiring his old coach to the brink of tears. Out of nowhere, Cougar head coach Steve Cleveland had a vision validating everything. He reached out to Silester Rivers, wrapped his arms around him and squeezed him so tight.

"I just had to tell him what it meant to me to see him there," Cleveland said. "This was something that a lot of people didn't think we could do."





Back in the beginning, these were Cleveland's favorite moments as a high school and junior college coach: The kids stopping back to visit, telling him they would do it all over again. Yet, this was different. This was BYU.

This was a black player. And for the longest time, this had been a struggle. Rivers hadn't just worked to restore the program to respectability in his two seasons (1998-2000), but turned the tide on the turmoil surrounding the coach's commitment to changing the complexion of the BYU basketball program. All at once at Arizona State in December, it washed over Cleveland: His plan to recruit more black players more relentlessly wasn't just worthy; it was working. It wouldn't just be enough for Cleveland to take this job six years ago and get the best Mormon recruits to return to BYU, the university founded and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He sold the school on reaching back to his own roots with inner-city players, with a recruiting pool that had long been ignored by his predecessors in Provo.

All those years of Mormon recruits, the Danny Ainges to the Shawn Bradleys, brought the Cougars a rich basketball history, if not a dubious and telling claim: BYU has the most NCAA Tournament appearances (19) without a Final Four appearance. It wasn't just that Cleveland wanted to make his basketball program reflect the church's growing black membership around the world; nor that Cleveland had comfort coaching mostly black players in his junior college background. It was the purely practical purpose of getting great basketball players and winning again. 

 "This is a sport dominated by African-American players, and we need them to compete on the highest level," Cleveland said. And so, five years ago, Cleveland awoke one night covered in a cold sweat and asked himself: "Do I want to bring in another African-American and have him fail?" That had been the worst week of his coaching life, when his first two black recruits -- Ron Selleaze, his top scorer, and Michael Garrett, his point guard -- violated the university's strict Honor Code policy with a marijuana possession arrest at a campus party. They had come with Cleveland out of Fresno City College, where they played basketball for him before he was hired at BYU in 1997. 

Eventually, charges were dropped against Garrett, but he and Selleaze left school. Cleveland believed he was to blame. "At that time, it was the most devastating thing in my 27 years of coaching," Cleveland said. "I had never been through anything so public in my life. I felt personally responsible because I didn't feel I put them in the proper position. I could've done more to prevent it. I should've been more pro-active. We learned our lesson." After that night of soaked doubt, Cleveland reported to the BYU basketball office the next morning, gathered his assistants and told them: "We're not going to stop doing this." As he remembered thinking, "We've got too much to offer, and I told my staff that morning that we were going to continue to bring in non-LDS kids. It was the greatest decision I ever made." Five years later, Cleveland has recruited four more black players to BYU, including starting junior point guard Kevin Woodberry and redshirt freshman Jermaine Odjegba. 

Cleveland was the improbable choice for the BYU job six years ago, an unknown junior college coach transforming into an inspired hire: Cleveland turned a 1-27 team into a Mountain West Conference power, reaching the NCAA Tournament in 2000, in 2001 and 2002 and bringing BYU to the brink of the NCAA's again this season at 18-6 and 7-2 in the conference.
This article was written in the mid-2000s. BYU wouldn't escape the first round of the NCAA tournament until 2010, when a white boy named Jimmer Fredette helped the Cougars shock Florida in double overtime. Tonight, they'll play Florida in a rematch of that epic game and BYU will play five white players throughout the entire game, against the Gators one or two white players.

Duke Hate is one thing; if BYU gets past Florida with a team of white players playing the bulk of the contest (something out of Hoosiers) the vitriol from American sportswriters will be overwhelming.

Even Sports Illustrated tried to say that the white athlete at BYU was nothing but an anomaly, but the emergence of a team of white basketball players in the NCAA tournament goes far beyond  Coach K of Duke's "pure" national title game between his team and Butler in 2010.

It could represent a damaging blow to Black Run Ameria (BRA) primary mystique; Black America's  continued failures are only tolerated because of the need for entertainment from Black athletes in football and basketball on both the collegiate and professional level.

If BYU gets past Florida, Duke Hate will seem like compliment compared to what the team of white players led by the amazing Jimmer Fredette face. It will be much worse then what Peyton Hillis endured.

White athletes succeeding on a national scale without Black athletes in either football or basketball is a sight rarely seen on television. BYU's 2011 team that looks like the cast of Hoosiers could emphatically change that in a couple of games.

If BYU gets past Florida, the BYU Hate coming from sports reporters will be explicitly white hate.

* Update: BYU lost in overtime to Florida. Exciting game that saw BYU tie it late. Oh well, our points still remain true: Duke Hate is basically a conditioned response to the oddity of seeing a team of predominate white student-athletes playing a sport dominated by Black athlete-students. Congrats to the Gators.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

-_- black people own sports; we're just naturally great at them. although there are some white players that are good too. but i still think UNC will win the march madness. just sayin.

Anonymous said...

Good game, but BYU didn't shoot well.

Anonymous said...

Incredible game. Jimmer did everything in regulation for BYU to win, but they couldn't track down the long rebound on the Florida miss that gave the Gators an extra possession at the end of the second half.

He was gassed in OT and forced dumb shots and passes.

Article was dead on though.

Keep it up.

Anonymous said...

"black people own sports; we're just naturally great at them"

That's why black swimmers are the best in the world.

Oh, wait...

Anonymous said...

A race of people being "naturally great" at something? Why, why, that's impossible....

Anonymous said...

"black people own sports; we're just naturally great at them"

Desiree, if you trying to be incognito, at least change your phrasing.

Anonymous said...

"black people own sports; we're just naturally great at them"

Not at every sport. Naturally great at sports like basketball, football and sprinting and jumping events in track, which involve explosive speed and/or jumping ability, at least for blacks of West African descent. At endurance sports, West Africans tend to be terrible, worse than whites. Africans from East Africa, particularly those from the Rift Valley are the best in the world at long distance running.

RobertB said...

"black people own sports; we're just naturally great at them"

exactly how many sports have blacks invented? And lets not forget that a;; white team from Argentina that won the Olympics--because the rules were enforced.

I don't know if any of you caught the remarks toward the end of the BYU game, but the announcers were dismayed that the refs were calling fouls against Florida for doing what they had been doing all night--fouling BYU. I watched the game on an 8ft wide 1080Pprojection screen--Jimmer was tripped when he cut his chin, he did not stumble. And there were the fans who were throwing change on the floor during the game in Jimmer's path.

Blacks came to dominate B Ball when they stopped enforcing the real rules. Back in the late 70's, we called it "ghetto ball" when it first began to emerge. It was the way they played, versus us. In HS, we watched so called fellow team mates not block for white running backs. We watch them not block for white quarter backs--until it became obvious "Jamal" couldn't throw. The list goes on, but you get the idea. My HS was a state champion in both B Ball and Football. The real joke was that in phy-ed, we white boys, with the white QB, beat the rest of the championship team. In Minnesota, no black team has ever won the State title beyond my alma mater, which was QB'd by a white kid and had a 60-40 (white) line. Seethe movie "Friday Night Lights".

BTW, whites own wrestling--I mean real wrestling. Go see who the national champs are. Black muscle is weaker and has less endurance than white muscle. In my son's career I watched thousands of matches from Pittsburgh to Greeley Colorado and from Minneapolis to Memphis. It was the rare black who could hold his own, and the even rarer black who could become a champion--one of the few, a collegiate teammate of my son's.

Go figure.

Dissident said...

The worlds greatest athletes are not football players, or basketball players, nor race car drivers, nor hockey players.


IMHO, it's gymnasts. I believe that gymnasts require more strength, more agility, more natural talent than just about any other sport. Yet, I can count on one hand the number of black world class gymnasts! Yea....blacks are certainly the worlds greatest at everything they do?

What about Iron-Man triathletes, that's certainly got to be one of the most demanding races in existence. How many blacks participate in that event....Oh! I forgot you have to swim, don't you? Sorry!

What about the worlds great explorers. Let me see was it a black that reached the South Pole first, the worlds highest mountain, walked around the world, sailed across the Atlantic solo, etc.?

Blacks don't own Shi!!, they just think they do, and the reason they think that way, is because stupid white liberals tell them what to think, and they just naively go right along.Feeds their superiority complex of bein' da' best I guess.

Anonymous said...

I'm with you on most things SPBDL, but as a degenerate gambler like the great Vinny the Greek, I have to think that blacks have the leg up in athletics. Between fighting tigers on the plains of Africa, to the survival of the maritime voyage, to my ancestors selectively breeding the slaves like fine Kentucky horses, there's been a 300 year process to making NFL and NBA players.

By the way, sorry to thread jack but I just had to share this hilarious but genuine video that nails SWPL hipsters on the button. Basically these guys and gals, grown adults, go around building forts. By forts I mean, pillow and blanket forts like you would do as a kid. I thought, perhaps this is the unconscious desire for further white flight, or maybe they are just dumbasses. http://videogum.com/289651/grown-adults-start-a-fort-building-club-are-your-boyfriends-and-girlfriends/webjunk/

Anonymous said...

For sports abilities it's all about evolution and natural selection, just like it is for intelligence. Yet many think because a group underperforms it's because of discrimination or something society causes. Sometimes that can be a factor, but like intelligence, genetics is the major factor.

There's a reason blacks of West African descent have something like 499 of the top 500 times ever recorded in the 100 meter dash, which is the best measure of pure speed.

There's also a reason there aren't any blacks from Kenya who are among the fastest 10,000 100 meter times ever recorded. Yet in the marathon, Kenyans dominate. But you'll never see a West African win a marathon.

Those who are trying to point out which sport has the greatest athletes are ridiculous. For different sports, different abilities are an advantage. Some favor explosive speed and quickness, for other sports strength is big advantage. Some sports favor agility, some hand-eye coordination, some endurance, and a lot of sports favor a combination of several traits.

Anonymous said...

During my time with LAPD, I can attest to the athletic prowess of many blacks. When they ran from us, holy cow it was tough to stop them. But as we used to say, "You can't outrun the radio" meaning our communications radios. They were FAST, but this comes from their genetics, having to chase down wildebeests and such on the savannah and Serengeti. One college star track and field athlete became a cop with LAPD, David Mack. He turned out to be a full blown Bloods gang member and went to prison; word is, he is out now. I wonder if he will go back to coach track and field, or opt for the Bloods?

Anonymous said...

Stuff, the Duke/BYU hate has a lot to do with self loathing whites and fawning liberal bias in the MSM towards blacks.

They had a closeup of a trainer rubbing Jimmer's thick "white" calves last night. Blacks have skinny calves, long legs, and high asses that generally allow them to jump and run faster (short bursts). Whites generally have brains that make them think better.

With that being said I believe that teams in college could benefit (and ESPN) from more mixed teams (think Duke/Butler). White sharpshooter, w/b floor general, black athleticism, white smarts, black defender, any big boy with height.

Most of my white friends growing up played tennis, wrestled, golf, hockey, rugby, or swam in high school/college. I played token bench in HS (w/all blacks) and Tech College basketball. Most whites like to play many different sports. A black guy won't typically play some of the aforementioned "white" sports (because they suck). I can tell you it drives them crazy when a white boy can "ball" better than them in "they" sport (that they didn't invent). --the Man.

Anonymous said...

I am a black man and I have been rooting for white basketball players and teams for years now. There are too many black males trying to play sports and not enough trying to be scientists or Zuckerbergs. I wouldn't care if not one black male played professional sports ever.A lot of what you are saying I have been saying now for years , maybe not as articulately or coldly but that is why I like this site so much because believe it or not everything here is exposing the stupidity of current popular black thought. Thank You SBPDL. My favorite NBA player is Dirk Nowitzski, Manu Ginobli, and Blake Griffin I get a half point off for that but he's racially ambiguous so I give myself a break with him. NFL, I love Peyton Manning, he's brilliant.

Anonymous said...

All things considered, given BYU's tiny recruiting pool-mormons are only one percent of the US population, not a bad run for the cougars.