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In 1974 Hank Aaron had to have 24-hour police protection due to death threats because he was about to break white Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs.

There are many reasons Blacks
dominate NBA, NFL and track
When a former cheerleader and I watch a college or professional football, basketball, baseball, hockey, swimming event or anything else to do with athletics, I always count the number of blacks who are on the field, floor, diamond, ice, pool or track.

Football and baseball helped me get a college education because I was recruited by MSTC’s football coach Fritz Bierhaus and baseball coach T. Edison Smith to become a Dragon. Bierhaus needed a center and guard and Smith needed a lefthanded pitcher.

I count the number of blacks because about a third of my Marine Corps Heavy Machinegun Platoon and Rifle Company I commanded in the 6th Marine Regiment in the 1950s were black. My three top sergeants in the platoon were decorated veterans of the Korean War. They turned me into a lifelong liberal because they were talented and smart Homo sapiens and knew a lot about life and death. They could have become university presidents or column writers.

Basketball probably requires the best all-around athlete. The players must be agile, quick, have high vertical jumps, and dribble, pass and shoot the ball with consistent accuracy.

That’s why, if you watch major college, NBA and WNBA basketball, about 80% of the men and women players are black.

Perhaps you might remember Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was fired from CBS in January1988 for telling the truth, saying blacks were bred to be strong plantation workers during slavery. That’s why about 80% of the millionaire and billionaire players in the NFL, NBA and WNBA are black.

Back in the days when Jackson, Miss., had more millionaires than New York City, some plantation owners made more money selling black babies and slaves than white cotton.

Sojourner Truth, a former black slave who gave an important speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” at a conference about women, had 13 children, with most being sold in slave markets.

What teams would look like if they chose by percentage of race
The NBA franchises can contract a maximum of 15 players. This means that each team would have nine Whites, three Hispanics, 1.5 Blacks, .8 Asians, and .7 multi-race – that is, if they had to follow the racial makeup of the Divided States of America.

One person could also be a transgender. In the real world these teams average 12 Black and three assorted, and 1.5 could be gay.

NFL franchises can contract 53 players. If they had to follow the racial makeup of the DSA, each team would have 32 Whites, 11 Hispanics, 6 Blacks, 2 Asians, and 2 multi-race. Five of the team could be members of the LBGTQUIA+ community.

In the reality world, 44 are Black and the rest probably White and Hispanic. This is why in major college and pro basketball games we entertain ourselves by occasionally counting the number of Blacks and Whites actually playing on the court.

In most pro games it’s a rarity to have three Whites on the court out of the 10.  It is not a rarity to have 10 Blacks battling each other for points.

Of the 10 top scorers in the NBA, nine are Black and one is White — and he happens to come from Serbia! (A new book just published, The War Within a War, reveals another startling statistic: during the Vietnam War in 1965 when Blacks were only 12% of the U.S. population, Army and Marine units in direct combat against the Viet Cong, had an average of 33% Black.

When Muhammad Ali, the Black heavyweight champion of the boxing world, was drafted for the U.S. Army, he refused to go. When asked why he would go to jail before going to Vietnam, he responded: “No Cong ever called me a nigger!” His words were as fast as his fists. Ali wrote good poetry, which I have copied and saved.

I have always been a big fan of basketball, but I only played intramural in high school because I played football and baseball – and couldn’t jump very high anyway. Because of my ability to throw strikes I could also shoot the long ball in basketball — except they did not have the three-pointer then.

When I taught English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Fargo Central High School I ran the clock for the varsity Fargo Central Midgets for eight years.

Now, I keep track of the top 25 college teams and always watch March Madness NCAA games. I bet the top 25 college teams average 12 Black and three White players — just like the pros. We always count them several times during the games.

A story about a baseball player
and the tragedy of race
Black Hank Aaron died on Jan. 22 at the age of 86, 52 years after he broke White Babe Ruth’s baseball homer record of 714 with his 715th hit in the fourth inning of an Atlanta Braves baseball game with the Los Angeles Dodgers on April 8, 1974.

As a Black player in a White league, he often could not stay in the same hotels as the team or eat in the same restaurants. He said the year he was chasing Ruth’s record “was the worst of his life.” Although the civil rights and voting rights bills had been passed into law in 1965, Atlanta was still a home for Jim Crow laws, not American laws.

In 1974 Hank had to have 24-hour police protection because he was going to break Ruth’s record. He and his family lived in a constant whirlwind of racial hate, although Jackie Robinson had broken the major league race barrier in 1947.

Hank received many death threats for his challenge. Here is just one example: “You’re Black so you have no business even being here. Over 700 and you consider yourself punctured with a .22 shell. You can hit all dem home runs over dem short fences, but you can’t take that black off yo’ face.”

Another letter writer threatened to shoot him with a rifle as he crossed third base on the way to home plate when he hit #715.

Hank’s wife always sat on the third base side of the stadium when he was playing — and she was there in a packed stadium when he hit one of Al Downey’s pitches into the Braves” bullpen for #715.

As Hank was running between second and third base, his wife ran out on the diamond and met him at third. She said Later: “If he was going to die by rifle shot, I wanted to die with him.”

Hank retired in 1975 after 21 years with the Braves with these records: 715 homeruns, 3,771 hits, and 6,858 bases. There were still no Blacks in baseball executive positions.

The Braves finally hired Hank as director of player development in the late 1970s with the rank of vice-president, the first Black to have an executive position in baseball.

Why Hugh McElenny kept
running – and didn’t transfer
I was playing the center position in football for the Little Falls Flyers in 1950 when Hugh McElhenny was crossing goal lines for the University of Washington after running around, away, through and over tacklers way out west.

One writer captured his skills with this line: “McElhenny was a dazzling figure on the field, twisting and turning as he eluded frustrated defenders on his circuitous romps to the end zone.”

People wondered why he didn’t leave Washington to play for one of the biggest football powers in the Middle West or East and get a fat pro football contract.

He was an All-American player on a team that had won only three games. Highly unusual!

Some fans joked that Hugh was getting paid too much to play for little Washington to have him leave for more profitable football fields. When Hugh signed a pro contract people joked that he was actually taking a pay cut to play pro football. It proved to be not a joke.

While being interviewed about football in general in 2004 by the Seattle-Post-Intelligencer when he was 71 years old, he finally confessed: “I know it was illegal for me to receive cash, and every month I received cash, I know it was illegal to receive clothing, and I got clothing all of the time from stores. I got a check each month, and it was never signed by the same person, so we never really knew who it was coming from. They invested in every year. I was a movie star.”

He admitted receiving benefits worth about $10,000 a year (about $115,000 in today’s money). He did take an unhealthy cut to go pro. He signed his first contract for $7,000.

How much money could he make using the NCAA transfer portals in 2026?

We now have college quarterbacks making more than $5 million a year by moving to a school with athletic programs supported by billionaires.

How did Indiana University win the 2025-26 national football title?

Because eight starters on the offensive team got huge raises from billionaires for transferring to Indiana from other colleges and universities. The team had a total of 16 football transfers from other colleges trying to keep players or “find” some more.

Billionaire Mark Cuban, a graduate of Indiana University and now owner of the Dallas Mavericks, announced in public he was going to give enough money so that the Indiana football team could win the national championship, and bless you, it came to pass!

And, in the meantime, the university team becomes a minor league team of the Indianapolis Colts.
European universities have already learned a great lesson: do not sponsor interscholastic sports for athletic teams that play other universities. Sponsor intramural activities for students only because you are not responsible for sponsoring interscholastic sports teams.

It’s been rumored a number of big college quarterbacks made as much as $5 million playing in the 2025-26 season.

The estimates for the average income of football players in the power conferences for the 2024-25 season are as follows: running backs-$340,000, defensive backs-$410,000. Linebackers-$440,000, defensive line-$470,000, offensive line-$550,000 Wide receivers-$610,00o, and quarterbacks-$820,000.

No figures are available for college basketball players who move from college to college depending upon what the bids are for their transfer portal employment. There are a number of active NBA players who are already billionaires. Think Lebron for one.

The top 25 basketball colleges have become farm clubs for the billionaires who own NBA franchises. Think Mark Cuban for one.

Greedy and testosterone-filled billionaires are ruining higher education and athletic programs at the same time. Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post (where democracy is dying a quick death because of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos!) is blunt about it: “The major universities that control the NCAA became untethered from behaviors befitting campuses that are now lobbying, begging even, for antitrust protection from an endless cycle 0f billion-dollar settlements and court judgments that they provoked with their chronic commercial abuse of athletes” rights. Without a federal shield, they contend, college athletics will be ungovernable.”

She’s wrong. It’s already happened.