In sports, harmful racial myth survives

The day may come when I can go to the Maryland public high schools wrestling tournament and not notice the race of the place-winners. Unfortunately, that day has not yet arrived. How could it, with the debate about supposed black athletic superiority still raging?

So there I sat in the stands at Western Maryland College in early March, enjoying some superb wrestling but noting that Ivan Hardnett and his twin brother, Brandyn -- of Gwynn Park High in Prince George's County -- were black, as was W. T. Aye of North County High in Anne Arundel County. Hammond's Vaymon Dennis, an ornery little 112-pound African-American cuss, wrestled his way to a championship. Some 27 of 156 place-winners were black, or about 17 percent of the total.

My main concern was that Baltimore would finally get a wrestling champion, and I wasn't especially picky about what color he was. (Dennis "Stringbean" Perry of Dunbar came in second, thus thwarting my hopes that Baltimore would have a wrestling champion.) So why was I engaged in keeping stats by race on place-winners? Why, because of my ever reliable friends at Sports Illustrated, of course. For whatever reason, they keep dredging up the issue of whether or not blacks are superior athletes.

"Whatever Happened to the White Athlete?" the Dec. 6, 1997, cover story of the magazine read.

"They're on the wrestling mats, more often than not pounding the stuffing out of their black opponents," I said to myself at Western Maryland, with, I'm sure, more than a bit of sarcasm in my voice. If any sport should dispel the myth of black athletic superiority, it's wrestling, which pits strength, agility, balance and speed against strength, agility, balance and speed. Wrestlers superior in any number of these categories usually win. That blacks participate in wrestling in proportionate numbers -- not disproportionate ones as they do in football, basketball and track -- and do not dominate the sport should be instructive and end the debate forever.

It hasn't, of course. SI devoted 25 pages to the "white boys as geeks" theory. "Unsure of his place," one quote from the story goes, "in a sports world dominated by blacks who are hungrier, harder-working and perhaps physiologically superior, the young white male is dropping out of the athletic mainstream to pursue success elsewhere."