The Weekly Screed (#669)

“Mammy’s power forward
loves short’nin’ bread…” 
By David Benjamin

“Harry, that son of a bitch is ordering me to get some niggers in here. What am I going to do?”  — Adolph Rupp

MADISON, Wis. — The Badgers of the University of Wisconsin have the whitest team left in the NCAA basketball tournament. I wasn’t aware of this until it was pointed out by Oregonian sportswriter John Canzano. Of course, while lamenting UW’s defeat of his hometown Oregon Ducks, Canzano didn’t explicitly use the word “white.”

He said that the Ducks are “the more gifted, more athletic group of players,” but what he meant was “blacker.” Wisconsin starts four white guys and Traevon Jackson. Oregon, like most leading NCAA basketball programs today, has a majority-black starting five.

This wasn’t always so. I recently re-watched Glory Road, the movie that chronicles Texas Western’s unlikely march to the 1966 NCAA title under coach Don Haskins. I remembered the triumph I felt when Haskins — the first major-college coach who dared to put five African-American players on the court at the same time — beat the lily-white Wildcats of the University of Kentucky.

In the mid-1960’s, even after passage of the Civil Rights Act, apartheid clung to college sports. A jowly racist from Kentucky, Adolph Rupp, towered over NCAA hoops like the Old Testament God. He disdained to play teams with black players. He singlehandedly enforced the color line in the mighty Southeastern Conference and he preached the dogma that blacks were flashy but dumb, lazy on defense, selfish, undisciplined and congenitally unfit for organized sports.

Since that night in ’66 when Bobby Joe Hill and David Lattin deliciously rubbed Rupp’s bigotry in his face, America has progressed so far that basketball racialism — take Canzano, for instance — has taken a sort of weird U-turn. Now, without exactly saying so, hoop fans assume that a white star on a big-time college or NBA team earned his distinction not because of talent or physical gifts, but only after beating the racial odds through thousands of grueling hours of extra practice. The term “gym rat” always applies to white kids.

Among the lexicon of basketball synonyms for “white” are also “gritty,” “blue-collar,” “hard-nosed,” “lunchpail,” “scrappy” and “grinder,” along with “stiff,” “awkward,” “a step slow,” “good without the ball” and “team-oriented.”

When a sportscaster invokes the word “athletic,” he means “black.” Other terms apply, too, like “quick,” “lightning-fast,” “above the rim.” The consensus prevails that black players were born with some sort of innate hoops mojo. Their Caucasian teammates just don’t have it. (White) film director Ron Shelton said it best for all time: “White men can’t jump.”

Canzano’s unsubtle dissing of the Badgers, “a less talented… outfit that Oregon could have dribbled circles around in a skills competition,” hints that there’s something illegitimate — perhaps even conspiratorial — about all those honkies playing for Wisconsin. Indeed, why are the Badgers so white? Is coach Bo Ryan secretly channeling Adolph Rupp? Or, is he just recruiting the best players available in a heavily white state? Or, perhaps he’s handicapped by the tendency of Wisconsin’s best black players to prefer Marquette, the Catholic college in Milwaukee where Al McGuire won it all in 1977 with four smart, disciplined out-of-state black guys and Jimmy Boylan from New Jersey.

Really, this has little to do with Bo Ryan or UW. Listen to Canzano, and you hear Adolph Rupp’s ghost, talking from the opposite side of his mouth. Canzano seems worried that if we let too many of the wrong sort of kids play, it’ll ruin basketball. Unless we’re careful, America’s most high-flying, fast-moving, spin-dribbling, slam-dunking, electrifying, mega-athletic, chocolate-thunder sport will become the equivalent of an Arthur Murray fox-trot class at the local YMCA.

Maybe I’m being unfair, but I can’t help thinking that guys like Canzano would have loved an old-time minstrel show, that defunct and degrading vaudeville spectacle in which black men (or white men in blackface) shucked and jived, tapped and pratfell, did the splits, lost their pants and carried on hilariously. The laughs were slapstick and the banter was pure Amos ‘n’ Andy. Minstrelsy was great fun, a (sometimes guilty) pleasure for both white and black audiences. In its most positive aspect, it sank deep and lasting roots in showbiz for African-Americans. On its dark side, it reinforced stereotypes: black men as fools and jesters, black women as vamps and Aunt Jemima.

In that era, it must have seemed to a Negro that his best hope for a career was a steady gig in a traveling show where he could dazzle the rubes nightly with his “athleticism,” dancing the cakewalk while strumming his banjo, playing the mouth organ and belting out “Short’nin Bread.” To suggest to a white man that this sort of simple-minded but strenuous self-abasement was the most he could do in life would be an insult. Indeed, an all-white minstrel show — without blackface makeup and racial mockery — wouldn’t have made sense or sold tickets.

So, fortunately, minstrelsy died when vaudeville died. Or… wait a minute.
Maybe our sportscasters and sportswriters are hinting at something we’d rather not admit. Maybe they’re whispering to us that watching the darkies dance and prance is still more fun than Fred Astaire.

Perhaps all we’ve really done is move the show, from Keith’s Palace to Madison Square Garden. And there — tonight! — LeBron is Mister Bones, Kevin Durant is Mister Tambo, and Dirk Nowitzki’s down on one knee in blackface with those big red painted-on lips, singing “Mammy” ‘til it just plain breaks your heart.