Counter-Currents
3,081 words
When we think of martyrs of race realism, the people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed for promoting race realism, we naturally tend to think of academics and political commentators. James Watson, discoverer of DNA, was unpersoned and rendered unemployable for saying that Africans were less intelligent than other races. John Derbyshire, once a fan favorite among National Review readers, was expelled from Con Inc for his 2012 Takimag article “The Talk: Nonblack Version” in which he dropped a barrage of unpleasant yet undeniable facts about blacks. But perhaps the most famous example of someone being cancelled for promoting race realism came from the world of sports and professional gambling: Jimmy the Greek who 1988 inspired a media meltdown for saying that blacks were better athletes.
The fact that Jimmy the Greek was a professional gambler is a lot of what makes the Jimmy the Greek controversy interesting. A successful sports gambler must be ruthlessly unsentimental. You have to be willing to bet against your hometown team whose games your grandpa took you to see when you were a kid. You have to be willing to bet for your hometown team’s hated rival. You cannot allow your judgement to be clouded by your personal feelings about the individual athletes as human beings, your feelings about the city where the team is based, or the quarterback’s heartwarming back story.
In the movie Casino, Nicky Santoro played by Joe Pesci explains how his friend Sam Rothstein, an astonishingly successful professional gambler, operates.
He made his first bet when he was fifteen years old, and he always made money. But he didn’t bet like you or me. You know, havin’ some fun with it, shit like that. He bet like a fuckin’ brain surgeon. He had to know everything, this guy. He’d find out the kind of inside stuff nobody else knew, and that’s what he’d put his money on. Even back home, years ago, when we were first hangin’ out together, he’d know if the quarterback was on coke. If his girlfriend was knocked up. He’d get the wind velocity so he could judge the field goals. He even figured out the different bounce you got off the different kinds of wood they used on college basketball courts, you know? He’d be workin’ on this shit day and night. There was nothin’ about a game he was gonna bet that he didn’t know.
Given the plethora of variables that a successful gambler has to consider, it’s not surprising that that race would be one of them for a pro like Jimmy the Greek.
Dimetrios Georgios Synodinos AKA James Snyder AKA Jimmy the Greek was born in 1918 Steubenville, Ohio where he was a childhood friend of Dean Martin. His parents had moved to Steubenville from the Greek island of Chios before Jimmy was born. When he was still a child, his mother and aunt were murdered by his aunt’s husband who proceeded to turn the gun on himself. When Jimmy was in high school, he discovered horse racing and dropped out of school to dedicate himself to gambling. He ran numbers for the local mafia for a while before moving to Miami and eventually Las Vegas.
Over the decades his reputation as a gambler grew after correctly picking the winner in several surprising upsets. One of his most famous wagers was on the 1948 presidential election. Dewey was an overwhelming favorite to win but after Jimmy’s sister told him that women did not trust men with moustaches, he polled 1000 women and found that indeed 2/3 of them said that they did not trust mustachioed men. Based on that piece of information alone, Jimmy bet $10,000 on a Truman victory at 17-1 odds and made himself $170,000 (over $2 million in today’s money). In 1945, Jimmy correctly predicting Great Lakes Navy Bluejackets defeating #1 ranked Notre Dame made headlines across the country.
This style of gambling is known as “fading the public,” going against consensus of public opinion. Jimmy noticed the public is generally biased towards popular big-name teams and offensive powerhouses whereas Jimmy put more value in a team’s defense. “Overall team speed is the biggest factor. Then the front four on defense. Then the back defense, especially the cornerbacks. Then the quarterbacks, and then I have to consider the intangibles.”
In Las Vegas, Jimmy the Greek became a local celebrity as an in-demand odds-maker and a pioneer of “sports lines.” He earned himself the nickname “the Wizard of Odds.” In 1961, he was profiled in Sports Illustrated. Because most sports gambling at the time was run by the mafia, Jimmy the Greek was put under the federal microscope, and in 1962, he was prosecuted for interstate gambling by Bobby Kennedy for giving betting tip to a friend over the phone. He would later be pardoned by President Gerald Ford.
In 1976, CBS hired Jimmy the Greek for their popular pre-game TV show The NFL Today program where he had a segment in which he made prediction of the day’s games including how many points he thought each team would win by. Both bookies and bettors would make decisions based on Jimmy’s predictions. Mr. the Greek was exceptionally popular with audiences. He was like a character from a mafia movie (indeed, he lived and worked in Las Vegas during the period when the movie Casino took place and was almost certainly mobbed up). Even the name “Jimmy the Greek” sounds like the name of a mobster. A lot of his appeal was that he came from this fascinating yet disreputable world.
Jimmy the Greek’s time on The NFL Today was tumultuous including a long-running feuds with his cohosts Brent Musburger (a white former NFL player), Irv Cross (a black former NFL player), and Phyllis George (a former Miss America) who each jockeyed for more airtime. As a gentleman of the old school, Jimmy felt that Phyllis George, being a woman, had no business being on a show about football. This tension reached its peak in 1980 when Jimmy the Greek and Brent Musburger had a bar room brawl after Jimmy insulted George’s husband.
On January 15, 1988, what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 59th birthday, Jimmy the Greek was drinking in Duke Zeibert’s restaurant in downtown Washington DC when Ed Hotaling from local NBC affiliate WRC-TV strolled in with a camera crew to do man-on-the-street interviews with people about Martin Luther King Day. Hotaling could not believe his good luck that inside the restaurant there was an actual celebrity. Hotaling asked Jimmy the Greek about the progress blacks have made in sports since MLK’s time, and Jimmy, with a headful of liquor, spoke freely.
Jimmy the Greek: “Pretty soon they are going to have to equalize it for the blacks, for the Greeks, the Jews, and for everybody. Let’s make it equal for everybody.
Interviewer: What about in sports?
Jimmy the Greek: “Well, they’ve got everything. If they [blacks] take over coaching like everybody wants them to, there’s not going to be anything left for white people. I mean, all the players are black. The only thing that whites control is the coaching jobs. Now, I’m not being derogatory about it but that’s all that’s left for them. I mean all the players are black; I mean the only thing that the whites control is the coaching jobs . . . The black talent is beautiful; it’s great; it’s out there. The only thing left for the whites is a couple of coaching jobs.”
Jimmy the Greek: “Black talent is beautiful, it’s great, it’s out there. The only thing left for the whites is a couple coaching jobs.
Interviewer: “That means we need more black coaches.”
Jimmy the Greek: “Alright with me. I’m sure they’ll take over that pretty soon.”
Other comments Jimmy the Greek said in the interview:
- “There are 10 players on a basketball court. If you find two whites, you’re lucky. Either four out of five or nine out of 10 are black. Now that’s because they practice, and they play, and they practice and play. They’re not lazy like the white athlete . . .”
- “The black is a better athlete to begin with, because he’s been bred to be that way. Because of his high thighs and big thighs that go up into his back. And they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs, you see.”
- “I’m telling you that the black is the better athlete, and he practices to be the better athlete, and he’s bred to be the better athlete because this goes all the way to the Civil War when, during the slave trading, the owner, the slave owner, would breed his big woman so that he would have a big black kid, see. That’s where it all started.”
Perhaps Jimmy the Greek thought that since the interview was with a local affiliate that no one would see the interview outside of Washington DC, but if that was the case, he was very wrong. An estimated 1,200 articles about Jimmy the Greek’s comments appeared in publications across the country. Willis Edwards, president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood chapter of the NAACP, said, “What a beginning for 1988. How long must the black people of this country endure these publicly touted demeaning and humiliating attitudes?”
Jimmy the Greek went on an apology tour including a highly publicized meeting Jesse Jackson who at the time was the de facto spokesman for the black race. Jimmy the Greek’s public apology to Jesse Jackson would later be satirized in a 2007 South Park episode wherein Randy Marsh is made to give a humiliating apology to Jesse Jackson to prove that he is truly remorseful for saying the n-word on TV.
Alas, the apology to Jesse Jackson was not enough to save Jimmy the Greek’s television career and he was summarily dismissed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FqdVhz2UZs
The Jimmy the Greek story stayed a subject of debate for a while to come. Saturday Night Live did a few sketches about it. In one sketch, the Schwarzenegger-esque bodybuilders Hans and Franz take umbrage with Jimmy the Greeks assertion that whites are less muscular.
The following week, Phil Hartman appeared as a new overly-PC Jimmy the Greek in a Weekend Update segment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfEeldBw4_g
I remember when the Jimmy the Greek controversy happened. Even though I had zero interest in sports, my dad listened to endless hours of sports talk radio in the car, and many callers called in to talk about Jimmy the Greek’s comments. I asked my dad what Jimmy the Greek had said and my dad replied “He said that blacks are better athletes.” I remember thinking “Well, aren’t they?”
Even to little Baby Trav, it seemed pretty obvious to me. They let blacks into boxing in the 1930s, and the heavyweight champ had been black ever since. Blacks were let into team sports in the 1940s, and 30 years later, they completely dominated basketball and mostly dominated football (other than the quarterback position). Blacks were 10% of the population but way, way, way more than 10% of athletes. I didn’t just see it on TV but in my own life as well. I went to an upper-middle-class high school where there were maybe 20 blacks, but half of them were varsity athletes, and the star player was black.
I had assumed that “blacks are better athletes” was common knowledge. It was like saying “the sky is blue.” No shit, Sherlock. If anything, I think white people took comfort in knowing that blacks were at least good at something as only a cruel God who would create a people who just sucked at everything. Instead, it was like “OK, God gave whites the brains and He gave blacks the brawn.” Whites got the better of the two, but getting to be most of the celebrated sports heroes was not a bad consolation prize. Blacks being good at sports meant that there was at least some shred of cosmic justice in the universe.
I assumed that maybe Jimmy the Greek’s sin was a lack of politeness. I was brought up in a time and place when everyone seemed to understand the harsh realities of race, but it was still considered impolite to talk about race or to speak unkindly about other races. It wasn’t a matter of being woke or politically correct but rather a sort of white noblesse oblige. As the top of the food chain, it was undignified to rub our superiority in other people’s face, but everyone knew the truth. While that noblesse oblige worked for the time to make a smooth running multi-racial society, it made whites loath to offer up counter-arguments when political correctness and wokeness emerged later on.
Looking back at the Jimmy the Greek controversy now, I see some layers I didn’t back then. To be fair, sure, I can grant that maybe Martin Luther King Day was not the best time to present your theories on eugenics. Nowadays, blacks have multiple holidays, but in 1988, they only had one. I can understand the argument of “Hey, just let them have their day.”
Second, even though “blacks are better athletes” seems pretty damn obvious to me, some think it is offensive because you are discounting all the hard work black athletes put into perfecting their craft. However, in the case of Jimmy the Greek, he clearly states that blacks work harder than white athletes: “Now that’s because they practice, and they play, and they practice and play. They’re not lazy like the white athlete…” so the “you’re discounting all their hard work” complaint does not apply in this particular case. If anything, Jimmy the Greek’s comments could be seen as antiwhite.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
It is also worth noting that Jimmy the Greek never said that blacks were not capable or smart enough to be coaches. This would actually make him a progressive by the standards of his generation. The year before in 1987, Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Al Campanis did an interview with Ted Koppel. The topic of the interview was the 40th anniversary of Jackey Robinson’s debut as the first black MLB player. Campanis used to be Robinson’s roommate when they played together for the Brooklyn Dodgers and so it was assumed that he was an anti-racist. Instead, Campanis created a firestorm when he said that blacks were too dumb to be coaches. His exact “I truly believe that they may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or, perhaps, a general manager.” Unfortunately, Campanis said other things that undermined what might have been a perfectly sensible statement by also saying things like “Why are black men or black people not good swimmers? Because they don’t have the buoyancy.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4XUbENGaiY
Now, we can nitpick over how accurate Jimmy the Greek’s theories are: is black excellence in sports due to selective breeding during slavery, or was it natural selection from evolving in Africa? But that was not the controversy. Jimmy the Greek was cancelled because the establishment opposes race realism in principle.
The thing that struck me about the Jimmy the Greek affair is that the establishment is so hostile to the idea of race realism that you can’t even use it to compliment other races. I get why people don’t want you saying “Blacks are dumb,” but you can’t even cite race realism to say “Blacks are good athletes.” People also freak out if you say Jews have higher IQ than whites (mind you, Jews can say this themselves but you can’t). For as many contradictions and double standards as the wokesters have (Racism is bad unless it’s against whites, in which case it’s not racism), when it comes to race realism, they are remarkably consistent. You can’t use it ever.
Or can you? In the wake of the controversy, Jewish Washington Post writer Richard Cohen wrote:
Back in my college days, I dabbled in anthropology. In physical anthropology we had to do something called “racing and sexing” of skulls. That entailed looking at a skull and determining whether it was once a man or a woman — and which race. Yes, Virginia, the races are physically different. And that, sort of, is what Jimmy the Greek said. A little bit out of his field, the Greek got about a thousand things wrong about race and genetics, but what he said seemed self-evident to most whites and a good many blacks as well: blacks in general are more athletically gifted than whites.
At first it looks like Cohen is defending Jimmy the Greek and race realism, but then he continues:
There’s no excusing what Jimmy the Greek said. But it can be explained and, indeed, it ought to be. After all, we all know Snyder was fired not so much for what he said as for what he did not. He spoke of racial differences, and that is an American taboo. Never mind that there are such things. Never mind that they are demonstrable. The fear is that once you recognize anatomical racial differences, you have assumed intellectual ones as well. But intellectual differences among the races don’t exist. They are mythic creations of racists and loonies. Physical differences, on the other hand, do exist. By denying that — but refuting what seems self-evident — you lend credence to the canard that mental differences exist also.
Oy vey! I believe that is what liberals call “saying the quiet part out loud.” It turns out that you can’t make the bleeding obvious point that blacks are good athletes because it might lead to another Holocaust.
One person took a lesson from the Jimmy the Greek controversy was Donald Trump who cited it as a reason for his “no apologies” policy. “Whatever you do, don’t apologize. You never hear me apologize, do you? That’s what killed Jimmy the Greek way back. Remember? He was doing OK ’til he said he was sorry.”
Despite his very public cancellation, Jimmy the Greek maintained his sense of humor “Do you know the odds against me being in that restaurant, at that time, on that day, answering those questions?” he asked. “Minnesota had to win at New Orleans and then win at San Francisco and Washington had to win at Chicago. Then the camera I was using for my piece on the city [at Duke Zeibert’s] for CBS had to break down for 40 minutes. All that had to happen for that interview to take place when it did Friday.”
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4 comments
There was an episode of My Name Is Earl back in 2007 where Earl was talking about his two sons being different colors when he dropped this gem….
”You know what’s crazy? The white one is the better athlete and the black one is a little genius.(shrugs) Taught me somethin’.”
Hard to imagine that getting past the network censors these days.
The Greek was the kind of gambler I’d ask who he liked then bet on the other team.
This can be counted as an early instance of cancel culture. He did have a point about some parts of it. With the Olympics as an example, Blacks (especially Kenyans) excel hands down at track and field. Meanwhile, Whites dominate weightlifting. Whites and Asians are about even as the top gymnastics contenders. Finally, Campanis had a point; Blacks don’t do too well at swimming. (I heard of a USMC drill instructor who made a similar point, way back in the days when you could still have a career after observing that Blacks tend to sink.) However, Jimmy the Greek was wrong about selective breeding. It didn’t work that way, and furthermore that’s the sort of thing that lying putz Howard Zinn would’ve said.
A great article and what a fascinating character. Being on the this side of the pond, I only ever heard his name mentioned in passing. It all comes together with this piece. Facts don’t count anymore as listed above and have demonstrably gotten much worse. Women with cocks and tits with the added placeholders of beard and blue hair, anyone?
I wonder how Charles Murray’s ‘Facing Reality – two truths about race in America’ would fair now, how it would be viewed. In that, he claims that whites are above IQ on certain aspects but certainly, Asians (sub-continental Indians, as we refer in the UK) do out perform all groups in certain aspects. Hence the law suit against Harvard.
To quote the back cover of the book by Charles Murray, “I decided to write this book in the summer of 2020 because of my dismay at the disconnect between the rhetoric about ‘systemic racism’ and the facts. The uncritical acceptance of the narrative by the nations elite news media amounted to an unwillingness to face reality. By facts, I mean what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan meant: ‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.’ By reality, I mean what science fiction novelist Philip Dick meant: ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.'”
Frightening to think this was only 3 years ago.
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