Paterno links black athletes to increased scoring

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THIS SHOULD NOT BE NEWS: BLACK ATHLETES RUN FASTER

The Daily Herald

Before Joe Paterno gets dunked in the same tub of recycled hot water where Fisher DeBerry nearly drowned last week, let's get one thing straight:

They're right.

Both of them.

Black athletes run faster.

Not all black athletes, of course. Distinctions are never more important than when discussing race, which is why generalizations like the paragraph above is bound to cause

headaches. But the most recent, most credible research on the subject arrived at the very same conclusion, over and over. And that was five years ago.

Too often in the past, saying blacks were superior athletes was little more than a backhanded compliment, intended to smear them in the same breath as inferior human beings. Like many of us, author Jon Entine hoped that notion was history by the time he wrote "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It."

But as the furor over DeBerry's remarks demonstrates, and while few would argue with what the Air Force Academy coach said, even fewer are comfortable talking about why it's true.

Entine is not, perhaps because he is careful about drawing distinctions, even among black athletes. He says descendants of East Africans -- Kenyans, for example -- are predisposed to lean body types better suited for distance running. Descendants of West Africans, on the other hand, have more muscular body types favoring speed.

DeBerry didn't bother with such distinctions when he explained a 48-10 pounding of his football squad by TCU this way: "The other team had a lot more Afro-American players than we did and they ran a lot faster than we did."

And earlier this week, asked about the offensive explosion in college football, Paterno stuck his toe gingerly into the same pool.

"You gotta be careful how you say things sometimes, DeBerry got in trouble," Paterno began hesitantly. But then the Penn State coach added, "The black athlete has made a big difference. They've changed the whole tempo of the game."

For a full, frank discussion of why that's so, read Entine's book. For a quick explanation, scan the ranks of NFL cornerbacks and world-class sprinters.

"I did hear the gist of it and I think I know the point that he was trying to make," said Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy, one of the NFL's most thoughtful leaders and a former cornerback himself.

"I didn't really read anything into it other than he wanted more speed on his team. ... I didn't think it was a racist comment. It may have been politically incorrect to say it that way," Dungy added, "but I didn't view it negatively at all myself."

Neither did Jon Drummond, a U.S. gold-medal sprinter who, like Dungy, is black.

"I laughed the first time I heard what the Air Force coach said. In fact, the flip side is a running joke in the sprint world. We're always saying, 'Find a white man who can run real fast and you'll find a man making a whole of money.'

"So do I think a guy should be reprimanded or fired for saying blacks are faster? No," Drummond said. "I think we've definitely come a long away from the attitudes in place a generation or two ago. But do I think that coach needs to have a conversation, have somebody pull him aside and explain that it's still a very sensitive subject? Absolutely."

The subject is still so raw that the right-thinking people at the Air Force Academy made a wrong-headed decision and forced a tearful apology from DeBerry the day after his original comments. All that proved is that people of every color can be made to atone in a hurry.

But DeBerry's sin wasn't as egregious as that committed by Paul Hornung, who said Notre Dame, his alma mater, should lower admission standards to net more blacks. Nor was it was as foolish as the pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo that Al Campanis and Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder tried to pass off as observations. Hornung got off light, but the same nonsense cost Campanis and Snyder their reputations and their jobs.

It's shameful how little the debate has advanced since. Entine believed when he finished "Taboo" five years ago that any discussion about race in the open "beats backroom scuttlebutt." But every time it spills back into the headlines, he's not so sure.

"I think what DeBerry said was absolutely accurate, though he didn't say it as elegantly as he should have. The problem arose because of the historical context in which the discussions have been carried on ... that because blacks are better athletes, they somehow have less between the ears.

"But DeBerry wasn't saying that," Entine added, "and frankly, I don't see how anybody with any common sense would question what he did say."

In 1999, Entine was attending an academic conference and listening to speakers debate whether racial profiling was still widespread in sports when he noticed a man the size of a defensive lineman sitting alone in the back. He turned out to be an assistant football coach at a big-time college.

"I've been listening to this nonsense going on half an hour. ... At Division I or in the pros, to survive coaches have to recruit the best players and we **** well better play them at the optimal positions," the assistant said. "We don't care if a player is white, black or striped. The pressure to win is immense."

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke@ap.org.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page C2.

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The Faster Race

Is race the key factor when it comes to speed?

BBC Two's Black Britain Olympics Special 'The Faster Race' asked the question: Do black athletes have a genetic advantage?

On Friday, BBC Sport Online will be hosting a live forum with reporter Kurt Barling. Click here to pose your question.

What makes a champion; hard work or natural talent? Put another way, is there a faster race? Are black athletes born winners or is it simply how hard they work?

With the sprint and middle distance events at the Sydney Olympics once again set to be dominated by black athletes, The Faster Race - a programme scripted and filmed by an all-black production team - asked whether black athletes possess a genetic advantage.

Scientists believe there are three reasons West African athletes have an advantage in the sprint events.

Ato Boldon is featured in The Faster Race

Firstly, they have more muscle and less fat. Secondly, they have higher levels of testosterone. Finally, they have more fast twitch fibres in their muscles than their white counterparts.

Roger Bannister, an Olympic gold medallist and the first man to break the four-minute mile barrier, was a respected neurosurgeon.

But even he was still pilloried as a racist when he said: "Black sprinters and black athletes in general all seem to have certain natural anatomical advantages."

British expatriate, Jean-Phillippe Rushton, caused controversy in 1989 when he claimed he had scientific evidence of an inherited link between brain size, intelligence and race.

"Blacks have a genetic edge when it comes to sports," he claimed.

Efficient stride

"They have a narrower pelvis which makes for a more efficient stride. They have more testosterone which gives them more explosive energy. But these come at a price and the price is a smaller brain.

"The testosterone also comes at a cost because it makes the children more restless in school and perhaps prone to crime, so you can't have everything."

Britain's Colin Jackson lends his opinion

It is such views as Rushton's that make this such a controversial issue to debate.

Geoff Small, who produced 'The Faster Race', certainly believes racism has a part to play.

"My worry is that young black people are not aware that they are being told the only place they will be allowed to spectacularly succeed in, is the sporting arena," he said.

"What we are trying to do with this programme is get to the heart of what is really going on with these issues.

"The question is, what is black anyway, who defines what race is and does it even exist apart from in our own minds?"

Reporter Kurt Barling will be conducting a live forum on the issues raised in 'The Faster Race' on BBC Sport Online on Friday at 1500 BST.

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Why Blacks Have the Golden Sprint

By Godfrey Robert

SINCE the sprint triumphs of Valery Borzov (Soviet Union) in 1972 and Alan Wells (Britain) in 1980, no white runner has won the Olympic title. In fact, since the Los Angeles Games in 1984, all eight finalists – 40 in all – for the century dash have been coloured Americans or of African origin. And the 10-second barrier for the 100m has never been broken by a white athlete, and the fastest 200 times for the distance are all held by black athletes – all under 10 seconds.

At the current Sydney Games, it was the black flash again, led by American world-record holder Maurice Greene, who beat Trinidad and Tobago's Ato Boldon and Barbados' Obadele Thompson to win the 100m in 9.87sec. What is it about black sprinters that gives them a headstart over the white runners?

"The theory has it that the blacks possess fast-twitch fibres in their muscles that give them speed," says Dr Teh Kong Chuan, director of the Singapore Sports Council's Sports Medicine and Sports Science Division.

No doubt, numerous factors -- genetic, psychological, cultural and financial -- go into the making of a super sprinter, but the right genes may be the most critical.

The fibres within most human skeletal muscles are close to evenly divided between fast-twitch fibres, which contract very rapidly, and slow-twitch fibres, which don't contract as quickly but generate energy much more efficiently.

Super sprinters, therefore, have an unusual abundance of fast-twitch fibres which give them explosive power, while the legs of marathon runners might contain up to 90 per cent slow-twitch fibres that give them endurance for longer aerobic activities.

In a controversial new book, entitled Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We Are Afraid To Talk About It, journalist and author Jon Entine boldly predicts: "No white man will ever again win the 100 m".

Entine claims that blacks are genetically better suited to most sports, adding: "Running is the most democratic of sports. Yet even as the Olympics and the world championships have become more diverse, the colour of the winners has become increasingly monochromatic. "In the world of sports, where black athletic superiority is axiomatic, the monopoly by athletes of African descent is astonishing."

Not everyone would agree easily with Entine's detailed claims. Harry Edwards, a sociology professor at Berkeley and a sprinter of national calibre in the 60s, disputes Entine, countering: "The argument that blacks are physically superior to whites is a racist idealogy camouflaged to appeal to the ignorant, the unthinking and the unaware."

Few would buy that, for the records speak for themselves, and the explosive power of Maurice Greene, Marion Jones and their "shadows", seen recently in Sydney, is further testimony of the black superiority in sprints.

Dr Teh stresses: "With the fast-twitch fibres in the muscles which ensure speed, the main thing left is to build strength. "And that can be done with weights, gym work, proper diet and the taking of supplements."

Another reason offered by Dr Teh is the the black socio-economic status. "Many of them come from poor, harsh backgrounds. They have to fight for survival, and this builds the hunger in them. Sport offers a way out of poverty," says Dr Teh, cautioning that this belief may not apply to all black athletes.

Some studies and research back Dr Teh's argument. Science has it that the genetical advantage of the "right muscles" aside, the social background of some of the "ghetto kids" has helped develop the sprinters.

So the combination of nature (genes) and nurture (the fight to come out of poverty from poor social backgrounds) helps the blacks stand tall in sprinting. The "father" of black sprinting, Jesse Owens, was a good example of someone seeking a better status to get out of the hard life filled with poverty.

The seventh of 11 children (polio victim Wilma Rudolph, who won the women's 100 m gold in 1960, was another, being one of 20 kids) to sharecropper parents Henry and Mary Owens, Jesse moved from Oakville, Alabama, to Cleveland, Ohio in search of a better way of living.

There are others who have fought through adversity. A double gold medallist at the 1984 Olympics, Valerie Brisco-Hooks had family responsibilities at a young age. When she started out at sprinting, she was diagnosed as having gallstones, and the pain was so severe that she was left motionless in bed for long periods. The illness left mental scars and, after marriage and motherhood, she broke through the human barrier, as a matter of survival, to make good.

Gail Devers, the 1992 Olympic 100m gold medallist, has a similar story. She rose to fame by overcoming a debilitating illness, called "Graves Disease", which made her suffer from fits of shaking, uncontrollable menstrual bleeding, severe weight fluctuations and some loss of vision. But all these made her a stronger athlete with a will to win.

Mark Richardson, a black 400m runner with the British Olympic team, duly agrees, saying: "There's a huge number of reasons why black people make great athletes, and most of those are socio-economic. "You don't need to have much money to take part in track-and-field -- you just need some clothes and a pair of shoes, and you're off."

Since the modern Olympics was initiated in 1896 in Athens, it was not until 1932 that a black sprinter won the Olympics. Eddie Tolan, a graduate of the University of Michigan, put the blacks on the sprint gold-medal rostrum with his 10.3sec 100m dash in Los Angeles. This was followed by Jesse Owens (1936), Harrison Dillard (1948), Jim Hines (1968), Hasely Crawford (1976), Carl Lewis (1984 and 1988), Linford Christie (1992) and Donovan Bailey (1996).

Among the women were Wilma Rudolph, Evelyn Ashford, Wyomia Tyus, Gail Devers and Florence Griffith-Joyner, who is probably the greatest, as her world record of 10.49sec, set in 1987, still stands.

Today, black athletes are increasingly dominant in track-and-field because speed and strength seem to be god-given gifts. And they don't just come from the United States, the African countries, South America or the Caribbean. Even Europe, especially Britain, is inundated with them. Black seems to be the universal colour of golden sprinting.

The writer is Contributing Editor (Sports) of The Straits Times. He can be reached at godfrey@sph.com.sg.)