Vinson’s Variety: Discrimination has no boundaries
Basketball fans in Middle Tennessee had valid reason to stand up and cheer this season. Both Vanderbilt’s men’s and women’s basketball teams advanced to the NCAA Sweet 16, “March Madness,” as it’s referred to by sports writers the nation over.
However, both have been eliminated. A few games back, though, on its journey to the elite Sweet 16, Vandy’s men played a tough Western Michigan team, with Vandy the underdog. Prior to the game, via the Tony Kornheiser Show on ESPN radio, sports columnist Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe commented that Vandy had “too many white players to win” against Western Michigan. However, Vandy did go on to win that particular game, 71-58.
Although Vandy did have a number of black players on its roster, it did not have as many as did Western Michigan. And if you really want to address the issue for what it is, such most often is the case with Vandy’s men’s basketball team: It has a much higher ratio of white-to-black players than most teams it plays.
A first-hand reflex is that Ryan was discriminatory in his remark that Vandy had “too many white players to win.” However, a solid rebuttal is that, over the years, blacks have proven they are superior to whites when it comes to performing in America’s three biggest team sports: baseball, basketball, and football. If you don’t believe me, then just check out the major college and professional rosters of these three sports, and you’ll find that blacks outnumber whites approximately 7-3. I don’t find anything discriminatory about that.
Vanderbilt University is known first as an academic institution and secondly as an athletic one. (NOTE: Heisman Trophy winner and Green Bay Packer great Paul Hornung, an alumnus of Notre Dame, made a statement to the effect that Notre Dame’s academic standards were too high to recruit top-notch black athletes, thus keeping Notre Dame from seriously competing at national championship level.)
Let’s say that at the beginning of this upcoming fall semester a contest will be conducted at Vanderbilt: One team composed of a greater number of white students than black ones will engage in academic competition against another team made up of a greater number of black students than white ones. Just prior to the event, though, some media sort makes the statement that the team with more black students is “too black” to academically best the team with more white students – uh-oh!
Of a three-point play, my first point is this: Even though sports columnist Bob Ryan was attacked for his comment that Vandy had “too many white players too win,” it pretty much has died down, and I wager that Ryan will not lose his job with the Boston Globe, given he has been involved in similar controversies in the past, yet has managed to maintain his position as a high profile sports columnist. (He openly insulted the wife of New Jersey Net guard/superstar Jason Kidd.) My second point: If a comment had been made that the predominately black Vandy team was”too black” to beat the predominantly white team in academic competition, then whoever made the statement would have been fired immediately; you probably would be hearing and reading about it on all major media outlets for months to come; and some vote-hungry legislator – state and federal – likely would author a bill outlawing the future occurrence of such. My third and most important point: Discrimination continues to attack America, and no race is immune to being victim or assailant. Our collective failure to address this stark reality is, itself, the worst act of discrimination imagineable.
(Mike Vinson is a Warren County columnist who can be reached at: [email protected].)