Germany winning the World Cup last July, repeat, kinda tripped us, for the very simple reason that, illiterate as we are in football, we have always regarded South Americans as the lords of this game — again, if only for Brazil’s almost mythical Pele, a black.
The same reaction would obtain if a US NBA dream team composed of Lebron James, Dywane Wade, Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Kawhi Leonard, and a healthy Kobe Bryant and Derrick Rose and Paul George — say — played a best of seven against a German or a Spanish basketball team and lost.
It does seem clear that Blacks rule sports. We remember how Isaiah Thomas of the tough, very physical Detroit Pistons, stirred a controversy for a remark he made on Larry Bird, the best white player in the late 70s and early 80s, who was arch rival to Magic Johnson.
Thomas said: ‘’Larry Bird is a very, very good basketball player. But if he was black, he’d be just another guy.’’
He was quoting teammate Dennis Rodman when he, Thomas, was asked for a comment on Larry Bird, but it was his saying it that reverberated.
The statement had a racist ring but oddly enough, it also had the ring of truth, as Larry Bird’s own words would affirm: “But it is a black man’s game, and it will be forever. I mean, the greatest athletes in the world are African-American.”
In fact, the second sentence does not specify basketball any more! Bird must have had Pele on his mind, as well as Muhammad Ali of boxing, where, again, the dominant fighters are black, especially in the heavyweight decision — from Joe Louis in the 30s to the heavy weight kings of succeeding decades Sonny Liston to Joe Frazier and George Foreman and Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson.
The white heavyweights Rocky Marciano and Jack Dempsey were the exceptions. Yet, Dempsey, ‘the Manassa Mauler’, appeared to have eluded black fighters.
The idea that this cultural icon in the Roaring 20s avoided fighting black boxers would have been glaring had there been a black challenger looming in the horizon.
Unfortunately, the racial thing was deep-zoned. The whites of America simply did not relish black pugilists beating the hell out of White fellow prize-fighters, and thus, they were ruled out, virtually banned.
Yet, in the decades just prior to Dempsey, there was Jack Johnson who became the first African American world champion, one of whose great wins — against Jim Jeffries — so incensed white America, that it triggered race riots across the whole country.
The Johnson phenomenon — he was manifestly, brutally superior to his white rivals — gave birth to the phrase The Great White Hope, obviously meaning a White boxer that would wake whites from the nightmare that was Jack Johnson.
The vicissitudes of history indeed. In 1930s to 1940s came Joe Louis, one-hundred percent beautiful black, who became the first black American hero of white America when he knocked out the German boxer Max Schmelling.
This event may have been the dawning of a new age — when fans go fanatical over the amazing black athletes.
I became a basketball fan very late — mainly because of Michael Jordan. The GOAT. In 2006, I rooted for Dywane Wade, also black, when his Miami Heat was down two to zero against the Dallas Mavericks — and that was a huge German who led the latter!
But the Joe Louis victory. That went really deep-zoned. Adolf Hitler was using Max Schmelling’s win over Louis as propaganda for his ‘supremacy of the Aryan race’ thing.
Let’s talk about that next time.
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Author’s email: cezaruis@gmail.com
