race Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Eagles Are The Whitest Team In The NFL, And Other Fun Facts
Ticket reseller Best Tickets has scraped the data to produce its Unofficial 2014 NFL Player Census, breaking down all of the league's rosters by height, weight, age, and more. I urge you to go poke around; it's interesting stuff. ...
Syracuse Soccer Player Squeezes N-Word And F-Word Into Same Insult
Here's an awful story about a young woman saying awful things and now likely paying an awful price for it. The woman in the video is Syracuse midfielder Hanna Strong, and as of this afternoon, she is suspended from the soccer team....
From Disappearing Donkey To Toasted: The 136 Skin Colors Of Brazil
The skin tones of Brazilians quite literally span the entire spectrum of possible human hues. Reflecting this are the 136 creative descriptions Brazilians came up with in a survey asking them to self-assess their color:...
The Whitening Of Neymar: How Color Is Lived In Brazil
Originally published in Africa Is A Country....
Do NBA Teams With Whiter Fan Bases Have Whiter Rosters?
In the NBA of yesterday, an owner could be explicit about structuring his roster around the race of the players. "No team should be all white and no team should be all black, either," Cavs owner and legendary boob Ted Stepien told a reporter in 1980. And why not? "Blacks don't buy many tickets," he ...
Every White Basketball Player Gets Compared To Larry Bird
This week's SI cover on the left; the Nov. 28, 1977, cover on the right. While we're doing throwbacks, here's Josh Levin in 2005, on the folly of white-on-white hoops comparisons. [Slate | SI.com]...
What ESPN And The NFL Don't Talk About When They Talk About "Nigger"
Last week, we got word that the Fritz Pollard Alliance, chaired by ex-NFL player John Wooten, was pushing a rule change in the league that would penalize players for the use of the word "nigger" on the football field. The proposal involves a 15-yard penalty for a player's first offense, with an ejec...
The Big Book Of Black Quarterbacks
On Sunday, the Seattle Seahawks walked all over the Denver Broncos, 43-8, to win Super Bowl XLVIII. Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson passed for 206 yards, ran for 26 more, threw two touchdowns, and made National Football League history. He became the second African-American quarterback ever to st...
The Last Of The Old Way: Larry Bird's Celtics Enter The Modern Era
Excerpted from Unfinished Business, a chronicle of the 1990-91 Boston Celtics season, now available as an e-book. The author's annotations appear throughout the story. ...
76 Years Later, Maryland Tries To Right A College Football Wrong
In October 1937, Maryland administrators threatened to cancel a game with Syracuse unless the then-Orangemen benched their offensive star, Wilmeth Sidat-Singh. The problem, as Maryland saw it, was that he wasn't the right type of colored boy....
A Tale Of Two NFL Buddies Who Call Each Other "Nigger" And "Cracker"
A fascinating story in today's Detroit News about Tony Scheffler and Louis Delmas, friends since college and teammates on the Lions. Like many friends, they have pet names for each other. Unlike many interracial friends, those pet names are racial slurs....
Charting The Decline Of The Black Baseball Player
A few years back, baseball writer and SABR member Mark Armour tracked the integration of baseball from 1947 to 1986, the 40 seasons after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Why 1986? That year would begin a precipitous decline in the number of African Americans, to less than half the high-wat...
Under Pressure
In the summer of 1968, Jack Olson wrote a series for Sports Illustrated about race (it was later turned into a book). Here is the first piece: "The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story." ...
Chael Sonnen, The UFC's Skip Bayless, Race-Baits His Way To The Top
Chael Sonnen is a well-known asshole, less a person than the remnant of a figure crossed out of a bad novel's first draft for being too obviously representative. At 36, he's a convicted money launderer, state-chastised steroid user, failed Republican candidate for the Oregon House of Representative...
The Major Leagues Were Never Really As Black As You've Been Told
Today Tyler Kepner’s New York Times story about the dearth of African-American players in the Major Leagues quietly distinguished itself from other articles in that vein, in that it didn’t cite a popular and wrong figure about the peak of black representation in baseball....
How Marshall Henderson Gets Away With Being Marshall Henderson
On Sunday night, we said goodbye to Ole Miss guard Marshall Henderson, college basketball's most exciting troll, a sort of human "u mad bro?" who did everything to antagonize his opponents short of popping motorcycle wheelies at halfcourt with their girlfriends riding pillion. He and the 12th-seeded...
Boxing's Great White Hope Problem; Or, Why The Fuck Was Mike Lee In A Super Bowl Commercial?
During last night's Super Bowl, one professional boxer appeared in a commercial. It was not Floyd Mayweather, and it was not Manny Pacquiao, though they are the two highest-earning athletes in all of sports. It was not any champion of any weight division at all. It was Mike Lee, a mediocre light hea...
Can Anyone Think Of Another Reason Sloane Stephens Is Considered Serena Williams's "Protégé"?
This evening, Serena Williams plays 19-year-old American phenom Sloane Stephens in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open. The two played for the first time just three weeks ago in Brisbane, when No. 3 Williams cruised past No. 25 Stephens, 6-4, 6-3. But tonight's match has something of a differen...
UFC 155: The Clumsy Marketing Of Cain Velasquez, UFC's Brown Ambassador
For a long time, Cain Velasquez, who will fight Junior Dos Santos for the UFC heavyweight title on Saturday, was a rumor. He trained in one of the world's best camps, in San Jose, Calif., and stories would filter out about his freak inexhaustibility, about how he would spar with good stand-up fighte...
Top Basketball Recruit Jabari Parker Is Ideal For BYU, But BYU Isn't Ideal For Him (Or For Any Black Athlete)
This has been a breakthrough year for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Mitt Romney captured the Republican presidential nomination. Manti Te'o led the Notre Dame football team to an undefeated regular season and a No. 1 ranking. And now the nation's top basketball prospect, Jabari Al...