Allen Johnson, News & Record (Burlington, North Carolina), April 5, 2009
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For all the excitement March Madness can bring, it also brings the sound of too many young college basketball players mangling the English language in tortuous post-game interviews.
One player from Chattanooga, the champ of UNCG’s league, the Southern Conference, offered this reaction to this year’s NCAA pairings: “When we seen that we got UConn, I mean, we was happy to be up there on the board. Coming here, we believed we can be one of the teams in history, to make history and beat UConn. It’s all about believing in the system, believing in yourself. When you toss up that ball, anybody can win. Ain’t just ‘cause they UConn it’s a lock. It’s a basketball game. Both teams we got to play, they just like us.”
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Of course, manglers of the King’s English are not consigned merely to the college basketball court. Or the football field.
But colleges and universities make significant money off the labors of these students. According to a recently released Forbes magazine ranking of the top-grossing college basketball programs in the nation, “amateur” athletics is big business. For instance, UNC-Chapel Hill placed No. 1 in the nation, worth nearly $25 million in 2008, including $16.4 million in operating income.
With all that money rolling around and these teams representing, after all, institutions of higher learning, something is fundamentally wrong when a “student-athlete” speaks so poorly.
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{snip} But the vast majority of these athletes won’t make professional rosters. Less than 1 percent of the Division I football players go on to NFL careers. And only 1 percent of the 3,900 Division I basketball players even qualify as pro prospects.
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Further, according to an analysis of this year’s NCAA tournament men’s teams, only 48 percent of them graduated three-fifths or more of their players. Ninety-seven percent of the teams in the women’s tournament did. (What do the women know that the men don’t?)
Only 32 percent of African American male players, who comprise the lion’s share of most teams’ rosters, are graduating. By contrast, 70 percent or more of white players are completing their college educations.
The solutions?
* Hold these athletes to higher expectations in the classroom and stricter oversight. If a free education is their compensation for competing in a school’s name, see to it that they get an education.
* Provide pre-college academic preparation for new recruits.
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Original article
(Posted on April 7, 2009)
Comments
If they do that, then there won’t be as many black “student”-athletes. Then these same media outlets and “diversity in sports” institutions will complain about how there aren’t enough blacks.
Can any of these backetball-scholarship college “students”, most of whom major in fluff like “recreation”, diagram this sentence and correctly identify the verbs in it?
I didn’t think so.
Unless blacks come up with proof that in addition to flying around the pyramids, they also invented the idea that schools should run professional scale athletic programs funded by tax dollars, I don’t think we can blame them for the hypocricy of college athletics.
In this case blacks are right about being used. If schools are going to make money off their professional sports teams, they should pay the athletes a cut, instead of giving pretend students a pretend education.
This is not just a race issue. The legendary “Gipper” of Notre Dame fame, was actually a 25 year old construction worker and not even a real student. He was a rare natural athlete who didn’t practice and had no respect for Knute Rockne. But the masses came out in droves to see him do what he did best.
The solution is not more pretending as suggested by the article. The real solution is honesty and getting rid of government money and involvement in college education.
In college as well as professional sports, I’ve always had a problem with understanding how a bunch of inarticulate thugs are somehow supposed to “represent” my school or my city and instill in me a sense of pride.
What very little firsthand contact I’ve had with black athletes has been invariably negative, usually efforts to disrupt instruction in classrooms near their practice areas. No black athlete is representative of ME, and as long as they’re not causing a disturbance I’m not the slightest bit interested in what they do or in providing one penny of financial support toward it.
I thought these ‘communists’ were all about the money? Not always, I guess. If they were, they might be interested in how often college players go on to the pros, or how often High School players are offered college scholarships.
Even though this was written by a black columnist, he never says that the players he quotes are black.
“Only 32 percent of African American male players, who comprise the lion’s share of most teams’ rosters, are graduating. By contrast, 70 percent or more of white players are completing their college educations.”
If 32% of blacks players graduate, that means that a good 25% of them have been generously awarded an affirmative action degree, because there’s no way that large a percentage could do it on their own.
And, as the university professor admitted in a weak moment: “If we don’t pass a certain number of African Americans we’ll have to answer for it to the administration.”
This entire diversity nonsense is just one big lie that feeds off itself and has been put in place, basically, to keep blacks from embarrassing themselves so badly they’ll react even worse than they do now resorting to riots and other violent responses.
Look at the above article from V-Dare where blacks are in last place in every academic endeavor behind even the Mexicans.
If they constituted a friendly race of people, I’d be the first to feel sorry for them, because of the position liberals have manipulated, pretending there’s no difference in the races, which blacks can’t live up to academically and in other disciplines, but they’re arrogant, in-your-face extremists who despise white people and commit such a high proportion of crime, the country could probably reduce its police forces by 50% if they weren’t here in this country at all, so they get no sympathy at all from me. I think they should be given their own state to destroy, with a 100 foot wall around it, along with the radical leftists, so the rest of us can continue to advance this country somewhat.
I wonder what the proverbial fecal material hitting the fan would be like had a white columnist penned this same piece word for word.
The black “so called athletes” are being “exploited” for financial gain and the majority of these poor souls don’t even realize it.
This reminds me of those television commercials that had black sports “figures” in elegant attire while attempting to speak in a “high-brow” (read: proper english) tone about the qualities of the offered product. Their stiffness and stilted delivery sounded strained at best and was simply hilarious. Needless to say it was such an obvious mis-match that even the mass marketers couldn’t pass that incongruity off and they were not seen anymore. Talk about a fish out of water!
To make matters worse, college basketball is absolutely fetishized by American men. I recall many a business meeting when this “March Madness” nonsense would come up and otherwise educated and intelligent professional(White)men were suddenly behaving like hooting, neanderthal sports-fans. Naturally, I just stared blankly and when asked just professed complete and blissful ignorance of the whole mess. It was altogether sickening to be honest.
“I can recall many a business meeting when this “March Madness” nonsense would come up and otherwise educated and intelligent professioanl White men were suddenly…”-HH
“In college as well as professional sports, I’ve always had a problem with understanding how a bunch of inarticulate thugs are somehow supposed to ‘represent’ my school or my city and instill in me a sense of pride.”
I couldn’t agree more with generalquagmyer. I made this same observation throughout my attendance at a private Florida university (during the late eighties) that was (and is) trying to fashion itself as a basketball “powerhouse.” The real students almost never saw any of the basketball players at anytime in the classes we were taking; in fact, about the only time we ever saw them anyplace other than on the court was in the cafeteria. Honestly, the “team” always just struck me as being made up of professional athletes who were paid to wear our school uniforms and compete as our school team…but who were no more legitimate as genuine students than anyone else who had never set foot on our campus.
To HH
White men talk about sports at work because it is a safe topic to discuss.
White men talk about sports at work because it is a safe topic to discuss.
I am a white male and I NEVER talk about sports, NEVER let alone blacksetball (right up there with golf) I don’t even watch NFL anymore and I used to enjoy it until it became totally dominated with blacks (except 1/4 backs) Blacks can’t seem to get a real handle on that position though some try. (AA i’m sure)
Do these Black basketball players who are barely able to speak English (or even, just able to speak, perhaps) even take their own exams, or is it part of some kind of program to have other students take their exams in those guys’s place? I mean, that kind of thing has been seen before, right?
