The NBA season has kicked off this week and if you are a white guy, you most likely don’t care all that much. That’s not to say that no white people follow the NBA. It’s just that basketball, particularly the NBA, is the sport for black people. My guess is 90% of black people would list the NBA as their favorite sport, while 90% of whites would have the NBA down on the list or not on the list. One reason for that is the league is dominated by black guys. As this site details, the honkies are thin on the ground in the modern NBA.
According to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, the NBA was 74.3 percent black during the 2015-16 season and 81.7 percent were people of color. The study said that the NBA was 18.3 percent white last season, which was 5 percent less than the season before. The league was also a record 22.3 percent international last season.
That 18.3 percent of whites in the NBA from TIDES also includes non-Americans such as Europeans, Canadians and Australians of white descent. Entering the 2015-16 season, the NBA had 42 white American-born players. The NBA had its inaugural season 70 years ago with a league full of white players. As of Sunday, there were 43 white Americans on 30 NBA teams with the season starting Tuesday. Eight teams didn’t have a white American player entering last season, while seven teams don’t have one now.
Unsaid here is the fact that the stars of the league are all black. The last prominent honky was Dirk Nowitzki. Before that, it was Larry Bird. Before that it was John Havlicek in the 70’s. In my lifetime I can count the white stars of the NBA on one hand so it is reasonable to say that the league has been dominated by the brothas since forever. Despite all the preaching and browbeating from our rulers, everyone knows that basketball is the black man’s game. Like a lot of reality, though, it remains unsaid.
The first bit of unintended humor in the piece is when the writer asks the honkies what they learned about black culture as tokens in the black man’s world.
“I like hip-hop, yeah.”
“I like to listen to hip-hop”
“I have definitely picked up on slang, music and food”
“I listen to more rap, hip-hop in the locker room.”
Not a word about peanut butter.
Anyway, the truly hilarious part is when the writer asked the honkies why there are so few white guys in the NBA. J. J. Redick’s answer suggests he had a mild stroke when asked the question:
It does seem there are less and less white Americans. I’d like to know with [Kirk] Hinrich and Steve Blake out this year, how many white guards are there this year in the NBA? Are there even five? If you’re 6-feet-10 inches, can walk, are skilled and can chew gum and all that, defend the rim, you’ll have a job. It doesn’t matter what your skin color is. You’ll have a job.
I don’t know if it’s other sports. Part of it is the game is faster. Players play in space. There is more of an emphasis on shooting. Maybe they are not being taught in suburbia. I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer to that is.
The rest of the answers from the other players range from gibberish to some version of “Please God let this end before I say something stupid.” You can’t blame them for it as the surest way for a white guy to end up in a public struggle session is to talk about race. The one guy, who said what everyone knows is true, is some guy named Parsons. He said, “The NBA is a collection of some of the most athletic guys in the world. And white guys just aren’t that athletic.” Yep, there’s the answer.
The NBA altered the rules of their game over the years to make it a running and jumping sport. Whether or not this was intended to make it a black guy sport is hard to say, but given the demographics of the league’s ownership, it is a safe assumption. This is also a league that embraced gangster rap and the hip-hop lifestyle in the 90’s so it is fair to assume they really want to be a black league, except for the ticket base, which remains conspicuously white. Going to an NBA game for these people is an act of contrition.
The lunacy of the modern age is on full display here. Baseball get grief because the makeup of their players matches up pretty well with America. About 13% of baseball players are black. There are loads of Hispanics, both local and foreign, as well as Asian players. Even the management positions have long looked like America, in terms of racial makeup. The NBA is nothing like the demographics of America and it is celebrated as a model of diversity. In modern America, this is diversity, while this is racism.
How long people refuse to notice this is the question of our age.
I’ve always favored a good hockey game
Hockey, done well in a radio broadcast, is a beautiful thing.
I’d say the NBA owes it’s great success with their black league to the slave owners who had a breeding program to produce bigger stronger slaves …. they upped the gene pool so to speak and many uber-athletic black people owe their great athletic ability and the fortunes they are paid, to their ancestors owners. Sounds crude, but it’s true. Jimmie the Greek of Vegas betting lost his gig for saying what I just said here. The truth if often forbidden.
The slave owners kept breeding books, the same as horse and cattle breeders do today.
I’ve seen them first-hand.
And why wouldn’t they? They only wanted to maximize their profits, like all good capitalists.
Now blacks are just the ancestors of obsolete farm equipment.
Bottom line: baseball is a thinking man’s game. It requires actual strategic intelligence in order to excel as well as tactical smarts (although it’s also been on the road to dumbing-down ever since the AL started that abominable “designated hitter” rule, both leagues banned hard slides into second, third and meaningful contact at home plate. And now it looks like they’re going to put a countdown clock on the pitcher. The horror…the horror…)
Basketball and that horrible “game” called soccer only require tactical thinking (i.e.short-term thinking). I’d rather watch paint dry than endure a soccer “game”.
In baseball you have to have a great command of both.
Now look at the racial makeup of the sports and draw your own conclusions.
It helps to be intelligent to appreciate baseball, but baseball is a sport that accommodates almost every type, including the very dumb. Henry Aaron is unusually dumb, and he was a pretty good player on both sides of the ball. Rube Waddell was quite retarded. Billy Beane’s intelligence held him back at the plate. You never know.
Unintended outcome: hitting a baseball will be more difficult.
Tall (six five and up) athletic white guys will shun basketball and become baseball pitchers.
Physics dictates they will throw harder and faster than normal-sized guys ensuring pitching dominance in MLB for decades to come.
You should have seen Gary Bettman (a fitting last name for a sports promoter) trying to diversify NHL. They used the one drop rule to scrape together a handful of ‘people of color’ players, and elevated them in a special promotional documentary.
I don’t remember its content, but I do remember the visible hurt on that Slovak Pavol Dimitra’s face standing in that group. I guess he wasn’t thrilled to be highlighted this way. And neither did he need to, as he was a good player as he was (RIP).
Growing up in New England, I was a huge Celtics fan in the 80’s. I vaguely remember my Dad being excited when they won in ’76. My interest really kicked in when Bird arrived. Part of what held my interest was the plays they ran. It wasn’t all isolation ball like today. Pick-and-rolls, moving without the ball, other types of set plays were integral parts of the game.
The early 80’s Celtics were a very white team – at times they would actually have 5 honkies (Bird, Maravich, Cowens, Ford, and Roby for instance) on the court while winning a basketball game. But many of the black players – Maxwell, Archibald, and especially Parrish were very popular in Boston.
I find the modern game unwatchable. Nobody can pass, nobody moves away from the ball, rarely does anyone cut towards the basket, they can’t even run an organized fast-break… It’s just post-up and drive or shoot. Race might have something to do with it but not everything.
My dad loved Bill Russell and those old Celtic teams. He was by no means a modern guy with regards to race, but he respected Russell. I largely lost interest in the NBA when they changed all the rules so Jordan could be a hero. To their credit, they seem to have figured it out and are trying to bring back passing and shooting, but I’ll never come back. There are too many other things that interest me.
It is true that they are trying to bring back skill and team-oriented play and get away from the one-on-one isolation style of the 90’s and 00’s. The NBA game is definitely much better than it was 15 years ago and it’s a heck of a lot better than the college game.
The reason it’s become more black over the years is because teams are emphasizing defense more and more. Teams work much harder on defense now, both mentally and physically, compared to the 80’s. By eliminating hand-checking, it has become nearly impossible to guard a good player one-on-one. To compensate, they have relaxed the restrictions against zone defense. There is now a lot more double-teaming, more defensive rotations, more stunting the post, more trapping the pick-and-roll, and more switching. Defenders must be more versatile. Everyone must have strength, length and quickness or the defensive system crumbles.
West Africans have superior length and quick-twitch athleticism than whites. (It’s not a coincidence that 64 of the last 64 Olympic finalists in the 100m dash are of West African descent.) Most white guys simply don’t meet the minimum athletic threshold to survive defensively without being exploited. There are lots of offensively skilled white guys in college basketball who simply cannot defend at the NBA level, no matter how hard they try.
Here’s an impression of me watching an NBA game now: “Travel, double-dribble, travel, double-dribble, move!, pass the ball!, double-dribble, is there a Center in the game?, travel…”
Pistol Pete Maravich…amazing ball handler,lightning-quick, a joy to watch.When he died, the autopsy revealed he had a congenital heart defect,no way should he have been able to have an NBA career. Serbian Honkie stock,God Bless him…
Disparate impact, and cultural appropriation.
But, …you know……glued together sneakers, made SOMEWHERE in Asia, for $200.
Can we chat about “Pro Sports Housewives tits of… (some disintigrating city)” ?
I am ready for the blast of US anger here… I accept that a lot of your readers here dislike “soccer” and have no knowledge of all sorts of other sports I might casually watch, but I have to say basketball has long struck me as the most useless game ever. Sorry, fans of seeing very tall black men swinging on hoops, but it bores me beyond belief. I admit I don’t understand the rules but my impression, dangerous though this may be, is that running backwards into someone gets the backward runner a foul. No, please don’t explain it to me: I shan’t watch another game again if I can help it.
I also get the impression this is how basketball games go: team x score, team y score, team x score, team y score, team x miss, team y score… ah, we have a winner. The game long ago struck me as more of who fails to score than who actually scores. This may be true of many sports in the final analysis but frankly, ’twas never more obvious than in what one of your readers here calls ‘ghettoball.’
By the way, I seem to recall in the dim and distant past a junior(?) basketball team whose coach got his players to deny opponents a free, unobstructed game start and tried to block or challenge the opponent all the time. I heard the league involved was so incensed they either fined or suspended the coach for such un-basketball practices. Now this invasion of authority interest me more than the game itself. Any comments on that story, or have I (as usual) got it all wrong?
(Confession: my view is that as I am white, old and small, I’d never get a game anyway)
Before the 24 second rule, basketball was even more unwatchable.
I’ll watch ants wrestle if they put it on TV and add a buxom side line reporterette, but I rarely watch basketball. In the US, I bet world cup does better on TV here than the NBA finals. It’s the third sport and a distant third. It’s in that spot because the ruling class wishes it so. If the NBA was dominated by Irish guys, it would get no coverage.
Three Irish NBA players walk into a bar . . .
Wait a minute, make that : three Irish NBA players walk into a goal post.
I think my view of basketball is much the same as yours: Cross the floor in 1, 2, 3 strides, toss ball, score. Over and over, with a little hunching down here and there for a second or two.
Basketball is the most useless game ever. This from someone whose country plays cricket? Just kidding. Women’s beach volleyball is the only ball sport worth watching.
I’m good with the women’s volleyball concept, but from a practical standpoint they are entirely too thin. If someone could recruit a ‘Sophia Vergara-esque’ team I’m sure it would become the national sport overnight.
As far as soccer (football), the thing to keep in mind is that the in the US, the very worst people are soccer fans. When a normal man thinks of soccer, the image of an urban, sexually ambiguous hipster comes to mind. These are the scrawny guys in the sports bar with the giant beards, wearing a Man U jersey, pretending to be “passionate” about team in a foreign country.
After the revolution, I will have these guys sterilized and sent to a labor camp.
No need. You’d think they are acting so out of conviction, but they have none of their own. They are just trying to score some hipster points to maintain their standing among their slice of society.
They’ll go with next popular trend when it arrives leaving their former ‘convictions’ lying among the clippings of their former beards.
I wouldn’t except to get much labor out of them at the camp. Maybe some weaving.
We various footy fans in the UK have the same view of Man U fans here, so we”ll help.
When I was a kid my dad took me to see Man U play at home, but back then the fans didn’t wear club jerseys and all came from Manchester. Not now: years later Manchester people have got pushed out by all the Londoners heading up to the north to attend Man U home games. I have even heard it said real Man U fans only go to away games because they can’t get in at home games.
Or some ethnic who refuses to leave his homeland behind and enjoys fighting other ethnics who feel the same way.
You might be thinking of this story: http://www.unz.com/isteve/dont-worry-its-just-malcolm-being/
I think Steve Sailer has the right take on it: the strategy was unsportsmanlike.
You and Sailer both pounding out Sportball stories of late………..the Mokita versions, at any rate. Good on ya. I enjoy it. Though I echo what a number of other posters have noted: my interest in Sportsball in general has waned. I’m well into my 50s, so age is probably some of it. I probably watch 1/4 of what I did 15 or 20 years age.
I don’t agree with the statement about “most athletic.” Basketball players generally have limited talents, including height, speed, and jumping ability. In my experience, they aren’t very good at golf or baseball, which require a lot of coordination.
It’s not the complexion, it’s the demeanor. I lost interest after Michael Jordan retired. Bird and Magic were OK too.
On the other hand, some of us are just sick of the blacks.
Attending a bakkaball game is even less appealing than performing a self-colonoscopy. Fact is, I cannot understand why even the brothas like it.
I can’t see why the brothas or anyone would like it. Oh, you mean basketball, not a colonoscopy.
The technical aspects of a self-colonoscopy sound like a worthwhile challenge, if you like technical challenges, but no, it does not sound appealing. You have to consider that a doc puts you into a light sleep for the procedure also. Can you be in a light sleep and still do the self exam? I asked the doctor who has done mine, “When you were young and people said, ” What do you want to be when you grow up? “, did you say, ” I want to be a doctor who looks up people’s butts for a living? ” She has a sense of humor, and laughed out loud.
I’ve had a colonoscopy without being in a light sleep. Not fun. You do know about the guy that removed his own appendix, right?
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/antarctica-1961-a-soviet-surgeon-has-to-remove-his-own-appendix/72445/
When I had mine, after I resurfaced, the first thing I said to my doctor was, “”Did you find the missing birth certificate?”
Black people seem easily amused … so … an idiotic bouncing ball game can mesmerize them for hours. Like a ball of yarn to cats. Then there is their rap music which amounts to someone beating on a log while someone recites inane lyrics that are often vile toward women and police. Their ‘soul music’ era was so much sweeter. We were getting along better back in the 70s than we are now that there is a mulatto in the white house …. he’s a big part of the racial tension in America now.
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I think you are wrong with the percentages.
From Manfred’s 2015 report:
Latin players: 29.3%
American blacks: 8.3%
Asian: 1.2%
Caucasian: 58.8%
Other? (unaccounted for to make 100%): 2.4%
http://www.city-data.com/forum/baseball/2567846-percentage-players-race-mlb-rosters-start.html
For the record I do not watch or follow baseball, football, or basketball. Could care less about them. We have a AA hockey team here and we go to a game about once a month. Has nothing to do with their race percentages. I grew up with the sport and played it on the ponds and rinks.
Lots of blacks in the Latin column. David Ortiz is not the most interesting man in the world. Feel me?
Who’s David Ortiz????
I call it ghettoball, and the league ought to be called the National Ghettoball Association.
It isn’t rocket science. White people be white people, black be black and so on. It is not wrong to be different by race, that is a fact and truth of life.
Not to put to fine a spin on it, shoving another races race up my ass, now that is the ultimate in bigotry.
Then to call me a racist, whatever that is as it is a term invented by cultural marxists, and it’s not rocket science either to grok if the cultural marxists made it up, it is class A bullshit from the git go, but to to call me a “racist” because I legitimately morally and traditionally absolutely in no uncertain terms refuse to accept that bull crap I’m a racist because I refuse to accept a black man’s, or any mans race as somehow superior to my own, is the epitome of being a fool and a coward. Tough shit if anyone doesn’t like that. I’m my own man. So mind your own freakin’ business.
Bigotry has nothing to do with it, but self esteem and virtue, my heritage, the legacy of the amazing Christian West and all it’s history, what it has accomplished and brought into the world for everyone’s betterment, well I like it, I’m glad, I count myself fortunate I was blessed to be born a white Christian man and everything good and wholesome about it.
The Sports Gene talks about basketball at length. NBA players aren’t just very tall. Players are also uniformly long-armed, with wingspans exceeding their heights by a few inches. Long extremities (arms, legs, fingers, toes, flaccid penises, noses) are more prevalent in warmer climates because they were selected out anywhere cold where frostbite was a concern. At least, this is what he says.