Why White People Tend to Pout (Sports Version)

By: D.K. Wilson

(Before you freak out, this piece is part serious, part poking people in the ribs. The title is a take off on the late Ralph Wiley’s book title, “Why Black People Tend to Shout.”)

White people took the impetus to come to this land - whether someone else got here first is immaterial - and take it for themselves. They journeyed from sea to shining sea and told the rest of the world how much each ocean glimmered and shimmered in their eyes.

After all, theirs were the only eyes that mattered.

It took white people centuries to tame this land —- and its itinerant denizens. It took centuries for them to remake this country in their image —- even if it wasn’t them who did most of the actual remaking.

When they looked around them and saw that they had accomplished, that they had imprisoned the people native to this land, and that they were able to command others to create a mashup of what they saw in their mind’s eye —- they smiled, prayed their prayers, and relaxed.

Games came afterward.

From Scotland, golf. From many different European and Eastern European countries, baseball. From Britain, football. From Canada, basketball. From ancient France, tennis. From the United Kingdom, boxing. And from ancient Greece, track and field.

White people became ultimately proficient in each of these sports and hailed each other as heroes. Oh sure, every blue moon or so someone of already dominated being, like Jim Thorpe, like Jack Johnson, stepped in for a moment’s applause, but the very white people who built them into temporary foci of attention found easy ways to destroy them. They took Thorpe’s Olympic medals and turned him into a battered old sideshow of a once-great athlete. Jack Johnson who was constantly harangued by the press and the police, rammed his car into a tree - already made into a joke of a black man - and died soon after. But he was already beaten and old before his time, chased by tax revenuers and the ghosts of the white women who brought him so much public scorn.

Though white people of the early 20th century fretted when first confronted with these other-colored men, they did not in any way, pout.

By World War II white people were in the midst of reaching the apex of the American Industrial Revolution. American white people had spent enough time fighting time looking inward and playing a role on the world’s stage but not owning it. The very strategic fight with Germany, though unpopular at first became a cause celebre. White people suddenly had the right to ask everyone in the country, white and black (though they lived separately) to band together and fight as one.

The precursor to that asking was the 1936 Olympics when America allowed Jesse Owens to travel to Germany and wreck Adolph Hitler’s plans for a show of German athletic domination. Though “his-story” will tell you - particularly children - that America sent Owens to perform just as he did to show Hitler about equality, or some fantasy like it, the truth of the matter was that Owens’ results were a surprise to everyone. And that story about Hitler leaving the Olympic stadium in Berlin to avoid shaking Owen’s hand is a lie. Hitler actually refused to shake the hand of another black athlete, Cornelius Johnson, who won the gold medal in the high jump before Owens won the first of his medals.

But white people wouldn’t pout over Owens’ winning four gold medals, or Johnson’s gold. They just wiped Johnson from America’s collective memory and invented a tale about Owens and “urged” him to play along. It worked, too, because Johnson is less than a footnote in the fable of Jesse Owens’ 1936 Olympics. And to this day, most Americans believe in the Owens and Owens-Hitler tale.

White people didn’t pout when Jackie Robinson - with the Brooklyn Dodgers - became the first black man to play Major League Baseball, or when Larry Doby arrived in Cleveland to play with the Indians a short time after Robinson. White people didn’t pout because there were plenty of white heroes in baseball and a couple of negroes weren’t going to ruin their vision of a pure national pastime. Just like tennis nine years later when Althea Gibson won the French Open and four more Grand Slam tennis tournaments, including two U.S. Opens. White people didn’t pout about Gibson because everyone else on the men’s and women’s tennis tours was white.

White people didn’t begin to pout when Bill Russell and K.C. Jones were winning NCAA Basketball National Championships in 1955 and 1956. White people didn’t pout when Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali, began spouting Nation of Islam black nationalist speak, and refusing to fight in the Vietnam War.

No, white people didn’t pout. They threw Ali’s black behind in prison.

They didn’t pout. They got mad and got even.

White people began to pout when black athletes like Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, and Lew Alcindor all were successful athletes, attended colleges on scholarships handed to them by white coaches at almost completely white colleges and universities, made plenty of money paid to them by white men, won gold medals because white men included them on Olympic teams, and had equal rights afforded them because of a white president.

That’s when white people began to pout. See, it became apparent that so many “normal” black people felt just like these ungrateful, famous off the backs of white people black athletes, that they could no longer get angry and get even. Even killing Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and a host of Black Panthers, in addition to imprisoning countless others did not dissuade these uppity blacks from speaking poorly of this country that white people took such great pains in populating and building and molding into their image.

Meantime a Texas Western basketball team started five black players against an all-white Adolph Rupp-coached Kentucky team in the NCAA Championship Game. Rupp’s team failed the litmus test. And every white person who remotely cared felt like they had failed, too. And white people pouted a little more. Two year later Arthur Ashe won the U.S. Open and at the end of the year became the number one male tennis player in the world. In 1967 St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson was winning his second World Series MVP award. Two years previous, Gale Sayers a rookie running back for the Chicago Bears, broke the NFL record for touchdowns with 22 and broke the record for all-purpose yards with 2,272.

Black athletes were everywhere - and were excelling and winning championships at every sport in which they participated.

A little more than two decades later a black quarterback - Doug Williams - won the Super Bowl with a performance for the ages. And white people pouted a little more because one of their final domains of sporting dominance, the position of quarterback, was broken forever. Two short decades after that, black athletes could be found at or near the top of nearly every major sport. Even the best golfer in the world is half-black is in the process of dominating his sport like no golfer before him. People in and around the golf world are so envious of him that a golf announcer joked that young pros should “lynch him in a back alley.” His response has been to win all but one tournament he has entered this season.

At this, white people tend to pout.

The best baseball player in the history of the sport is no longer an over-sized white figure who was as famous for his drinking, eating, and womanizing as much as he was his baseball exploits. This man, Barry Bonds has white people so mad at him they have created ludicrous stories to excuse themselves from recognizing his records. They are attempting to drag him through federal court to further impugn his character.

But today white people can get angry and try to get even, but black athletes have deeper pockets than they can ever imagine and can protect themselves.

At this, white people tend to pout.

Though basketball is the new black sport of choice, much to the chagrin of the many white people who adhere to baseball as the national pastime, the best young home run hitter today is Ryan Howard —- and he is black.

At this, white people tend to pout.

The best football player in the NFL today is a black man, running back LaDanian Tomlinson. There are no white running backs of any worth in the NFL.

At this, white people tend to pout.

Four hundred years of careful planning and even more careful domination, is unraveling. And with each passing day, efforts to regain the vision of pastoral America filled with smiling nuclear family faces, a tail-wagging Chesapeake Bay retriever running through the scene, houses framed by green, green grass and bordered by white picket fences, become more and more strained and desperate. Oh, to get back to the “good old days” using today’s technology.

White people yearn for an NBA hero who looks like them badly enough to announce their search for the next white hoops superstar on national television. Maybe the FOX Network can create a show, “America’s Search for the Next Great White NBA Star.”

They can set standards for inclusion in the show:

White boy must be at least 6′5″ tall and have at least a 36-inch vertical leap. White boy must be able to 360-degree dunk. It is recommended that said “White boy” look “uniquely white” and be easily distinguishable from his peers. White boy must have some acting experience in order to make the simplest “hustle play” appear like a life or death situation. White boy must have some dancing skill so that, while acting exuberant, he can match dance moves with his black peers (hip-hop dance experience preferred). White boy must be at least bilingual to speak “Ebonics” during live halftime, post game, and morning television show interviews, yet possess a perfect command of the “King’s English” for high-end retail goods endorsement opportunities.

White boy cannot have a proclivity for bling, the want to purchase multiple “whips,” or an attraction to tacky suburban “estate style” homes, or black women.

The judges would be Dirk Nowitzki, J.J. Redick, Dan Dickau, and Steve Nash’s wife, Alejandra.

Simultaneously, FOX could run a, “Marry the Next Great White NBA Star” show for white girls. Show them back to back Monday through Friday - live. Together they would be the biggest shows in the history of television.

They could find a bona fide NBA star and root for his every move for the next 15 years.

Maybe then white people could stop pouting.

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    D.K. Wilson is a freelance sports writer. He is better known on the internet as "DWil," and writes for Sports On My Mind.

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