Something I noticed in researching my Taki’s Magazine column on running backs is what a high percentage of star white high school athletes have their dads coaching them.

Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh, a former NFL QB who played for his dad in high school, likes having players, such as his NCAA-leading running back Toby Gerhart, whose fathers were their high school coaches:

“Kids who have been coached by their fathers, they are almost always really coachable kids,” Harbaugh said. “They take advice, they’re willing to learn. I’m happy to have them.”

Any teenager who will listen to his father will listen to any adult male authority figure.

So, is the correlation between star athletes and fathers who are employed coaching them in high school nurture? That makes sense. Football is a complicated game, and having a professional coach around the house can certainly help.

Or, is it nature? That also makes sense. Coaches tend to have been very good players, so some of their skill is likely passed down.

Yet, keep in mind a third possibility: reverse nepotism. There are a few high school coaches who have inherited their jobs from their star sons. Generally speaking, high schools aren’t supposed to recruit grade school athletes, but hiring a kid’s dad as a coach is okay.

Sports Illustrated ran a good article last spring on How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke, which an awful lot of them do. There are really two classes of jock bankruptcy — the stars who made enough millions to live on for a lifetime and went broke spectacularly, and the guys who made only a million or two in a career that ended before they expected. The latter are especially prevalent in the NFL, which chews up players rapidly.

Wonderlic test scores suggest that NFL players average about 5 IQ points higher than their race’s average. They tend to be above average in work ethic, too. And they’re pretty good at following instructions. Merlin Olsen, the great defensive lineman who later starred as the dad on the long-running “Little House on the Prairie” TV show tells the story about his first day on the set. The director is telling him “Just act natural,” until finally he explodes and explains that he’s a professional football player not a naturally talented actor, but the one thing you can say about professional football players is that they are coachable, so get him a good acting coach who will teach him how to move and how to react on camera.

(By the way, I wonder what percentage of guys with the natural ability to make the big time never do because of lack of intelligence or lack of self-discipline, and thus ends up in jail or at fails to do the rehab to come back from an injury.) (more…)

The New York Times Magazine features a weekly column entitled “The Ethicist” in which Randy Cohen dispenses ethical judgments from a contemporary perspective — i.e., Who? Whom?

Is Golf Unethical?
By Randy Cohen

THE ISSUE

Last week in Berlin, the International Olympic Committee’s executive board voted to recommend that golf be included in the 2016 Games; the full membership will vote in October. In July, in Caracas, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez denounced golf as “a bourgeois sport,” and officials have taken steps to close two courses. The joys or miseries of playing the game aside, when it comes to assessing golf’s underlying ethos, who is more persuasive, Chávez or the I.O.C.?

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The beginning of my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Countless pundits have debated whether the Henry Louis Gates Jr. brouhaha is about race or class.

In truth, Barack Obama’s maladroit but heartfelt interjection of his own prejudices into the controversy stemmed from a quite precise intersection of race with class. Obama spoke out in defense of Gates’s tantrum because they are both members of the tiny (but increasingly potent) black overclass.

Obama’s feelings of class solidarity haven’t been widely discussed, largely because they are rather boring. In a world bedazzled by black entertainers and athletes, and troubled (but intrigued) by black criminals, the black upper class goes almost unnoticed as they engage in respectable rituals such as relaxing at Martha’s Vineyard, where “Skip” Gates has summered for 27 years and the Obamas will be vacationing next month.

This Affirmative-Actionocracy’s access to power and wealth stems largely from their claim to theoretically represent 40 million African-Americans, particularly the foreboding and puzzling black underclass. Yet, they try to associate with less lofty blacks no more than necessary, and they especially don’t want their daughters to marry them. Hence the constant inward socializing.

Read the rest there and comment on it here.

Thanks to commenters for finding the picture of Henry Louis Gates riding his “adult tricycle” while summering on Martha’s Vineyard.

Sam Francis’s old site doesn’t exist any more.  But you can access it through Archive.org, and that includes his Chronicles columns from 1989 through  2002 in PDF:

They don’t make them like Sam anymore. Here, for example is his take on Littleton, which various people at the time tried to blame on the “Right.”

I Was a Teen-Age Werewolf
CHRONICLES, August, 1999
Principalities and Powers
Samuel Francis

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school…,” Paul Simon mused in a popular song some years ago. Simon, of course, was in high school long before multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, Outcome-Based Education, bilingual education, Heather Has 17 Mommies, Holocaust Studies, and assorted therapeutic group gropes and mass seances in “counselling” displaced the deathless vapidities about history, life, and literature that typically spill from the lips of school teachers in all ages and nations. But no matter what sort of crap Simon endured in his high school and no matter what sort poisons the minds and spirits of teenagers today, it is as nothing compared to the offal the American news media regularly inject into grown-ups and anyone else who pays attention to them.

The mass murders of some 12 students at Littleton, Colorado’s Columbine High School on April 20 was the occasion for the construction of a veritable mountain of journalistic chicken doodle by almost every major newspaper and news service in the world. The blood had not stopped flowing nor the corpses flopped under the coroners’ carving knives before the ace reporters and investigative journalists had the whole gory mess all figured out and ready to serve hot and piping to a gape-jawed public. As it turned out, almost everything they reported was wrong–some of it almost certainly deliberately wrong–and not only wrong, but a carefully crafted wrongness that pointed in the exact opposite direction of the truth about Littleton and a lot of other things in the United States that it is important for some people to hide.

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A new report:

By MIKE KNOBLER

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Football and men’s basketball players on the nation’s big-time college teams averaged hundreds of points lower on their SATs than their classmates, and some of the gaps are so large they call into question the lengths to which schools will go to win.

The biggest gap between football players and students as a whole occurred at the University of Florida, where players scored 346 points lower than the school’s overall student body [out of 1600 points, or about 1.5 standard deviations]. That’s larger than the difference in scores between typical students at the University of Georgia and Harvard University.

Hmmhmm, isn’t Florida playing in the national championship game next month? Could there be a connection?

Seriously, one aspect of this that gets overlooked is that the average SAT scores at many state flagship schools have risen significantly over the last generation. For example, football players at Florida average 890, but U. of Florida students average 1236 which is pretty good. (Old timers who took the SAT before the fall of 1995 should subtract 110 points from these glitzy new scores to adjust them down to the harder scoring standards prevailing in their days.) (more…)

Recently a police officer in Durham, NC was investigated for posting anti-Obama comments on Myspace, even thought the comments were said to not involve a racial slur. [Durham police probe allegations officers made anti-Obama remarks online, November 13, 2008 ] Durham has an African-American mayor, and a Hispanic police chief.

Now a university student in Texas has been kicked off his college football team for posting an anti-Obama comment that apparently did involve a racial slur, although nobody is saying which one, and it’s still only a 12 word comment on Facebook. From the Chronicle Of Higher Education:

November 11, 2008

U. of Texas Kicks Football Player Off Team for Anti-Obama Comment on Facebook

A sophomore on the University of Texas football team was dismissed from the squad last week after posting a racially charged comment about President-elect Barack Obama on his Facebook page, The Houston Chronicle reports.

Buck Burnette, a center for the Longhorns, posted the comment on Election Night and was released from the team on November 5. Mr. Burnette said the comment was sent to him from a friend via text message and that he made a poor decision in posting the remark to his Web page.

It appeared under the “update status” on his Facebook page and read, “All the hunters gather up, we have a [racial slur] in the White House,” referring to Mr. Obama, the nation’s first black president. Mr. Burnette has since apologized and, in a written statement, called his action a “terrible decision.”

Longhorn coach Mack Brown said he had warned his players about the dangers of posting personal information on the Internet and called Facebook and other social networking websites “really dangerous.”

During a Big 12 coaches’ conference call Monday, a survey found many other coaches share Mr. Brown’s concerns. Some universities go as far as to monitor their athletes’ pages, the newspaper reported. At the University of Oklahoma, for instance, the college’s compliance office routinely checks their athlete’s personal profiles.—David DeBolt

The interesting thing is that the commenters at the Chronicle Of Higher Education, which is probably Stuff White People Like #1187, seem delighted with this. One commenter says “I guess you lose your right to make vile public statements if you represent your school on a sports team. Good — that’s the way it should be. After graduation, a player has the rest of his life to be a jerk, but let’s hope young Mr. Buck Burnette has learned an important lesson (about racism, not just about getting caught) and that his apology is sincere.”

Well, I think he’s at least learned something about “hate.”

And the next commenter says “Mack Brown did the only thing he could. Still, it is disturbing that a prestigious university would admit a student like that, obviously because he can play football.”

This is someone who has no idea of how the minority sports stars that colleges admit behave. Hint: it frequently goes beyond mere speech. But it goes to show, once again, that the Sixties generation that made the long march through the institutions became totalitarians when they arrived.

As I’ve often mentioned, the most remarkable streak in sports is in the Olympic men’s 100 meter dash. The 100m competition typically starts off with about 80 entrants from around the world. After the first round, the top 40 move on to the quarterfinals, then 16 to the semifinals, and ultimately 8 to the finals.

Over the last six Olympics, 1984 through 2004, all 48 finalists have been men of West African descent.

Of the 40 survivors of the 2008 first round, there appear to be 3 East Asians (two from Japan and one from China), six Europeans (Poland, Italy Britain, Slovenia, Spain, and Russia), one or two mulattoes (e.g., Brazil), and around 30 blacks of West African descent, including the representative of Norway.

The Japanese can be pretty fast, as baseball player Ichiro Suzuki shows. Japanese runners made up 3 of the 32 semifinalists in the 1996-2000 Olympics.

Judging by the first round times, I’m assuming this streak will continue for a seventh Olympiad.

If I had to guess the man to break this string, it would be 21-year-old Craig Pickering of Milton Keynes, England. The British beat the Americans to win the gold in the 4×100 meter sprint relay in Athens in 2004, showing that they are a legitimate sprinting power, so Pickering even making the British team for the Olympics is impressive. In the first heat, Pickering ran a solid 10.21 to finish third just behind two West Indian stars, former world record holder Asafa Powell and two-time Olympic finalist Kim Collins. That made him the fastest nonblack in the world on Friday. (To be precise about this, you should adjust for wind velocity, which I haven’t done.)

But Pickering’s year probably won’t be 2008. His goal now is to make the semifinals. He’ll likely be more of a threat when he’s at his 25-year-old peak at the 2012 Games in front of the hometown crowd in London.

Pickering told the Guardian:

“I only get bothered when I’m asked about the race issue. I don’t believe I can’t run 100m in 9.99 because I’m white.

Of the 364 times that human beings have run under 10.00 seconds, only once was by somebody not of largely or completely West African descent — Patrick Johnson of Australia, who is half Irish, half Australian Aborigine. (A Pole and a Japanese have run ten flat.)

“And I don’t believe black sprinters think that just because of their colour they’re automatically going to run under 10 seconds without working hard. But I don’t like these questions because I’m scared of saying something that might offend black people - or even white people.” …

The prospect of both Pickering and Aikines-Aryeetey improving markedly between now and the London Olympics needs to be considered in light of Colin Jackson’s recent assertion that it would take a miracle for a British athlete to win gold on the track in 2012. “I actually endorse that,” Pickering says, while acknowledging that Jackson’s formidable record as a world champion hurdler was also forged under Arnold’s coaching. “If you look at the current state of British athletics, it is going to need a small miracle. America can produce 10 great new athletes a year. Nine of them might go to American football but the 10th will probably still beat most European athletes. The Americans won’t be quaking that I’ve run 60m in 6.55. Next year in the indoor world championships they’ll probably have three athletes running under 6.50 - so in that sense we might need a miracle.”

And yet Pickering’s strong displays this year are striking especially because, as he points out, “60m is not my best distance. I’m much more suited to the 100m and I’ll be 25 in 2012 - which is the perfect age for a sprinter. So who knows?”

Many thanks to several amazingly energetic readers who, after my appeal in Olympics: We need fewer medals – and more Americans for the email of US men’s track coach and Treason Lobby mouthpiece Bubba Thornton responded while I was eating dinner with the goods: bthornton@mail.utexas.edu

I am very impressed. Right from the beginning of VDARE.com it has been obvious that huge amounts of amateur talent is out there, thirsting to write on our key issues. Now I see that there is research capability too: less ego-gratifying for the contributors, but frankly just as valuable. (If only we had the resources to encourage them!)

This I suppose the impulse which has built Wikipedia.

Our occasional correspondent John Derbyshire has christened this “Blegging”. I myself feel it deserves a more honorable name: it is a community rallying to a cause.

So, once again, thanks to those who helped us. “Bubba” Thornton needs to be told that for every African imported to win Olympic medals, a native born American (most likely black) is rejected. He needs to explain: why is this good for American Society? Also, Randy Capps of the “Urban Institute” needs to explain why discouraging American athletes is such a good idea.

email Bubba Thornton

email Randy Capps

Thank you, VDARE.com friends.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.’s Sunday night Detroit NAACP speech:

Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different. In fact, Dr. Janice Hale was the first writer whom I read who used that phrase. Different does not mean deficient. Different is not synonymous with deficient. It was in Dr. Hale’s first book, “Black Children their Roots, Culture and Learning Style.” Is Dr. Hale here tonight? We owe her a debt of gratitude. Dr. Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks. [Ha-ha.]

And in so doing, we kept coming up with meaningless labels like EMH, educable mentally handicapped, TMH, trainable mentally handicapped, ADD, attention deficit disorder.

And we were coming up with more meaningless solutions like reading, writing and Ritalin. Dr. Hale’s research led her to stop comparing African-American children with European-American children and she started comparing the pedagogical methodologies of African-American children to African children and European-American children to European children. And bingo, she discovered that the two different worlds have two different ways of learning. European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America. Back in the early ’70s, when Dr. Hale did her research was based on left brained cognitive object oriented learning style. Let me help you with fifty cent words.

Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.

African and African-American children have a different way of learning.

They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn’t stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.

Because they learn from a subject, not from an object. Tell me a story. They have a different way of learning. Those same children who have difficulty reading from an object and who are labeled EMH, DMH and ADD. Those children can say every word from every song on every hip hop radio station half of who’s words the average adult here tonight cannot understand. Why? Because they come from a right-brained creative oral culture like the (greos) in Africa who can go for two or three days as oral repositories of a people’s history and like the oral tradition which passed down the first five book in our Jewish bible, our Christian Bible, our Hebrew bible long before there was a written Hebrew script or alphabet. And repeat incredulously long passages like Psalm 119 using mnemonic devices using eight line stanzas. Each stanza starting with a different letter of the alphabet. That is a different way of learning. It’s not deficient, it is just different. Somebody say different. I believe that a change is going to come because many of us are committed to changing how we see other people who are different.

Rev. Dr. Wright resents not being taken seriously as an intellectual, and I think he has a point. So, I’ll respond at some length.

This is pretty similar to a lot of stuff that I wrote in the late 1990s: for example, “Great Black Hopes” in National Review, my “Nerdishness” essay, and my review of Arthur Jensen’s The g Factor.

The problem, of course, is that while Rev. Wright’s ex-parishoner Oprah Winfrey can make a billion dollars being America’s best nonrational subjective interpersonal improvisational thinker, it’s a limited market. If you are the 100,000th best accountant in America, you probably live on a golf course. But if you are the 100,000 best talk show host, you are unemployed.

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