Justice Sandle: Why Is There A Difference In How Athletes Are Described?

Most athletes only dream about getting a chance to play for a team on any level. This starts at an early age with little league teams at the community level and competition starts to build inside the young player. This is before black and white is a concept to children, and where their only concern is if Jordan or Madison will be at the game this week. Eventually, time passes and more race-related things get thrown into sports. You can see it in the way that some sports are segregated in small but impactful ways. Look at how coaches and the media will ask or answer certain types of questions about different players of different ethnicities or genders. Their responses can also take offense to some because of the characteristics in how players are described that will only bother some because of the racial context behind it. 

It can be media members, sideline reporters, or even commentators who have ways that they describe athletes. You have your typical “athletic freak,” “tactician”, etc., but some might know to pay attention to how people are being described. A famous quote by NBA legend Larry Bird highlights this prominent issue during his time playing basketball in the 80s. “As far as playing, I did not care who guarded me- red, yellow, black… I just did not want a white guy guarding me. Because it is disrespectful to my game” (Bird, 2004). For average basketball players or fans who know Larry Bird understand that this is a tongue-in-cheek comment that is meant to be a joke. The media ran with it and took it as a racial commit that tried to lower other white NBA players to say they were not on the same level as African American players in the league.

Why is there such a disparity in how athletes are compared? The word athleticism is used for a lot of descriptions for most African American athletes. The term means “a high degree of natural talent, strength, or enthusiasm in physical sports or exercises.” There has always been this misconception that “black athletes dominate sports” because of the conception that if you are black, it makes you more athletic than any other race and more likely to be an athlete just off of pure stereotypes.

This idea also goes back to hundreds of years ago when slaves were auctioned off and typically, the best slaves were the ones that had the most physical aesthetic to them. The first slave auction happened in New Amsterdam in 1655 and would last until the final one which was dated in Savannah, Georgia in 1859.

This could also be down to the cultural impact that sports have on the African American community. Most grow up with hopes to play basketball or football because those are the sports that represent most of the black athletes in America. 53 percent of NFL rosters are African American and 73.2 make up that percentage of NBA athletes.

Out of the three most prominent sports in America, baseball is the only sport that still holds a significant percentage of players who are white. According to a Major League Baseball Racial and Gender Report Card, about 40 percent of the MLB is made up of people of color but only about six percent identify as black or African American. This can also be said about other sports like golf and tennis as well.

Because of the cultural differences in each sport, the way athletes are described is different as well. The economic differences between each sport also play a role in why athletes are described the way they are. The cultural idea of “making it out” also plays an influential role in why young athletes train as hard as they do to advance further in their playing careers.

Some experts believe that because of the over-representation in sports by a particular race could be another reason there is such a stark difference. PBS’s Jonathan Marks believes that” If we take the sort of commonsense idea that black people are faster than white people, what does that mean in a rigorous test? Does it mean that all blacks are faster than all whites? Well, that is demonstrably false. Does it mean a hypothetical average black person is faster than a hypothetical black person? Well, that is meaningless because I do not know how you'd find the hypothetical average person. Does it mean the ten fastest black people are faster than the ten fastest black people? This is, I think, close to what people mean when they say something like that. But the problem with that is it is statistically nonsensical to characterize a group of a couple of billion people by its most extreme members.”

Most of these are hypothetical takes but because of how big of an issue race is in America, small minuet differences will play a role in how athletes are talked about and compared. These characteristics have a history to them dating back to slavery but some take it as a compliment than thinking about the historical significance of why, while true, these statements are still made today.

Email me at jcs1275@msstate.edu with any questions

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