Source: TomDispatch
by Robert Lipsyte
“In the year I was born, 1938, the White Christian males who ruled the sports world considered their various games and pastimes as definers of righteousness, crucibles of character, and a preparation for dominance in business and war. Anyone who played but didn’t look like them was an interloper, clearly operating with some kind of performance enhancers. That was made clear in a book published that very year by one of the premier sportswriters of his time, Paul Gallico. … he declaimed that the ‘colored brother’ was so good at boxing because he ‘is not nearly so sensible to pain as his White brother.’ … ; that New York Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, ‘like all people who spring from what we call low origins … never had any inhibitions’; and that the reason basketball ‘appeals to the Hebrew … is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smart aleckness.'” (12/18/25)