One Man’s Sun-Baked Theory on Athletic Supremacy

A few days ago, NBC, which should have known better, presented a one-hour seminar-type TV program that undertook to show that blacks are better athletes than whites. Next week, presumably, they’re going to have one to show the earth is round. Water is wet.

But it’s when they got into the reasons for blacks being superior that they got into water they couldn’t tread. They brought in grave scientists to give learned discourses. And when they traced it to physiological racial differences, they raised the hackles on large segments of the populace.

Any sportswriter could have told them that would happen.

You see, none of us likes to be told we’re different. Even if the differences are advantageous. With the exception of a few Anglo-Saxon eccentrics who despise the rest of mankind, we’re a conformist lot.

If we’re good at something, we don’t like to be told it’s because we have this twitch muscle not given to the rest of human beings. It’s like being able to see better because you’ve got three eyes.

Great athletes, like great musicians, of course, have some gift the rest of mankind doesn’t. Sam Snead, the great golfer, is double-jointed. Ted Williams, in his prime, had the eyesight of a hungry hawk. But these were hardly group legacies.

Do black athletes have some edge that accounts for their preponderance of representation in all sports they undertake? Well, of course they do. There’s an old saying that when a thing happens once, it can be an accident. Twice, it can be a coincidence. But if it keeps happening, it’s a trend.

The poor doctors on the network, a physiologist and an anthropologist who stuck their test tubes into this liquid dynamite of an issue, appeared on television to be politically and sociologically naive.

They seemed startled that their innocent research could arouse such vehement passions as when the Berkeley sociologist, Harry Edwards, with whom few dare to cross adjectives and prepositions, thundered that their study was racist. You learn never to cross points of view with Harry. He’s bigger than you are. Also louder.

The scientists are not only naive, they were a little unscientific. To understand why American blacks were succeeding in such boggling numbers, they studied West Africans. Figure that one out.

It didn’t take Harry Edwards long to point out--correctly--that American blacks are a long way genetically from any African blacks. The American black, like the American anything, is a mixture of races, cultures and pigments. Sherman’s army has descendants in every ghetto in America, you can bet me. Edwards himself reminded the panel that he had great, great grandparents who were Irish. So did I but I never had a good jump shot.

Harry likes to think racism and segregation drove the young blacks into the one avenue open to them in a closed society--sports. They got good at them because they were desperate.

I can buy that. Up to a point. Deprivation is a powerful motivating force. So is hatred. There’s very little doubt raging hatred made Ty Cobb excel after the day he came home and found that his mother had shot and killed his father by “accident.� Cobb set out to make the world pay.

But I would like to offer my own theory of athletic supremacy.

Unweighted by any scientific gobbledygook, not bogged down by any documented research, not even cluttered by facts, Murray’s Law of Athletic Supremacy is beautiful in its simplicity, based on a longtime non-balancing of the issues, a resolute refusal to entertain any other points of view. Charles Darwin, I’m not. I base my findings on that most incontrovertible of stances--total ignorance. Compared to me, Darwin was equivocal.

First of all, I don’t think it is twitch muscles or long tendons or larger lungs or even that old standby, rhythm, that contrives to make African-Americans superior athletes.

In the second place, I have never been able to understand the convoluted scientific efforts to explain away the darker pigment on some human beings. To me, it is a simple matter of geography. The closer you get to the Equator, the darker the skin.

I mean, aren’t southern Italians darker than Swedes? Skin coloring is a function of climate. I will cling to this notion until a blond, blue-eyed baby is born to natives in Zimbabwe or a black-skinned child emerges in Scandinavia.

I am absolutely positive that if you had put a colony of Irishmen in the Sudan in, say, 5000 BC, their descendants would be black today. If you had put a Sudanese population in Dublin in 5000 BC, their descendants would have red hair.

Now, we come to athletic prowess. Murray’s Law is simple: Athletic prowess is bestowed on that part of the population that is closer to the soil, deals with a harshness of existence, asks no quarter of life and gets none.

Nothing in my business, journalism, makes me laugh louder than to pick up a paper and find some story, marveling wide-eyed, at how some deprived youngster from a tar paper shack in Arkansas, one of 26 children, rose to become heavyweight champion of the world, all-world center in the NBA, home run champion or Super Bowl quarterback. Well, of course he did. That’s dog-bites-man stuff.

A much bigger, more astonishing story would be if a youngster came out of a silk-sheets, chauffeur-to-school, governess-at-home atmosphere in the mansions of Long Island to become heavyweight champion of the world, or even left fielder for the Yankees.

You always get great athletes from the bottom of the economic order. That goes back to the days of ancient Rome, when the gladiators were all slaves (later Christians, and we all know the early Christians were the poor).

In this country, the lineups of professional teams were always filled with the names of farm boys or the sons of the waves of immigrants who came over here from the farmlands of Ireland or Germany or Italy or Poland. How do you think Shoeless Joe got his nickname? Why do you think he couldn’t read or write?

The African-Americans are simply taking up where the Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans and the home-grown farm boys left off. Like their predecessors, they come from a long line of people who worked long, hot hours in the sun, growing grapes, chopping cotton, cutting cane. This makes the belly hard, the muscles sinewy, the will stubborn but accustomed to hardship. This is the edge the black athlete has. The same edge the boys from the cornfield, the boys who came from a long line of Bavarian stump-clearers, had in another era.

And what happened to them may happen to the American black. Already, as blacks migrate from the levees and cotton fields of the Old South and get more than one generation away from it to the metropolises of the North and East and live their lives by radiators and soft beds and eat junk food instead of soul food, they are losing their places, increasingly, to the hardy breeds from Central America and the Caribbean. That’s the way it goes.

Don’t ask me to explain any of this. Trust me. I’m fresh out of test tubes. Don’t burden me with facts. Or twitch muscles. As Harry Edwards and I could tell you, Irishmen don’t have twitch muscles.