Sports Teams & Players Quotes
Page was an almost ageless player who played long after most athletes retired.
He had knocked out Joe Louis earlier. Hitler and the Nazi propaganda machine promoted the championship fight to prove their racial policies. Schmelling was Aryan—the Master Race of the World according to the Nazis while Joe Louis, a Black American, was considered to be an untermenchen—a lower man. For the two boxers, this was all nonsense, but symbolically this boxing match was a geopolitical event. Louis won by a knockout in a minute and a half of the first round and for a while the German racial propaganda machine was silenced.
He was warning about the desire of so many Black young men at the time to be entertainers or professional athletes.
The year before {625800} he had castigated the Germans for discriminating against Jewish and other athletes because of their warped political/ideological views. However, there were so many people in the Olympic movement, that by 1934 there was much advocacy of the boycott of the coming 1936 Berlin Olympics. Brundage who himself was somewhat anti-Semitic had made the earlier statement to try and head off calls for boycott. So in 1934, he changed his approach and argued to keep all “politics” out of the Olympics. However racism transcended politics and much athletics in the American South was segregated so there was some support to keep issues of racism out of the Olympics although it had been introduced in Nazi Germany and the American South in the tryouts and the membership on the Olympic Committees. In 1935 Ernest Lee Jahncke, the American delegate was expelled from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in July 1936 after taking a strong public stand against the Berlin Games {625798}. Based on this statement The IOC pointedly elected Avery Brundage to fill Jahncke's seat. Jahncke is the only member in the 100-year history of the IOC to be ejected. Brundage beat back the boycott movement and the Olympics went on with American Blacks winning many medals to the distress of the Nazis. However, behind the scenes, Brundage worked to have two Jewish runners removed from the American 400 meter relay team where they were overwhelming favorities so that when America won, Hitler would be spared the embarrassment.
He was specifically discussing weapons research and development. However at that time the tendency for scientists to work in isolation in most fields of science was already reducing.
Legendary pro football coach Vince Lombardi was a strict disciplinarian.
He was a great football and track & field star. When he was in college, he had played baseball during the summer recess and was paid $2 a game, a common practice for college athletes who played baseball under an assumed name. Thorpe’s school had no athletes who had done that before, and his experience with formal rules was very limited. There was no one at the Carlyle Indian School who could advise him. Later, that technicality was used to strip him of his amateur titles and medals. Despite that, he was voted as the greatest athlete of the 20th century.
Even in the 19th century, cities felt that professional sports teams were a benefit and a source of pride. That was before the era when sports team owners demanded payments from the cities to stay in that locality and the cities began to realize that the cost was greater than the benefit. Latrobe was a 7 term mayor who was eventually ousted by his own party, The baseball team to which he referred was the precursor of the Baltimore Orioles. At the time, the Chesapeake Bay produced the finest oysters and shipped them all over the continent in huge quantities. This was before the farming run off and chicken waste polluted the bay shrinking the oyster harvest to a small fraction of its 19th century yield.
There was a planned boycott of the Olympics protesting three factors: Avery Brundage, the long serving head of the American Olympic Committee was a notorious racist and anti-Semite, Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia had been invited to the Olympics, and there were almost no Black coaches of the American Olympic team while the majority of the athletes were Black. Dr. King met with the organizing athletes. The boycott did not get organized soon enough and did not materialize. However, Carlos and Tommy Smith made the famous raised fist gesture during the Olympic victory ceremony, and the third medal winner Australian Peter Norman wore a button supporting the protest at the ceremony. All 3 athletes faced serious retribution afterwards.
