We have recently begun to see the end game of a case of cultural appropriation as masculine degradation. The NFL, started by men of European descent as a human chess game and a school of hard knocks and rough values, has become a dance and prance pout-fest glorifying the perpetual African American man as martyr victim without agency at White Daddy's knee. Professional football as a cultural expression—has been getting ugly for decades, but now is emptily monstrous. Many on the Right attribute this to permitting non-whites to play the game, believing blacks to be superior athletes and also moral inferiors. However, nary a point is scored in the NFL without a white man placing the ball in the black scorer's hand at just the right moment. Not only do I refuse to believe that blacks are a master race of masculinists, but also that they are as hopelessly flawed on the moral field as they have been made to seem.
I see blacks as having been socialized in America according to the lesser angels of their nature, by a ruling class of white liberals dedicated to bringing out the worst in this people, in order to engineer a divisive criminal class. African Americans, for reasons I do not fully understand, seem to be hyper-susceptible to materialistic impulses, such as robbing the 7-11 around the corner form my home of $26 and dying under a policeman's gun—yesterday.
Likewise, due to its incredibly expensive equipage, and the rough nature of the sport facilitating high turn over and necessitating the recruitment of socially adolescent "men," as opposed to boxing and baseball with relatively little equipment and larger skill sets that require a man 4 additional years to hone to elite standards, these sports have not been degraded in a crippling fashion, but only marred on occasion by thug antics. Ali made the sport of boxing so repugnant and degraded the standards of behavior to such a low that boxing nearly died by the late 1980s and has been on life support ever since. However, it is making a comeback in its cyclic way.
Since boxers and baseball players must play offensive and defensive roles there is less room for the hyper-specialization of football, which makes it the assembly line of sports, as well as a reflection of our highly specialized society, where most men cannot effectively do the job of his neighbor, or even his coworker! Boxers and baseball players typically do not compete at the top level until their late 20s, whereas NBA and NFL players can be starting at the top echelon in their early 20s. The individual skills of certain football positions might be as extensive as a boxer's skills and as little understood by the layman, but, boxers have to attack and defend, where top football players do not. [Shep, this might be a place to discuss special teams and their salaries relative to the starters on Offensive and Defensive squads.]
Beyond the possible skillset debate, the requirement of more rounded behavior [defending and attacking] by boxers and baseball players and the fact that they are not injured as badly and as early as football players, places a younger man on the gridiron at the top level, than is placed in the ring or on the ball field at the top level. [Athletically, every man starting on a Major League ball team is essentially as athletically talented as a prize fighting champion. This is due to the economics of these sports favoring ball play over prize-fighting.] This younger man also requires more institutional support, from more affluent backers, at an earlier age, and such organizations have a tendency to tolerate aberrant behavior in players talented enough to increase their revenue.
For instance, a friend of mine was expelled from a university and convicted of a felony for rescuing a female student from a star basketball player and injuring that player. The player was not charged with the attempted rape or the abduction. Such factors are character eroding. While the boxer is working a day job and the baseball player is making less than a carpenter playing in the minor leagues, vast reserves of alumni money and goodwill often shield the university football and basketball STARS [these are the ones who go pro] from legalities associated with criminal behavior and even the responsibility to perform academically. It must be understood that most NFL and NBA players were the prince of some university program and do not represent the general character of the majority of non-professional players. the NBA reaches into high school basketball programs more with every passing decade.
Ironically, black boxing fans are getting sick of black boxers being so risk averse. All of the black boxers I have worked with in recent years are really keen on the up and coming Latino and European fighters and care little for the trash talking, flamboyant run and huggery of top black boxers out of America. As a sport boxing benefits much from knowledge being preserved by non-boxers, or non-pros, fellows with the gift of observation and visual mechanical recall, who often become trainers, commentators or fans, over the years helping the top bodies of the sport—often gratis—in preserving the art.
Such were the two young men, speaking of boxing on the bus last night, two fit fellows that look like fighters. They were both versed in nuances of footwork and tactics unknown to most boxing TV commentators, known only to fighters and coaches. Whether they were coming home from the gym late after grabbing something to eat at the Chinese Buffet or simply practicing astute observation and topical discussion building rather than argument, these guys knew boxing—something that is now utterly alien to most young black men, though it was once a skill that one in three black men could be expected to be versed in two generations ago.
After being reinvented by working class Englishmen and fencing instructors around 1700, then passing into Irish-American hands by 1870, and thence through Jewish, Italian, Black and Latino pugilistic strains, boxing was being taught [meaning preserved for future generations of men] at the highest levels, predominantly by black men by 1980, Emanuel Steward and Eddie Futch, among them.
Now, with the passing of these great teachers and others of their generation, their understudies, black fighters recently out of the ring, have taken to training eastern Europeans, for Black America has lost the spark for boxing, has become so emasculated that the art must be taken up by men of ethnicities which have not yet been denuded of heroic values, as boxing is, above all, toilsome heroics, heroism writ small for a civilized stage. Now, as current young black men prance in pink shoes and chant angrily, middle aged black men, left over from the age when their kind dominated boxing, are passing the skills back across the Atlantic.
Ironically, the favorite boxers of black American fans are smaller to medium sized fighters from the former Soviet Block, who stand a chance of serving as proxy avengers against the Latino boxers who now dominate the lower weight classes.
Most charming of all, was the two young men on the bus going on about how much they like heavyweight Tyson Fury, an Englishman who used his status to speak out against immigration ruining job prospects for the men of his country.
Brutal, solitary, masculine rituals, such as boxing, MMA, grappling, stick-fighting and kickboxing which, are far more important for keeping the human spirit alive than any team sport—for the State mimics the team, sanctions its activities and conditions the player to submission and for this reason were outlawed by the Catholic Church in ancient times and the governments of Britain, the U.S. and Sweden in modern times, because they hone defiance through hard work and agony, taking the two sharpest tools of the culturally negating and emasculating monster CIVILIZATION out of its devil's toolbox. Solitary suffering and toil, what civilizations have used to break men and turn them into women for ages, are taken up by the fighter as his chisel and hammer for sculpting himself into something more resistant to the curse of submission which rots any race that slaves for generations.
Keeping these arts alive is not a colorblind act, nor are they ethnically exclusive skill sets, but rites that might be kept alive by one group of men while their socially assigned "betters" wallow in decadence, so that it will be available to their grandsons, when the current inheritors of the art themselves fall prey to CIVILZATION's soft embrace and the sons of the decadent elite wake up from their drugged slumber. After all, combat sports were contrived to preserve heroics in anti-heroic settings, heroism itself being the characteristic necessary for defeating the monsters that prey upon us, particularly the one that preys upon us all as we share HER terminal wedding bed.
A Well of Heroes: Two:
Literary Impressions of the Prose and Verse of Robert E. Howard
Under the God of Things
The Punishing Art
Ruling class of white elite and Jews.
theoccidentalobserver.net/Jews&Blacks.pdf
Tyson Fury, while technically an Englishman, identifies strongly as an Irish Traveler.
At first I thought he was a traveler until I was corrected. Thanks for validating my instincts, Bob.
Great essay.
I did as much research as my indolent nature would allow and this is what I came up with:
There is no salary breakdown for special teams players, per se, aside from punters and kickers, who make a tidy 3 to 4 million on average. Special teams players are not broken out as such, salary-wise, because they are second and third-string safeties, linebackers, and running backs, and their salaries are determined according to the collective bargaining agreement for these positions. NFL coaches don't expend starters on the "bomb squads".
Evidently the minimum basic salary for an NFL player on an active roster is $400,000 to $435,000, signing bonuses and incentive clauses not included.
Hope this answers the question asked.
So these are aspiring mainline specialists rather than specialists of their own type which was what I suspected. In other words, the reward of this sport at the top level is to be put in a position that limits the need to be versatile.
Imagine how much different it would be if the armor was removed and the men all played offense and defense like in baseball?
I'm guessing every thing would improve except for eye appeal for the masses.
The salaries for the 2nd and 3rd stringers are 10 times greater than minor league baseball and 100 times greater than boxing and MMA for prelim fighters. with minor leagers making around 40K and pro fighters around 4K.
Thanks a lot, Shep.
Outstanding essay. I never thought of football being a reflection of the modern workforce or corporate America. The atletes are compensated the same way as corporate wage slaves: the more specialized and skilled you are at one thing, the more money you make. Its interesting how Latin Americans dominate the lower weight classes because they are not naturally gifted in height, strength, or quickness compared to blacks. This suggests their extra 4 years developing boxing skills are also spent developing a style that works with what they have individually, be it reach or counterpunching ability
If boxing weren't so bad for the thing I use to make money Id love to do it.
That extra time in boxing is needed for developing interactivity skills, the nuances between offense and defense which, in ball sports are more rigidly defined and taken on my different players, instead of in combat, where, ultimately, you do both at the same time.
Top boxers begin at age 5 and do not become established at the top level until age 27, that is 22 years of experience.
Olympic wrestlers follow the same trajectory.
The #2 stick fighter in the world, who I fought often, began fighting as a boy of 9 and, by the time he was 27 was at the top. But weapon fighting is easier to train.
The important thing to note is that most top boxers are not athletic paragons, but more typical men, the same with stick fighters. Ball sports selectthe highest quality physical specimens. Which makes, baseball a better contrast to football, which has the highest level of rigidity, in terms of the division athletic tasks of any sport.
James—sounds like you are describing rugby, which is a Man's Game. A lot of fun to watch and a lot of fun to play. Also quite a "social" event in a way that football, basketball et al. are not.
I very much enjoyed watching rugby a few years ago and would have liked to played it if it had been available for me as a youth. Rugby seems to be what American football evolved from just as our highly specialized society evolved from something more generalized.
Bob - when is Tyson Fury's double-secret probation gonna be over? He should just move to the U.S. or Australia and leave all that UK BS behind.