Michael Irvin on Tony Romo:

Back in the 1990s, in between getting arrested in the company of hookers and cocaine, Michael Irvin caught a lot of passes for the Dallas Cowboy Super Bowl teams. This year, a journeyman white quarterback named Tony Romo (who is half Mexican-American) has suddenly gotten red hot, throwing five touchdown passes in the Cowboy's Thanksgiving Day victory. On Dan Patrick's ESPN radio show, Irvin, who is employed as a broadcaster by ESPN, laughingly suggested that:

"He doesn't look like he's that type of an athlete," Irvin said of Romo. "But he is. He is, man. I don't know if some brother down in that line somewhere, I don't know who saw what or where, his great-great-great-great-grandma ran over in the 'hood or something went down."

Patrick tried to suggest to Irvin that he shouldn't go there, but Irvin was having none of it, continuing:

"If great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandma pulled one of them studs up out of the barn, 'Come on in here for a second,' you know, and they go out and work in the yard. You know, back in the day."

It's common for white announcers to lose their jobs after referring to the genetic differences between black and white players, such as Paul Hornung who lost his radio job on Notre Dame games after suggesting that ND needed to lower its academic standards so it could recruit black players fast enough to compete with the Florida powerhouses.

So far there hasn't been much of a controversy over Irvin's comments. It's worth noting that it reflect the view widespread among famous black athlete that blacks tend to be genetically superior athletes. It's politically incorrect, but, hey, they're black so the usual rituals of censorship and public humiliation seldom apply to them.

Ironically, this racial self-assurance comes at a time when blacks aren't doing as well athletically as in the 1990s. Three of the four claimants to the heavyweight boxing title are Ivan Drago types from the former Soviet Union. The US. Olympic Basketball tem got beat pretty bad in the 2004 Olympics, losing to Argentina, Puerto Rico, and Lithuania. A white Canadian has won the NBA MVP award two years running. A Chinese player is the best center now that Shaq is in decline. The two best 400m sprinters are white Americans. A Chinese runner won the 110m hurdles at the last Olympics. An all white team won the World Cup.

On the other hand, blacks continue to dominate the 100m sprint (in the last six Olympics going back through 1984, all eight men who made the finals have been of West African descent, an amazing 48 of 48). African-Americans also continue to dominate at tailback and cornerback in the NFL, holding all the starting positions, last I checked. Blacks continue to dominate most of the statistical categories in the NBA.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer