It’s March, and that means that it’s time for the annual ritual of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, also known as “March Madness.” Whites have been steadily driven away from basketball since the 1970-80s, when the Black Power movement imposed its culture on the ABA (American Basketball Association) and the high-flying antics of slam dunkers “Dr. J.” Julius Erving, Ralph Sampson, and Michael Jordan took over the NBA. Since then the number of white American men participating in the sport has steadily declined, to the point that black ESPN commentator Michael Wilbon asked why there weren’t any white Americans in the 2006 NBA All-Star Game.
The ESPN-owned black sports website, The Undefeated, did a follow-up 2016 article on the subject of the disappearing white American basketball player. The five white men who agreed to talk about the subject uniformly supported black protests against the national anthem and loved hip-hop music. One of them, Chandler Parsons, thought the reason why there weren’t more white Americans in the league was because of whites’ genetic inferiority.
The NBA is a collection of some of the most athletic guys in the world. And white guys just aren’t that athletic.
Maybe the combination of white self-hatred and repulsive hip-hop culture is why so many white parents don’t encourage their boys to pursue basketball. Former NBA player and ESPN analyst Tim Legler said,
For a white player to succeed in basketball, he’s got to have a backbone. He’s got to have that competitive mentality and play with a chip on his shoulder.
That’s what happens when you’re a despised minority.
Wilbon was wrong to dismiss the factor of anti-white racial discrimination as part of the reason why white American boys shy away from basketball. To play basketball at a high level today means to immerse oneself in a mainly non-white culture, in which white basketball players are in a minority and in which white basketball players are expected to adopt the majority black culture in dress, speech, and attitude. To be an upright, traditional white Christian in basketball is like being an orange-colored deer on the opening day of hunting season.
Yet for as much as white basketball players and fans have embraced black thug culture, they can’t escape the unforgivable sin of their whiteness. The 2014 scandal over former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling was an example of how anti-white the sport of basketball has become in the past fifty years. Despite the fact that Sterling is Jewish and that he made his “no-blacks-please” remarks to his mistress, somehow the incident became a stain on the soul of white Christian America. Huh?
Whites’ abdication of basketball is understandable given the sport’s present hostility towards us, but it is a shame because white Christian Americans literally invented basketball. James Naismith was a white Canadian-American doctor studying at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891 when superintendent Dr. Luther Gulick asked him to come up with a game that would be interesting, easy to learn, and could be played indoors during winter. Since 1844, the Young Men’s Christian Associations have existed to draw young men to Christ, and giving them healthy pastimes has always been a big part of the YMCA missionary outreach to young men. Naismith took a peach crate, nailed it to a gymnasium wall, and threw a round ball through it. Basketball was born. It spread to YMCAs around the world and became an Olympic event at the 1936 Berlin Summer Games.
The white Christian America that created basketball was represented in the excellent 1986 movie, Hoosiers. Gene Hackman portrayed a tough basketball coach who overcame his own demons while lifting a small-town Indiana basketball team to the state title. Fittingly, his lily-white small town team defeated an integrated team from the big city. The integrated teams of civil rights lore as depicted in Glory Road and the football film Remember the Titans are not the be-all and end-all of sports history. Forgotten are basketball’s roots in white history. It’s actually hard to believe that white NBA legend Jerry West still adorns every NBA product, as the logo of the league. But before there was LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and Dr. J, there was John Havlicek, Jerry West, Pete Maravich, Bob Cousy, and more. Even after the advent of the NBA in the late 1980s-1990s, white players such as John Stockton and Chris Mullin continued to excel. Despite the flood of color and imports from abroad, there are still a handful of white Americans faring very well in the NBA today. The racial disparity is not much different in the NCAA.
Sadly, during this year’s March Madness few teams will have a majority-white roster. Most of the major teams will have few to no white players. Just as with the transformation of our country from a white Christian nation to a non-white secular nation, the analysts, fans, coaches, and players who participate in basketball know exactly what is happening, but are either happy about it or too scared to speak out against it. Contrary to Hollywood myth, white men can jump and they’re often as good or better at basketball than blacks. If white people have the desire to retake the sport, as a matter of performance it is possible. Blacks are not inherently better basketball players than whites. If the costs of integrating with a horrid thug culture outweigh the benefits, though, whites will continue to stay away.
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