Race And Sports

4 Pages 905 Words

When asked to define an area of interest I realized that I love sports more than pretty much anything. Besides school and friends, sports take up my life. If I am not busy playing them, I find out other ways to be involved by either watching events on TV or live in person. After being surrounded by sports I have come up with five observations which give me reason to suggest that race plays an important role in the participation of these games. First, I realize that black people dominate the NBA. In a game that used to be filled with white people, basically all the world’s best players are black. My second observation deals with my first one in the way that classic NBA players (such as Larry Bird) have publicly stated that today’s NBA is a “Black – man’s game.” This is a powerful statement coming from a man that is arguably the greatest white player basketball has ever seen. My third observation is that the NHL (professional hockey) is basically all white. I believe there is one black man playing in the entire league. The fourth observation deals with another professional sport, as I would put it, “missing some color.” The USTA (professional tennis) is another club with whites being the main participants. The only black tennis players that I can think of are the Williams sisters, but boy do they make up for a lack of African Americans because both of them are always in contention for a title. Finally, my fifth observation comes from my own experience. Playing in both basketball and baseball leagues growing up, I remember that most of the kids I played with and against were white.



After reading over my observations, I began to wonder which race, black or white, take part in more sports. Unfortunately, this does not sound like a question coming from a man with intellect so if I were to change this query into an empirical one it would go as follows: Does race of respondent influence participation of ...