Michael MacCambridge's 2004 America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation:
In the modern NFL, a vast majority of coaches and administrators were white, while a vast majority of players, about 70 percent, were black. While that led to an inevitable cultural divide, it also resulted in an increased awareness of what it took to excel in the game. On the field, the racial stereotypes of blacks as gifted but undisciplined athletes and whites as gutty, cerebral competitors often was turned on its head.
"Look, white kids are riding around in their mama's air-conditioned SUVs, eating Twinkies," said the longtime pro player and college coach Bill Curry. "The African-American kids are out there busting it in the heat, they're hungry. There are far more of these kids who come out of tough circumstances, who live and watch their mama work three full-time jobs trying to feed five brothers and sisters by herself with the grandmother helping to raise them and the great-grandmother involved too and they turn out tough, hungry, young people."
"I was at Stanford, and that's a great place to coach and it was an enjoyable place to recruit and you interacted with a great class of people," said Brian Billick, the onetime Bill Walsh assistant who became the head coach of the Ravens in 1999. "But one of the difficulties at Stanford was, you had in large part a bunch of kids who, when it's fourth-and-goal on the one-yard line against Notre Dame, know in the back of their mind, 'You know, if this doesn't work out, I'm going to be okay anyway. I'm going to go make my money, I'm going to have my career, I'm going to have my Stanford degree.' And that's all well and true, and in the bigger perspective that's the way it should be. But at that point, I want them to have a little bit more at stake. Kids from less-advantaged backgrounds take more of that perspective. 'This is my way out.'"
Tags: Michael MacCambridge, America's Game, Football
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