Natural (black) athletes v. smart hardworking (white) ones

Those of us of a certain age can remember that back in the 1970s and 1980s, it was completely routine for sports broadcasters and writers to repeat various absurd stereotypes about athletes, based on their race.

Examples:

Key black player terms:

Tremendous natural athlete

Freak of nature

Flashy but erratic

Undisciplined, instinctual, street ball, hard to coach up

Key white player terms:

Gritty

Gutty

Lunch bucket blue collar ethic

Student of the game

Coach on the field

Makes the most of his abilities, a thinking man’s player etc etc.

ETA: Commenter Catpush reminds me of the all-time first ballot classic: “Plays the game the right way.”

Sometimes this kind of thing would be transposed onto entire sports, with for example baseball being an analytically challenging game to play, where players who weren’t great athletes could still flourish as a result, which basketball was a game where freaks of nature would just run up and down the court like wild animals, performing amazing athletic feats while not really being forced to think about how to play the game.

After awhile, people — meaning of course white people — started to become sensitive to these cliches, and the younger generation of sports media types started avoiding them, to the point where you don’t hear this stuff nearly as often as you used to. (A side point is that only recently has it become legitimate to compare a white player to a black player and vice versa, when discussing general player types. For example, it used to be sort of funny to hear every single white receiver in the NFL automatically compared to the most prominent white receiver of the moment, even if they really had nothing much in common besides their racial identity).

However, not everybody has gotten the message — or maybe some people have gotten the message and consciously rejected it, as being too politically correct and woke and all:

Ron DeSantis, born in 1978, has some thoughts:

I am a little curious if this is strategic rhetoric, or if DeSantis actually believes this stuff. He was I guess a pretty decent college baseball player, which means he should know from personal experience that any major league baseball player is every bit as much of a freak of nature in the relevant athletic terms as any NBA player. Nothing is more absurd than the idea that you can be an elite athlete by simply working hard, as 15 seconds of actual competition in any sport will drive home to all those gritty gutty hardworking lunch bucket ethic coaches on the field out there.