Racism...Forever?

If we're talking about Auria (I admit to being a bit lost here), my one quibble would be that he was very sensitive on his particular issue, and not so much on others. Black/white relations, he gave little quarter. But talking about which women he would have, and why, and their looks ... his reaction to complaints of sexism was, "Loosen up baby."

I get it. Most people are like that. Only he was a bit more extreme.

I'm surprised he disappeared. Demo, I got. She was very noticeably disappointed in the U.S., that this country could have made *that* decision. She is in hiding not because she can't take the reality of Trump, but because she can't take the reality that her fellow citizens permitted Donald Trump. The latter is much more crushing than the former, who is after all just a single unlikable person.

But Auria never expected any better of (white) Americans. He wouldn't have been let down.

 

I think it wasn't/ isn't a matter of "let down" so much as it was a safety issue.

His posting history here was a little bit of an attention grabber for the type of person who shoots India born neighbors thinking they are Muslims; and I think he wanted to err on the side of caution for a while while he got some sense of the new reality that President Trump was bringing us.

Nor do I think that was very unreasonable of him-- I don't think he's in any real danger, but that's maybe easy for me to say since I'm not darker than blue. He's had to live with more safety-firsts than I have.

 

Real interesting how different the NFL and NBA are when it comes to these things.

The latter has a very clear black majority as far as players are concerned but the NFL isn't too too far behind. In coaching and management, the difference starts getting bigger.

And in culture it's almost night and day. Something about football brings out the most authoritarian aspects of people.

 

Where do you get this stuff?

 

They're fundamentally different games. Football is drill, drill, drill until you get it right and can do it in your sleep. The coach is a "field general" who takes the team into battle. Think of George Carlin's description of football.

Basketball has more free lancing, open play and the coach isn't so much a field general as a benign leader who in most cases keeps things organized but doesn't hamstring his best players. Phil Jackson was the coach but we all know who called the shots in Chicago. And Phil's being pilloried by the NY press & sports talk as GM of the Knicks today. They're basically saying - you were this great coach with stars like Michael/Scottie, Kobe/Shaq....but what have you done with Carmelo, Derrick Rose, Porzingis and some spare parts?

 

Who do we see at Mar A Lago? Patriots owner Bob Kraft. As if America didn't need another reason to hate the Pats.

 

There was a time when basketball was very pattern oriented as well.Many defenses today are highly rule oriented.
The game in itself changed as the players became bigger and faster.
I remember as a boy reading an SI article discussing the possibility of raising the rim to 12 feet to get rid of all that pesky dunking.

 

Basketball vs. football -

5 players vs. 22 players
openly visible vs. hidden by masks
improvisation vs. playbook
city vs. suburban/rural

For starters. At any rate, the NBA and NFL do have very different vibes. Several NBA teams are boycotting Trump hotels. Meanwhile, the Buffalo Bills had a coach who openly and vocally supported Donald Trump. That wouldn't fly in the NBA.

 

I'm a bigger NFL fan than NBA. The regular NBA season is almost meaningless. But I do like NCAA bball.

You're right, guys like Greg Popovich have been calling Trump a dumbass for some time and his owners do nothing.

 

Steve Kerr, too. The Houston Rockets owner is a NJ atheist who thinks religion is stupid. Etc. The NBA is a blue league, NASCAR is red, and NFL/MLB are purple.

 

I don't think, in my area, basketball/football has a city/suburban split. Football is played in all of the urban parks in the fall, same as the suburbs. I have friends that have moved their suburban kids to the inner-city youth leagues because the play is better.

 

Maybe your area. There ain't no NFL players coming from the cities of Chicago or New York, and I expect most of the other largest cities, either. There aren't football fields.

Only one Chicago football team ever made it to State finals, and that was in 1982. The burbs rule.

 

I'll give you the state championship programs tend to be the suburban schools, private high schools and rural programs. Football isn't an inexpensive sport to play like basketball is, but here in central Ohio I think the allure of OSU and seeing some of the inner-city kids make it out through that route keeps the sport alive in the inner city public schools.

 

Stereotyping? The Chicago city champ has won Illinois State basketball 7 years in the past 8. Chicago ball is BIG. People write about it, watch it, talk about it. Chicago city football ... nada. Can't beat anybody, nobody cares about them. The best of them would get smoked by the big suburban schools.

It's the same in New York, and I bet in Boston, Cleveland, DC, Philly, etc.

 

NJ Catholic powerhouses have solved the problem by attracting their core base of wealthy (mostly white) suburban kids and brought in ringers from cities like soon-to-be top pick Jabrill pepperrs.

Also see The Blind Side.

 

Familiar. That's the formula that got Loyola the 2015 Illinois title, and runner-up in 2016. Although its ringers come as much from poorer suburbs as they do the city.

 

Think how often the Chicago schools would win if they were represented based on population, not just geographical region. The Sweet Sixteen would have 7-10 schools in some divisions. Which would kill the ratings for the state championships downstate, which in my day was the only part of the state that cared about high school basketball enough to watch it on TV in March.

Hey, how long have they been playing in Peoria, and not in the Assembly Hall at the U of I? And what's with four divisions?

Huh. It looks like they do arrange more by population than region these days. And how the ******** did Galesburg lose to Macomb?

 

I bought that book thinking it would be to football what Moneyball is for baseball. Instead, it was the Feel-Good book if the year about corription in high school and college sports, a feat which was amplified in the chick-flick movie version.