Why American Basketball is a Black Game: The Xavier- Cincinnati Fight and Kenny Frease

I played AAU basketball, and hated it (high school basketball was much better). The game was completely the "Black" version of basketball, as instead of being a team-oriented game - with set plays, screens, pick and rolls, and outstanding shooting - it was the street version found in the ghettos of America (or at midnight in crime-ridden inner-cities in a vain attempt to stop Black-on-Black crime).

Not a Coach K "Pure" game: This is why white people shouldn't play Black Basketball

It was basically an inner-city pick-up game with athletes trying to impress college scouts by one-upping their competition and showing off spectacular ball-handling skills with the ability to drive to the basket and score in one-on-one situations. It was their one shot at college.

As Larry Bird once said, the NBA is "a Black man's game." If you are young white male that can play basketball, you are invariably going to have to play AAU ball and be surrounded by Black athletes from Black Undertow cities that your parents moved far away from to avoid the wanton criminality found there.

But it must be stated that the culture of basketball is dominated by rap, hip-hop, and pure thuggery. Here's a white NBA player (and former Kansas star) on that reality:

Kirk Hinrich
24; BULLS; FIRST-TEAM ALL-ROOKIE 2004 "I grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, and me and all my friends listened to hiphop. We used to play DMX, Mase, Tupac and, obviously, Biggie, before games. Almost the whole population of basketball listens to hip-hop, regardless of where they're from or if they're black or white or whatever. If you play basketball, you're exposed to it."

In the impressive biography Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel, the author lets slip that part of the mystique of Pistol Pete Maravich was his odd skin color that infrequently appears upon basketball stars skin. The DNA code that made up Maravich was supplied by Europeans, and he excelled at a Black sport like few Black players could dream of doing.

Kriegel tells us that Pistol Pete's father - a respected college basketball coach - thought that Black players would dominate the game, based on their physiological makeup.

Another theory as to why great white hopes are few and far between is courtesy of Pistol Pete Maravich. When he was drafted by the Atlanta Hawks, people thought he would revolutionize the game but his predominately Black team wouldn't pass him the ball, deciding to practice reverse racism instead. He finally snapped, saying, "I hate you. I hate all of you niggers."

The ghetto style of play came to dominate the NBA and, worse, NCAA college basketball courtesy of Michigan's Fab Five. Coincidentally, this is when many fans started tuning out.

Which is why the 2010 NCAA Tournament final between Duke and Butler will live on as what college basketball and sport could be (instead of a game dominated by thugs).

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":

"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."

It was a "pure" game: 7 or 8 white guys on the court at one time, representing their respective schools with dignity and class. Unlike most of college basketball or the NBA now, which boast rosters full of thugs who are unemployable in any other endeavor (and wouldn't get into college were they not capable of dribbling a basketball).

Black people feel entitled to dominate the game of basketball because Black Athletic Supremacy is a social construct. It's their game and the style of play that is found at the pro, collegiate, and AAU circuits in America reflects that fact.

Which brings us to Xavier-Cincinnati and a wild-brawl that erupted between emotionally unstable Black players - with one white player getting cheap-shot by a Black guy which was reminiscent of the Kermit Washington's sucker-punch of Rudy Tomjonavich -that illustrates what a "Black game" really is all about:

The latest chapter in the heated city rivalry between Xavier and Cincinnati ended with raised fists, elevated tempers and spilled blood.

With Xavier leading 76-53 and less than 10 seconds remaining in the game, Musketeers star Tu Holloway and Cincinnati guard Ge'Lawn Guyn got nose-to-nose squawking back and forth with one another in front of the Bearcats bench. Xavier freshman Dezmine Wells came to the defense of his teammate and shoved Guyn, inciting a wild benches-clearing melee that resulted in referees ending the game with 9.4 seconds still left on the clock.



The ugliest moments of the brawl both involved Cincinnati players and Xavier 7-foot senior Kenny Frease. First 6-foot-9, 260-pound Yancy Gates dropped an unsuspecting Frease with a right hand to the jaw in the middle of the scrum. Then Cheikh Mbodj appeared to connect with a stomp to Frease's head while the Xavier big man was bloodied and kneeling on the ground.

Maybe the only thing more reprehensible than the incident itself were the comments made by Xavier's two best players in the postgame press conference. Instead of apologizing for their role in the melee escalating, Holloway and guard Mark Lyons seemed almost proud of how they behaved.

"We're the tougher team," said Holloway, who later apologized on Twitter. "We're grown men over here. We've got a whole lot of gangsters over here. Not thugs, but tough guys on the court. We went out there and zipped them up at the end of the game. That's our motto: Zip 'em up. And that's what we just did to them."

Added Lyons: "If somebody put their hands in your face and tried to do something to you, where we're from you're going to do something back. We're not going to sit there and get our face beat in by somebody like Yancy Gates."

It's unclear how many players on both sides will face punishment for their actions or their comments, but it's safe to say at least Gates and Mbodj will likely be suspended. Frease knelt at mid-court for a minute or two as both coaching staffs and the refs attempted to separate the two teams, but he recovered enough to gesture to the home crowd to celebrate the victory on his way to the locker room.

Cincinnati coach Mick Cronin admitted in his postgame news conference that the fight did not come as a surprise to him because of the way Xavier's players had trash-talked to the Bearcats bench as the lead ballooned in the second half.  Although Cronin said he "repeatedly asked the officials to stop it" and even tried to get a timeout just before the brawl began to allow tempers to cool, he did not excuse his own players for their actions.

Why was Kenny Frease singled-out for a blatant, cowardly cheap shot? Oh, he's a white dude. 

Why are any of the Black athletes representing either Xavier or Cincinnati attending either school in the first place? Oh, because Black people have come to dominate a sport that reflects Black culture beautifully, with any white player that shows any skill having to adapt his game to the 'street' style that college coaches look for at AAU camps.

Where's that Chinese National team when you need them?

Let's get real for one moment: Pistol Pete was right. What we saw on the court at the Xavier-Cincinnati game was the short-fuses of the children of the Black Undertow that white families all across the country consciously avoid, except when they are recruited to play for your alma mater. Same thing with football. That inability to control ones temper is why Black criminality is such a problem in the real-world, and why white athletes have a difficult time competing with Blacks... who knows when they might, (what's the word?) ... chimp-out?

It doesn't change the fact that what Pistol Pete said back in the 1970s was completely true.The NBA and much of college basketball is filled with n-----s, the type of Black people that EVERYONE avoids in real-life and explicitly moves away from once a city or county has become too Black (it's because the schools aren't good anymore, right?).

Boycott Black Basketball. You never know when some of the players might enter the stands and attack you.

NBA Lockout: They Still get an "A" from Richard Lapchick for Diversity!

Editor's note: Due to events outside of my hands, SBPDL must undergo an emergency fundraiser. You can make a donation through the PayPal link in the upper left-hand corner or contact us and we'll you send PO Box information. Or purchase Hollywood in Blackface or SBPDL Year One from Amazon.com in either book or Kindle form.

This is a re-post from SBPDL 2.0 that was written before the National Basketball Association (NBA) lock-out began. Be sure to check that Web site for stuff that isn't posted here. I'm working on a big article for tomorrow on Milwaukee, a city that is right now at 11:50 p.m. on the doomsday clock heading toward a total Blacks Behaving Badly (BBB) meltdown at (12 p.m). Remember, it will only takes one incident of police brutality for a story to go viral and bring an increasingly hostile and lawless segment of society (youth, gang of teens, Black people) to fully remind us all of Los Angeles in 1992. This time - thanks to Flip Cams, cell phone cameras, social media, security and surveillance cameras - it will all be documented.
 
Thanks again to all who have donated or sent in kind thoughts: you have no idea what this outpouring of support means to fuel my drive and intensity to make SBPDL that much more impactful. I've been working on a lot of new material for the book tentatively titled Captain America and Whiteness: The Superheroes Dilemma (coming out on July 22, 2011), but wanted to post this for the time being. Enjoy.
 
--- Paul Kersey

And... you are locked out.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) has cause to celebrate: the playoffs generated the highest ratings for TNT basketball ever, and 2011 championship series between the Miami Heat and the Dallas Mavericks saw sports fans actually compelled to care about and invest in the product again:

Sunday’s Game 6 pulled in almost 23 million viewers, 31% more than last year’s marquee Game 6 matchup between the Los Angeles and Boston Celtics, according to Nielsen Co. data. (The 2010 final went seven games.)

It’s clear most were tuning in to watch the Heat: In the two months of the playoffs, the Heat were mentioned about 330,000 times on such consumer media sites as Facebook and Twitter, as well as on blogs and message boards, said Nielsen. That compares with 140,000 mentions of the Dallas Mavericks.

More importantly, Richard Lapchick just bestowed the NBA with an "A" ranking for its commitment to diversity:

The NBA isn't resting on its laurels as a pacesetter in sports diversity.

The league has again earned an A grade in a study of the diversity of its leadership in its front office and its 30 teams.

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida released its annual report on the league Thursday. The NBA received an A-plus for race and an A-minus for gender. It is the only men's pro league to be awarded an overall A.

Using data from the 2010-11 season, the study found that for professional positions at the league office, 36 percent were held by people of color and 42 percent by women.

At the beginning of the season, 33 percent of head coaches and 45 percent of assistants were people of color. The percentage for general managers or executives with equivalent responsibilities was 26 percent.

There were five African-American CEOs/presidents for teams and two women who were presidents.

"Our goal has always been to hire the best people available, which has worked well for us, and we will continue to do that," NBA spokesman Mike Bass said.

"They've consistently had a record of opening up the search process so it includes a diverse group of candidates, and I think that's helped more than anything else," said Lapchick, chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at UCF and director of The Institute for Diversity of Ethics in Sport.

The study found that 83 percent of the league's players were people of color this season, with the percentage of African-American players increasing one point to 78 percent. The percentage of Asians remained 1 percent, the percentage of Latinos rose slightly to 4 percent and percentage classified as "other" was under 1 percent.

Lapchick only believes professional sports that have a complete commitment (a religious fervor and zeal) to replacing all white people in front office, managerial and coaching positions are worthy of an "A" rating.

He has attacked NASCAR for having a 'racist' culture; called the college football practice of hiring predominately white coaches a grave injustice and attempts to hire more Black coach "too slow" that can only be remedied with the implementation of a 'Rooney Rule'; and bemoaned the dropping participation of Black people in Major League Baseball (MLB).

But a sport with only 17 percent white participation is classified as an "A" for diversity in his book.

As of 2008, the NBA was a league with only a couple score white American players:

Is it just a coincidence that the Indiana Pacers have 5 White American players on their team?

As of January 27th, 2008, there are 51 white American-born players in the NBA. This represents just 11.8% of the 432 total players on current NBA rosters.

Here I’ve selected 12 of the best to see how an All-White USA team would stack up.

With the game of basketball being more global than ever before, and with more and more international players becoming stars in the states, is the white American baller a dying breed in the NBA? Do certain NBA cities prefer white players more than others?

Lapchick's view of a perfect world for professional and ultimately collegiate sports is one where every player is a Person of Color (PoC) and every head coaching, assistant coach, and front office (athletic department) position is held by a non-white.

Sadly, the popularity of the NBA compared to the NCAA March Madness Tournament (and revenue generated during that 68-team battle royal) shows that sports fans do enjoy seeing white players compete. As of 2006, 30 percent of players on Division I NCAA teams were white.

People can say they hate the Duke Blue Devils and other teams that play white players, but as Richard Spencer put it, perhaps its because the Duke players overwhelmingly look like the student body they represent.

The NBA is largely being rejected by casual white fans turned off by the thuggery of the Black athletes, a problem that football needs to be worried of repeating.

And who can forget that NBA had to take out an emergency $200+ million loan to help teams make payroll a few years ago?

The NBA is headed for a lockout. Were it not for ESPN basically buying the league and writing them blank checks to survive, the NBA would be in a situation where attrition of at least 8 financially underperforming markets would be necessary to monetarily survive.

Players salary are too high and not enough revenue is being generated to substantiate paying exorbitant salaries to players who more likely than not end up bankrupt upon retirement anyways:

Repeating the words several times, David Stern made it clear: NBA owners and players are "very far apart'' on a new labor deal.

And with the union saying the league hasn't moved off its harshest demands, it may be hard to get closer in time to prevent a lockout.

"I think one of the owners indicated at the conclusion of today's meeting that he was very pessimistic as to whether or not they'd be able to reach an accord between now and the end of the month, and I'm forced to share that sentiment,'' union executive director Billy Hunter said Wednesday. "I think maybe it's going to be a difficult struggle.''

Representatives of the owners and players completed a second day of meetings, scheduled two more for next week, and expressed hope that continued dialogue before the June 30 expiration of the collective bargaining agreement could head off a work stoppage.

Yet the players reiterated their opposition to a hard salary cap, reduction in contract lengths and the amount for which they could be guaranteed, and said owners haven't budged on their desire for all three.

"No change at all. What has changed is maybe the mechanism, the system somewhat in maybe how we get there. We tossed around some ideas in that regard, but there is no hiding the fact that the main components of what we originally received in their proposal have not changed at all,'' union president Derek Fisher of the Lakers said. "So from that standpoint, there hasn't been much of a negotiation because that really hasn't changed.''

Owners are seeking an overhaul of the system after losses of hundreds of millions of dollars annually during the current CBA, which was ratified in 2005. They believe they could get the relief they seek through a hard cap that would replace the current soft cap system that allows teams to exceed the limit under certain exceptions.

During a lockout, one wonders if NBA players will resort to payday loans - like National Football League do now - to make ends meet?

One day, Americans will reject Black-Run America (BRA) and it will start with the rejection of professional sports. When they realize that the goals of Richard Lapchick are also the goals of Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs) for every profession in America, perhaps people will finally say enough.

All that takes is turning off the television and not watching sports, the only avenue for positive images of Black people to be manufactured left in America.

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.

Requiring High Graduation Rates is Racist: Why Arne Duncan's Suggestion for the NCAA Tournament Will Not be Implemented

Remember the article on Auburn and the Opiate of America? Consider this the basketball version of that piece.

Duke and Butler had 3 or 4 white players on the court each during their 2010 championship game

The U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has inadvertently shown the Disingenuous White Liberal (DWL) hand and, worse, illustrated that impeding any part of the United States' sprint to ruin will be greeted with howls of protest.

Yesterday we illustrated the gross disparity between white and Black basketball players in graduation rates for NCAA Tournament teams. Knowing that more than 60 percent of the NCAA rosters are Black and that these players are recruited in spite of their academic abilities, it is becoming increasingly clear that any attempt to reform college athletics in favor of athletes actually being students first is an impossibility.

Unless you lower the qualifications for earning a degree at colleges and universities, Black athlete-students will continue to weigh down the graduation rates prompting Richard Lapchick to continue documenting Black failure while blaming the nurturing of these students, dismissing the nature argument as 'racist.'

In 2009 Jeremy Fowler of The Orlando Sentinel showed that recent Final Four teams lack white players, while Lapchick's research continues to show that it is these few white players that help prop up graduation rates.

Why is it that white players, who make up only 35 percent of major NCAA teams, have graduation rates far exceeding - by 32 percentage point in the most recent data - those of Black players? They both receive the same amount of tutoring and access to multi-million dollar athletic centers?

Yet it is the token few white players - many who ride the bench - at major colleges in the NCAA Tournament that make the graduation rates appear acceptable at all in many of the teams cases.

And so we come to what Mr. Duncan said should transpire for those teams whose Academic Progress Rate is below 925 (meaning they graduate less than half their players):

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says schools not on track to graduate at least half of their basketball players should not be allowed to compete in the NCAA men's and women's tournaments.

If such a standard were in place now, three women's teams and 10 men's teams, including traditional powers Syracuse and Purdue, would not be in the tournaments.

Duncan said in an interview with USA TODAY that the NCAA should use its own Academic Progress Rate as the metric to measure tournament teams. He proposes bans for teams with a score lower than 925, which predicts a graduation rate of roughly 50% of a team's players.

"The math on this is not complicated," Duncan said. "If you can't graduate one in two of your student-athletes, I just question the institutional commitment to academics. And I think if the NCAA were to draw a line in the sand, you'd see this behavior change very rapidly."

The NCAA believes that figure is no more than 20%, vice president of communications Bob Williams said.

"Money talks," Duncan said. "So right now there is an absolute perverse incentive. Folks follow the money, and the money says, 'We don't care about academic outcomes.'

"If the NCAA stepped up and said, 'Well, we actually do care about academic outcomes' (by banning teams with low rates) I guarantee you behavior would change very, very rapidly. This is eminently solvable."

This makes sense. Punish those schools that rely on "one and done" style players -- read the Fab Five mentality-- while promoting teams that rely on basketball players who will actually utilize the scholarship their athletic ability earned them to attain a degree (see Duke University).

The problem: the schools that will be punished primarily utilize Black athlete-students that come from a community with students performing at a level far below that of every other racial group.

Duncan, like Lapchick, is a Disingenuous White Liberal and his proposal goes against the rules of Black Run America (BRA) so they cannot be taken seriously. Punishing teams that rely on Black athlete-students will be seen as racist (like Prop 48 and 42 were) and denying these schools the opportunity to play in the NCAA tournament will prompt Lapchick to publish a study blasting the NCAA for instituting Jim Crow-style laws to keep Black players from showcasing their athletic skills, all because their academic ability is less than proficient.

Take a quick look at the 10 NCAA schools that Duncan would have banned from the tournament because they have APR scores below 925. One of the schools is Alabama State, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) primarily known for that awesome cafeteria brawl. HBCU's are already known for producing graduates of little value to employers, and the ASU graduation rate is 71 percent (they have no white players) or a APR of 907.


The University of Alabama Birmingham has an APR score of 825 and a Black graduation rate of 18 percent. The white graduation rate is 100. 


Texas-San Antonio has an APR score of 885 and a Black graduation rate of 50 percent. The white graduation rate is 100.


UC-Santa Barbara has an APR score of 902 and a Black graduation rate of 33 percent. The white graduation rate is 100.


Morehead State has an APR score of 906 and a Black graduation rate of 33 percent. The white graduation rate is 50 percent.

Syracuse has an APR score of 912 and a Black graduation rate of 44 percent. The white graduation rate is 75 percent.

Purdue has an APR score of 919 and a Black graduation rate of 50 percent. The white graduation rate  is 83 percent. 


Kansas State has an APR score of 924 and a Black graduation rate of 14 percent. The white graduation rate is 100. 


All of these schools would be punished in spite of their white athletes, who graduate. They represent individuals whose ability in the classroom off-sets the inability of Black athlete-students to get the job done in that same environment.  

In fact, if you look at the graduation rates of the schools that have an APR rating over 925, the vast majority of them rely on the high white graduation rates to off-set the poor Black graduation rates. 


How many more teams would graduate less than half of their roster if they had more Black players and less white players improving the graduation rate average? Michigan, Michigan State, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Kentucky, Washington and UNLV all have white graduation rates of 100 percent and Black graduation rates of under 40 percent (Washington is 17 percent; Arizona is 14 percent).

Duncan's idea to bounce low-grade teams would negatively impact teams with low Black graduation rates, thus it will be disregarded without a moments hesitation.  In Black Run America (BRA), Black people can never be portrayed as a problem. All solutions to fixing problem must center around improving Black people's inability to perform at levels that their white counterparts routinely exceed (not to mention Asians). 

So Duncan's suggestion for banning teams that lack actual students and instead relying on athlete-students is inherently racist and will not be seriously entertained, even though Lapchick said the Department of Education was needed to fix this situation:

Lapchick continued, “Race remains a continuing academic issue. By itself, the increased 32 percentage point gap between graduation rates for white and African-American student-athletes demonstrates that.

“However, it is equally important to note that African-American male basketball players graduate at a higher rate than African-American males who are not student-athletes. The graduation rate for African-


American male students as a whole is only 38 percent, a full 21percentage points lower than for African-American male basketball student-athletes. Presently, too many of our predominantly white campuses are not fully welcoming places for students of color, whether or not they are athletes. There are lessons that our campuses could learn from athletics. We have to find new ways to narrow this gap and that includes looking at the urban high schools which many of our African-American student-athletes graduate from…answers there must come from schools systems themselves, perhaps with help from the Department of Education.”

The following results from 2011 also are alarming. The GSR data shows:
 30 men’s tournament teams (54 percent, an increase from 49 percent in 2010) have a 30 percentage point or greater gap between the graduation rates of their white and African-American basketball student-athletes. 

36 men’s tournament teams (64 percent, a decrease from 65 percent in 2010) have a 20 percentage point or greater gap between the graduation rates of their white and African-American basketball student-athletes.

Lapchick concluded, “As always, there are schools that win big enough to be here in March and graduate their student-athletes. If we were to choose a Top 10 for Graduation Success Rates, these schools would be there: Belmont, Notre Dame, Villanova, Wofford, Illinois, BYU, Utah State, Vanderbilt and Arkansas – Little Rock. All of these teams had GSR greater than 92 percent. Seven teams achieved a 100 percent GSR: Belmont, Notre Dame, Villanova, Wofford, Illinois, BYU, and Utah State.”

 Those teams with high graduation rates for both white and Black student-athletes are known for being academic rigorous institutions. Notre Dame and BYU are teams that play four and five white players routinely, showing that relying on Black athlete-students is unnecessary.

Teams with players like Jimmer Fredette can succeed, both academically and on the hardwood. I'd also wager that the primary reason Notre Dame's Ben Hansbrough - the Big East's Player of the Year - transferred from coal-Black Mississippi State to lily-white Notre Dame was to have the opportunity to play the white style of basketball and not be treated like Pistol Pete.

Duke University's shunning of Jalen Rose type players -- Black thugs-- and recruiting, in his words, Uncle Tom's like Grant Hill, has consistently turned out to be a recipe for winning. Having high IQ Black players utilizing the white-style of play with a plethora of white players (Duke played 4 white players in last year's run to the championship and have 4 white players contributing heavily on this years team) is an equation that equals victory:

This week in a way to usher in the upcoming  NCAA Championship Tournament, ESPN aired a new documentary of Michigan's victorious teams of the early '90s titled "The Fab Five".

Rose had this to say about Duke and Hill in the documentary:

Schools like Duke didn't recruit players like me. I felt that they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms. ... I was jealous of Grant Hill. He came from a great black family. Congratulations. Your mom went to college and was roommates with Hillary Clinton. Your dad played in the NFL as a very well-spoken and successful man. I was upset and bitter that my mom had to bust her hump for 20-plus years. I was bitter that I had a professional athlete that was my father that I didn't know. I resented that, moreso than I resented him. I looked at it as they are who the world accepts and we are who the world hates.

Hill was respectful and mature in his response but obviously a tad sensitive when it came to discussing the slur Rose hurled upon him and his teammates.

"In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only 'black players that were "Uncle Toms,"' Jalen seems to change the usual meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families. He leaves us all guessing exactly what he believes today," Hill wrote Wednesday in a New York Times college basketball blog.  

"To hint that those who grew up in a household with a mother and father are somehow less black than those who did not is beyond ridiculous. All of us are extremely proud of the current Duke team, especially Nolan Smith. He was raised by his mother, plays in memory of his late father and carries himself with the pride and confidence that they instilled in him," Hill wrote.

Black Run America (BRA) cannot be reformed. It must fall apart on its own accord. It is falling apart. DWLs, like Duncan and Lapchick, cannot reform college basketball without relying more on white players to compensate for the intellectually inabilities of Black players.

Since DWLs refuse to acknowledge what every standardized test confirms and since they worship at the altar of BRA, they will be unable to defend rule changes that deny teams with Black players the opportunity to compete in the NCAA Tournament.

The Fab Five created the thug mentality in basketball -as did Sony Vaccaro - and helped ensure that Black players who do graduate are labeled Uncle Tom's and Acting White. I'd wager 90 - 95 percent of Black people agree with Rose's analysis of Hill and Duke.

But it is this reliance on Black athlete-students who have no business being at anything called a major college or university that puts schools at the disadvantage.

In virtually every level of American life whether it is academics, politicians, executives of Fortune 500 companies, pastors and clergy, DWL-thinking dominates the decision-making process. How a decision will impact Black people is the number one concern for the government, businesses and universities.

It is for this reason that BRA will ultimately collapse. The sad thing is that almost every facet of American life will be negatively impacted in its demise.

Arne Duncan is to be commended for stating that low-grade teams should be bounced from the NCAA Tournament, but if such a suggestion was implemented that would mean all-Black teams would be impacted the most.

And in BRA, that just can't happen.

But remember last year's NCAA Tournament. Teams with white players excelled, not just in graduation rates, but also on the court.

The 2011 NCAA Basketball Tournament and Richard Lapchick: That pesky white-Black graduation gap strikes again

I recently watched the film Hoosiers again. You know, the high school basketball film starring Gene Hackman that Spike Lee said made him "uncomfortable" when he watched it. One day that movie will be banned, because it fails to show sufficient empathy for the Black plight.

Regardless, March Madness is upon us. Even President Obama took time out of his busy schedule avoiding the problems of the world and actually leading to fill out a bracket.

Richard Lapchick is on the far right.

And once again Richard Lapchick published startling statistics on the white-Black graduation gap present at the colleges and universities that will compete in the NCAA Tournament for the basketball championship. You remember Lapchick right? Constantly bemoaning the porous graduation rates for Black people and the lack of Black participation in managerial and front office as well as coaching and athletic director positions, he publishes Racial and Gender Score Cards of professional sports with a highly subjective criteria: sports with too many white participants get a "D" or an "F" while those with high levels of minority participation get an "A". 

Quoted as an authority on sports and race, Lapchick has built a career documenting Black ineptitude when it comes to academics and he has consistently put the blame for these failures on Predominately White Colleges that have failed to prepare Black students for the rigors of collegiate life (strange that he never mentions Asians who perform at levels that exceed white people).

The white-Black graduation gap grows in both college football and college basketball and we can thank Lapchick for documenting this fact for us all. In 2006 Lapchick wrote this for ESPN.com in an attempt to explain what is obvious to everyone save Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs) who will never admit the obvious for their entire reason for being would cease to exist with such an admission of honesty:

It is my hope that, at some point, those schools also will be held accountable specifically for the academic success of their black student-athletes. If they graduate 80 percent of their white basketball players but only 45 percent of black basketball players, the NCAA should take away scholarships. Accountability is critical.
Should some of the blame for the disparity between graduation rates be directed at coaches who recruit students-athletes solely to win games? I have no doubt that some coaches work closely with the school's admissions office to admit student-athletes who have little or no chance at academic success.

In some cases, coaches might believe a player will leave after one or two years to turn pro anyway, so the coach will not have to be accountable. This is thinking without an ethical foundation. If a student is brought to a school, he or she has to be ready and must have the appropriate support to succeed. Are admissions officers at fault when they accept students who cannot succeed academically on their campuses? Some are fans of the game.

Some, no doubt, feel the pressure from an unethical coach. Either way, the student-athlete loses. And what about the fans and alumni who care more about winning than about the academic performance of the student-athletes on their favorite teams? They reinforce a coach who feels the heat to win. They make it easier for an admissions officer to admit a gifted athlete who can't compete in the classroom. 

They distort the value system for the student-athletes who ultimately win or lose the games. And how much blame should be placed on the student-athletes themselves? They are partners in the contract with their institutions. Surely, they bear some responsibility for their own behavior academically. But who is providing them with the road map to what is right? On many campuses, the climate sometimes isn't welcoming to students of color who might be underrepresented in the student body, among faculty and administration, and in the athletic department. 

Maybe there is a Martin Luther King Boulevard or a Malcolm X Center somewhere on or near campus, but it's a safe bet most of the buildings and streets are named after white people. Should the general public be held responsible? At least, the part of the general public that assumes black student-athletes simply aren't as capable in the classroom as white student-athletes? Every time I publish graduation rates, I routinely get e-mails, letters and phone calls from fans who represent that sort of thinking -- the sort of thinking I can only describe as racist.

The New York Times admitted that Black male students proficiency is incredibly low. Every test that measures intelligence shows that Blacks score on the bottom end of the academic totem pole. Yet every year, without fail, Lapchick publishes another study documenting Black athletes inability to graduate from colleges and universities that they have no business attending in the first place.

Their athletic ability represents their academic transcript. What's truly sad is that armies of tutors and multi-millon dollar athletic centers litter the campuses of every college in America and the graduation rates of Black athletes participating in sports still lag behind those of their white peers.

Attempts to legitimatize college athletics have always come under attack as racist, with any creation of academic standards an obvious attempt at barring Black athletes who post scores far below those of their fellow white athletes. Proposition 48 and 42 were both declared racist -- and eventually outlawed -- for imposing such stiff academic standards that would require athletes to score more than a 700 on their SAT and have a 2.0 grade point average in high school .

 As we have seen with Duke basketball and with white basketball players graduation rates, the idea of the dumb-jock seems to resonate with only one segment of the athletic community. It is this segment of the community that many people believe to produce superior athletes that must be recruited without hesitation to ensure basketball success. Such is the case of Georgetown:

But the fear, back then, had as much to do with race as hoops. Georgetown basketball under John Thompson was always intertwined with racial politics. That was inevitable when an elite Eastern university, then as now overwhelmingly white, started fielding teams made up almost exclusively of black players. When Thompson came to Georgetown in 1972, he wasn't plucked from some other sideline legend's "coaching tree." Rather, he had been plying his trade at a tiny Catholic high school in northeast Washington, D.C., at a time when the only notable black coaches were Lenny Wilkens and Bill Russell—both player/coaches for NBA teams.

Mediocre Georgetown teams composed of white parochial-school graduates soon became a relic. Thompson recruited inner-city black players, often well after they'd graduated high school. (He had to wait for one of his first recruits, Mike Riley, to finish a hitch in the Navy.) The Hoyas' rise came shortly after the founding of the Big East Conference in 1979. Before the Big East, Georgetown was part of the sprawling Eastern College Athletic Conference, which represented more than 200 schools. As part of the Big East, Georgetown played regularly against the finest black players from New York and Philadelphia, helping to market the Hoyas to both recruits and East Coast hoops fans. By the late '70s, the Hoyas were starting an all-black five. Soon, African-American basketball players—Patrick Ewing, Sleepy Floyd, Fred Brown, Reggie Williams—became the university's most visible symbol. Perhaps most visible was Michael Graham, a substitute on the 1984 team, who was the spitting image of every Angry Black Man stereotype: He was the bald-headed, bruising spark plug on a championship squad before academic troubles forced him to transfer away.

Around the time Georgetown won the 1984 national championship, the university trademarked the Hoyas name and snarling-bulldog logo. This was the first college sports team to become a brand—and it was a tremendously lucrative one. By the early '90s, Georgetown apparel outsold even schools with powerhouse football programs. Georgetown Starter jackets sold well across the country, but the team's image was especially resonant in black America. Not only was this an all-black team with a black coach, the Hoyas also played in a majority-black city run by a black mayor. Thompson took a well-publicized stand against Proposition 42, an NCAA rule change that he believed would threaten black athletes by imposing higher academic standards. Eventually the racial cues became more overt, most famously in the kente-cloth-trimmed uniforms of the Iverson era.

 People can hate Duke for playing white players and winning, while people can sing the praises of the Fab Five at Michigan for instilling the idea that thuggery on the court would equal long-term financial returns.

Watching the film Hoosiers is interesting: You get the opportunity to watch the America that once existed, when people were unabashedly proud of their nation. We no longer live in a such a nation, because the rest of the world decided that they wanted to move to that white nation that only existed because whites created it. The white Americans left, who still remain a hated majority, have been taught that every minority failure is somehow on their hands and that the nation that once existed was unequivocally racist.

So what if it was? Things worked. Public transportation was excellent and public schools produced students prepared to lead the world in innovation. Now public transportation is the exclusive mode of transportation for the population that most people have no desire to be around. Public schools still work, but they fail the one segment of the population that must succeed at any cost.

Black students. The failure can never be blamed on them.

Richard Lapchick worked tirelessly to bring down Apartheid in South Africa. As a true DWL, Lapchick undoubtedly sleeps well every night knowing that he liberated that nation from white rule while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge that in liberating South Africa he helped it become the lawless rape and murder capital of the world.

Looking at the 2011 NCAA Tournament teams graduation rates is interesting. Eleven of the schools failed to have a single white player on the roster, which is a statistic Lapchick is unconcerned with. All he is concerned with is the meager Black graduation rate:

Lapchick noted, “The report presents good news about the overall graduation rates, which continued to rise for both white and African-American basketball student-athletes. Academic Progress Rates also rose. However, the staggering gap between the graduation rates of African-American and white student-athletes grew by four percentage points to an even more unacceptable 32 percent. This was the third successive year that the gap grew from 22 percent in 2009 to 28 percent in 2010 to the current 32 percent.

“There was a two percentage point increase for all male basketball student-athletes to 66 percent, while 91 percent of white and 59 percent of African-American men’s Division I basketball student-athletes graduate. That was a seven percentage point increase for white male basketball student-athletes and a three percentage point increase for African-American male basketball student-athletes compared to last year’s study.”
 
Lapchick went on to say, “For years we have noted the deeply troubling disparity between the GSR of African-American and white men’s basketball student-athletes. While the actual graduation rates of African-American basketball student-athletes continue to increase, the gap increased to 32 percentage points! An ESPN poll conducted for Martin Luther King Day this year indicated that the greatest concern of both whites and African-Americans in the general public was this disparity. Hopefully that concern will generate new resources to address this problem.”

Lapchick continued, “Race remains a continuing academic issue. By itself, the increased 32 percentage point gap between graduation rates for white and African-American student-athletes demonstrates that.

“However, it is equally important to note that African-American male basketball players graduate at a higher rate than African-American males who are not student-athletes. The graduation rate for African-American male students as a whole is only 38 percent, a full 21percentage points lower than for African-American male basketball student-athletes. Presently, too many of our predominantly white campuses are not fully welcoming places for students of color, whether or not they are athletes. There are lessons that our campuses could learn from athletics. We have to find new ways to narrow this gap and that includes looking at the urban high schools which many of our African-American student-athletes graduate from…answers there must come from schools systems themselves, perhaps with help from the Department of Education.”

Mr. Lapchick is prepared to participate in Waiting for Superman, a strategy destined for failure. He did note that Black male athletes have a higher graduation rate then the Black male student general population. What he failed to note was that these same players have an army of tutors and mult-million dollar athletic centers at their disposal, resources which normal students - Black or white - don't have.

Watching Hoosiers will one day be akin to watching Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation. This is why Spike Lee said he felt "disturbed" watching the movie, where white athletes at a white school compete for the honor and glory of their small Indiana town.

This is why Lapchick is constantly invokes such names Martin Luther King Jr. and denounces Predominately White Colleges for failing to make campuses conducive to people of color (does he do the same for white students at HBCUs or include Asians in "people of color" diatribes?). Lapchick is one of the finest representations of a DWL, a person who is constantly bemoaning the sad state of Black America without acknowledging that most of the problems are largely self-inflicted.

White-Black graduation rate differences? Athletes of both races can be tutored to pass courses and "earn" a degree in sociology, all the while maintaining their eligibility so they can play in March Madness. This is the "nurture" part.

Ever wonder why so many schools with 90 percent + white student enrollments trot out teams of nearly all-Black players? Some would say that the "nature" part, a reason many would give for the inability of Black athletes to graduate.

Sports represent the primary reason Black Run America (BRA) continues to exist. The day will come when every excuse for continued Black failures in education finally runs out, when the bar for passing tests has been lowered too low.

On that day, Richard Lapchick will still find a way to try and explain the white-Black gap in educational achievement in terms that make sense to him. The data he continues to compile seems to be pointing at only one logical conclusion. 

The Fab Five and the Ghetto, Hip-Hop Black culture of Basketball: Short-term success, Long-term rejection

The Fab Five: The Trojan Horse for Hip Hop that fans ultimately rejected

ESPN must be commended for the excellent 30 for 30 series that they have aired for the past two years. The U is an outstanding documentary about the criminals, felons, and thugs who played on the University of Miami football team in the 1980s and helped establish the culture of black players flamboyantly celebrating every single successful play. Others to be applauded are Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson, a film that documents the overly-tattooed, controversial basketball star’s inglorious high school arrest for a bowling alley brawl with white people, and The Best that Never Was, which highlights the 1980s Mississippi high school phenomenon Marcus Dupree, who ushered in the modern era of recruiting with every college football program in the nation desiring him and going to great lengths to ultimately boast his placement on their roster.

All of these, and more, represent excellent examples of the blueprint for the creation of Black Run America (BRA).

You can even watch The Legend of Jimmy the Greek, a documentary on the infamous sportscaster who dared admit publicly what everyone knows privately: that genetic differences between white and Black people play a major role in why Black people dominate positions in sports that require excellent sprinting and jumping abilities, such as running back and cornerback in football and all five positions in basketball.

This Sunday’s newest addition to the 30 for 30 family, The Fab Five, is most surprising because it documents -- indeed, celebrates -- the moment in basketball history when Hip-hop, ghetto culture, and Black-style all became fused with the game and has come to dominate the sport’s culture since. Simultaneously, this moment marked the repudiation of the white-style of play with its emphasis on the team accomplishments rather than the efforts of a single star.

The Fab Five represented the harbingers of change in basketball when they stepped onto the court for the first time at the University of Michigan. Retiring short shorts for baggy pants and playing with a street ball style, Jalen Rose, Chris Weber, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, Ray Jackson represented the merger of basketball with the burgeoning Black identity in Hip-hop.

In the most watched college basketball final of all time, the Fab Five lined up against the Duke Blue Devils to compete for the 1992 championship. Duke represented then -- and still represents today -- the old style game of basketball typified by screens, pick’n’rolls, tough defense and team offense; Duke's game was and is, basically, the white style of play.

Of this Duke team, one of the Fab Five’s members had this to say:

If you grew up in the ’90′s you’re probably familiar with college basketball’s Fab Five, Michigan’s 1991 recruiting class which included Jalen Rose, Jimmy King, Ray Jackson, Chris Webber and Juwan Howard. Rose, King and Jackson appeared on ESPN’s “First Take” Tuesday to discuss their “30 for 30” documentary on the Fab Five that will air on Sunday.

About midway through the “First Take” segment, they played a clip from the documentary in which Rose says:

“For me, Duke was personal. I hated Duke. And I hated everything I felt Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.”

Asked about the comment, Rose elaborated:

“Well, certain schools recruit a typical kind of player whether the world admits it or not. And Duke is one of those schools. They recruit black players from polished families, accomplished families. And that’s fine. That’s okay. But when you’re an inner-city kid playing in a public school league, you know that certain schools aren’t going to recruit you. That’s one. And I’m okay with it. That’s how I felt as an 18-year-old kid.”

College basketball in the early 1990s was already dominated by Black players, but the merger of hip-hop and the overt Black-style of play had not been embraced fully by the NCAA, the universities, or even the Black players. It was the Fab Five that destroyed this barrier once and for all, and it was the Hip-hop lifestyle personified by these athletes that was eagerly embraced by consumers nationwide:

The Fab Five didn't just win, of course. They styled. They sported those now-ubiquitous baggy shorts and black socks, and they brought Michael Jordan's bald look to the college game. They ran the floor with playground joy and swagger, slapping hands and bumping chests and talking. Always talking. "Michigan was one of the first anti-establishment programs in college," says McCormick, who counted himself a fan. "It gave them a freshness."

It gave them rock-star charisma. "We were almost compared to somebody like the Beatles," says Howard, now with the NBA's Denver Nuggets. "We used to go on the road, and there'd be fans lined up outside our hotel wanting our autographs. There'd be people on the campus selling T-shirts with our names on them, with our faces on them."

The Fab Five made the Michigan brand red-hot, and the school cashed in. Annual athletic royalties more than tripled, from $2 million in the pre-Fab year of 1990-91 to a peak of $6.2 million in '93-94. That windfall, according to then-athletic director Jack Weidenbach, helped the school accelerate upgrades in the women's athletic program, from coaches' salaries to facilities to travel.

"Kids could relate to the Fab Five and wanted to emulate them. Wearing Michigan merchandise became a way that you could transform yourself into being as 'cool' as the Fab Five," says Derek Eiler of the Atlanta-based Collegiate Licensing Co.

The Fab Five brought short-term financial success, but ultimately the transformation of basketball into a hybrid Hip-hop, overtly Black game had devastating long-term monetary effects on the National Basketball Association (NBA). In essence, the overt Blackness of the game turned off white fans.

The college game didn’t completely thug-out because of those pesky academic requirements that mandate student-athletes actually go to class (the reason for the Duke-Butler 2010 championship game). Major institutions must maintain an air of academic legitimacy, and this is even true with regard to the athletes that represent the school. But perusing the graduation rates of Black players participating in the NCAA Tournament reveals that the alarming rates at which they fail to graduate when compared to their white counterparts.

Less alarming is the paucity of white players on these NCAA Tournament teams.

Many Black players do stay for one year at your Kentucky, Kansas, Kansas State or other big-time program as rented talent, but the best players normally bypass college and go pro straight out of high school.

It is the ghost of the Fab Five and the ghouls they let of the ghetto-box that threatens to doom the NBA:

League and club executives decided to marry the NBA to hip-hop, and clearly didn't know what they were getting into. As my friend Brian Burwell wrote in Tuesday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch, NBA marketing people "thought they were getting Will Smith and LL Cool J. But now they've discovered the dark side of hip-hop has also infiltrated their game, with its 'bling-bling' ostentation, its unrepentant I-gotta-get-paid ruthlessness, its unregulated culture of posses, and the constant underlying threat of violence . 

The Fab Five created an environment where teams with majority white players are castigated by fans and media alike for a perceived lack of athleticism. Recall the words of sportswriter Bob Ryan who 2004 stated Vanderbilt was too white to win in the NCAA Tournament:

The team too white to win was too good to lose.

Basketball remains a beautiful sport.

Stereotypes have no place here. The truth is always on the scoreboard. It showed a 71-58 Vanderbilt victory this day. So it's official: Color has no bearing on a basketball game.

Bob Ryan tried to test this certainty. The Boston Globe columnist said on a radio show this week that Vandy was "too white" to win its NCAA Tournament game against Western Michigan.

Don't be too harsh to Ryan. The foolish have a strong following. Such thought dominates this game. In no other sport do people try to correlate ability and skin tone as much as they do in hoops. It's the saddest fact in a game enlivened by its diversity.

"It really disappoints me," said C.M. Newton, a Hall of Famer for his basketball contributions, which included detonating several racial barriers throughout college basketball. "I would think we're way past that. Obviously, we're not."

Newton was disturbed that Ryan, a respected basketball writer, would make such an assertion. If someone so experienced and revered could think this way, then anyone could. It's disrespectful to a man like Newton, who spent most of his career changing the game.

It's amazing that, after all the melting, a new divide is starting to freeze.

Blacks in. Whites out.

Basketball is a game of athleticism and movement. Apparently, only one race can supply that. Spread a few white players across the roster for shooting. This is how twisted we think.

What's too white, anyway? The Commodores started three black players. Is two white starters too white? Is one too white? Is a single mixed player too white?

When a basketball player like Jimmer Fredette of Brigham Young University comes along, average basketball fans have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dog to proclaim “he’s pretty good -- for a white guy,” The perception being that basketball is a sport wedded to the image of a tall Black guy covered in tattoos, hair in corn-rows and selfishly playing the game instead of selflessly playing the game.

Those selfish Black players in the NBA are crippling a league that once entertained visions of expansion into Europe, but now faces potential losses of $350 million this year and required an emergency $200 million to distribute among cash-strapped teams in 2009:

Commissioner David Stern says the N.B.A. is on course to lose $350 million this season. He says there’s a need to cut leaguewide salaries by as much as $800 million, hints at contraction, and acknowledges the ever-looming presence of the elephant in the room; there’s a good chance that there will be a lockout in the summer.

We’re about to enter one of the most exciting periods in the sport’s history, and yet we might lose it before it even begins.

The possibility of contraction in a league that leveraged its future on the short-term profitability and marketability of the ghetto Black-style of basketball – which white fans have rejected and no longer pay to watch – should be on the minds of those who view The Fab Five 30 for 30 special.

White fans embrace the NCAA for the off-beat chance a championship game such as the epic 2010 clash between Butler and Duke can materialize:

Five white players could be on the court at tipoff. That’s the most since 1998, when six white players started in the Utah-Kentucky final.

Gordon Hayward and Matt Howard – two of Butler’s top players – are white. So are five of Duke’s top seven players.

Even though the race issue isn’t discussed in polite company, it’s been the subject of hushed conversations at the Final Four and will be obvious to anyone in attendance or tuning in at home. The subject is so taboo that even Larry Bird bristles when it’s brought up.

Perhaps it is fitting that the legacy of the Fab Five has been virtually erased in the history books, thanks to rampant rule violations:

The banners from the 1992 and 1993 Final Fours no longer hang at Michigan’s Crisler Arena. A federal investigation said that Chris Webber took $280,000 from Ed Martin, a local bookmaker and booster who pleaded guilty to conspiracy as a result of the inquiry. (Martin’s son, Carlton, said this week in a phone interview that the amount “could have been $100,000 to $200,000 higher.” Webber has said that he took far less, and repaid the money.)

Nearly two decades after their high point, the Fab Five’s legacy has gone from black socks to black marks, their swagger replaced by the shame of bequeathing the Michigan basketball program a generation of chaos.

The true legacy of the Fab Five is the demons they unleashed upon the game, demons which haunt NBA accountants on a daily basis. Sure, it was cool, rebellious, and edgy back in the 1990s for white kids to emulate the Fab Five they saw prancing around the television; but those same white fans, now having grown up, are rejecting the subsequent ghetto-ization of the NBA. Young, Black, Rich & Famous by Todd Boyd documents with gloating terms the rise of hip-hop in the NBA. Boyd fails to address, though, the financial devastation of the merger.

So check out the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary The Fab Five and understand that what you are viewing is men who ushered in the era of hip-hop, ghetto basketball culture that ultimately drove white fans away from the NBA and precipitated the slow financial slide of the game into oblivion.
 

So what is the important lesson we should glean from this? It is that Black people see nothing wrong with their behavior; it is that Black people love being Black no matter the effects such behavior has on how people perceive them.Outside of professional and college football, popular culture is is rejecting the ghetto aesthetic.

It should be noted that ESPN pays the NBA roughly $930 million a year for broadcast rights, while CBS and TBS paid $10.8 billion for the rights to March Madness over a 14-year period. The NBA season is 82 games, while March Madness transpires over a three-period in late March- early April.