From Pro Football Hall Of Famer John Hannah's autobiography -
"(In 1970) we were playing our opener against USC, which had lost only two games in three seasons, and we had our work cut out for us. USC was tough, very physical, and extremely fast. USC also had a roster of black players who were unbelieveable. One of those guys was a running back, Sam "Bam" Cunningham......The game at Legion Field was Cunningham's first road trip and his first game starting on the varsity.
"The Trojans killed us. I mean they absolutely mauled the Tide and handed us a 42-21 trouncing that was downright embarrassing. They racked up 559 total yards - 300 more than Bama - and Cunningham ran for 135 of those and scored two touchdowns in only twelve carries. It was humiliating beyond words. It became rumored that Coach Bryant had invited Sam into the Tide locker room and paraded him around saying, 'Boys, this is what a real football player looks like.' Cunningham disputed that quote as an exaggeration, but he did tell me that Coach Bryant actually sought him out after the game and congratulated him on his performance. That rout of Bama by USC in 1970 became infamously known as the 'Cunningham Game.' Many said that sixty minutes on the field did more to integrate Alabama than Martin Luther King Jr. did in twenty years."
Bear Bryant had wanted to integrate his team before, but he needed everyone to see for themselves why it was a good idea, and once they did, they accepted it. Says Hannah, "He knew you couldn't intimidate players into playing better."
Which illustrates a far larger social point - the complete futility of social activism. Baseball had long integrated by that 1970 point - and did so for baseball reasons. Football likewise integrated for football reasons - the New England Patriots which would draft Hannah and Cunningham in 1973 from their opening season (1960) of existence went out to sign black players such as Ron Burton (the team's first ever draft pick), Larry Garron, and Jim Lee "Earthquake" Hunt. Later they would sign such players as Houston Antwine and Jim Nance, and they weren't alone in the fledgling American Football League to scour to sign black players.
The idiotic Anthem protest movement in sports is another manifestation of the longstanding disease of social activism, and it at heart is based on a myth - "speaking for those without a voice," as Duron Harmon of the Patriots has put it. The problem is activism is merely advocacy of favoritism, of picking the winners instead of letting the chips fall where they fall. To put it bluntly, these "people without a voice," did they in fact do anything to warrant even having a voice?
It's a myth long demolished by real history - of the failure of Prohibition Paul Johnson writes (in MODERN TIMES: THE WORLD FROM THE TWENTIES TO THE NINETIES) -
The truth is Prohibition was a clumsy and half-hearted piece of social engineering, designed to produce a homogenization of a mixed community by law. It did not of course involve the enormous cruelty of Lenin's social engineering in Russia, or Mussolini's feeble imitation of it in Italy, but in its own way it inflicted the same damage to social morals and the civilized cohesion of the community. The tragedy is that it was quite unnecessary. America's entrepreneurial market system was itself an effective homogenizer, binding together and adjudicating between ethnic and racial groups without regard to color or national origins. The way in which the enormous German and Polish immigrations, for instance, had been absorbed within an Anglo-Saxon framework was astounding: the market had done it.
And market forces were doing likewise in the years before the Johnson Administration's failed "War On Poverty," with black incomes rising both overall and competitively with white incomes; in the 1958-63 period black participation in professional and other high-level careers rose faster than in the five years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, noted by for instance Daniel P. Moynihan in 1965 in his "Employment, Income, and the Ordeal of the Negro Family" essay in DAEDALUS that year.
Not only in the US was this occurring; South Africa's "peculiar system of ethnic socialism" as Paul Johnson puts it received preposterous levels of Intellectual anger - among the more risible examples was a 1986 Paul McCartney song attacking Margaret Thatcher over South African apartheid. What made the famed musician's anger all the more foolish is at that time market forces were creating the very integration he and other celebrities and Intellectuals claimed to be demanding, while Big Government intervention - as always happens no matter what the nation - dragged down economic power (a fact explaining why F.W. DeKlerk ended it starting in 1989).
"Even in South Africa under apartheid.......employers often defied or evaded the apartheid laws to hire more blacks, and in higher positions, than permitted by the government. The South African housing market produced such racial integration, in defiance of the law, that whites were in some cases a minority in areas legally designated as being for whites only.
So notes Thomas Sowell in THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED in demonstrating yet another case where market forces create real social change, without The Anointed picking the winners. The reality thus is as it has always been - activism solves nothing that market forces and natural evolution don't deal with better.
So player Anthem protests are grandstanding acts not based on any credible understanding of reality - it's a fact players - enabled far too long in this endeavor - and everyone else need to understand.
Postscript - noteworthy was the "activism" of NY Giants great YA Tittle in 1968.
No comments:
Post a Comment