The Greek chorus, Jimmy the Greek got it wrong but so did his critics - Jimmy Snyder and his views on pro sports and race

Washington Monthly, April, 1988 by Jonathan Rowe

The Greek Chorus

Jimmy the Greek got it wrong but so did his critics

After Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder spoke his views on pro sports and race before a Washington, D.C. TV camera last January, Dave Anderson of The New York Times called Snyder "crude" and "dumb." Carl T. Rowan, writing in The Washington Post, compared him to Goebbels. A cartoon in The Boston Globe showed a hooded Klansman consoling Snyder with the words, "I certainly didn't find you offensive."

In all, more than 1,200 articles appeared around the country, according to WRC-TV in Washington, the station that interviewed Snyder. Jesse Jackson met with Snyder to receive a highly publicized confession of error. CBS Sports, where Snyder (his real name is Demetrius Synodinus) was pro football's bookie-in-residence, promptly handed him his walking papers.

It was almost an eerie replay of the episode last April when Al Campanis, then an executive with the Los Angeles Dodgers, asserted on "Nightline" that blacks don't have more jobs in management because they aren't qualified for them.

Except for one thing. My first inkling that there was something different about the Jimmy the Greek affair came the following evening when I was listening to a sports call-in show in Boston. The affair had dominated the talk shows that day, and despite Boston's checkered reputation on racial matters callers sided overwhelmingly with CBS. One station found that 80 percent of its listeners agreed that Snyder deserved to go.

Then a man called from Roxbury, the predominately black area that recently tried to secede from the white-controlled city. He called himself Ali and he said, "Jimmy the Greek said nothing but what was true."

"The guy asked him a question. He told the truth and they do not want to hear the truth."

The uproar, of course, began on Martin Luther King's birthday, when a reporter for WRC-TV caught Snyder at lunch in a Washington restaurant. The reporter asked him what he thought of the civil rights record of pro sports. In a rueful tone Snyder replied that whites were holding on to coaching jobs because, with blacks dominating the playing fields, management was the only role left for them. He added that young black athletes work harder than their white counterparts.

Finally--and this caused the most outcry--he said that black athletic prowess dates back to slavery. The slave owner, he said, would "breed his big black to his big black woman so that he would have a big black kid."

It was pretty bad. And Snyder made matters worse by talking about what he termed "the thigh situation," which he said helped to account for black success. With this, even while stating the opposite, Snyder managed to invoke the old racist canard that gifted black athletes don't have to work or think the way white athletes do.

Feeling edgy

Still I'll confess to feeling slightly sorry for this seventy-year-old man self-destructing before the television camera. There seemed to be a lack of malice, an innocence almost, in the way he bared the sentiments of the culture in which he had been raised. CBS, after all, had hired Snyder to play the questionable role of rogue ethnic bookie to begin with. (Brent Musberger always addressed him as "the Greek," or sometimes just "Greek.") So in a sense, they were getting what they bargained for.

Snyder was right, moreover, about the reason blacks aren't getting more jobs in coaching and management. Some commentators compared him to Campanis, but Campanis said that blacks weren't qualified for front office jobs. Snyder gave the real reason: whites want to keep those jobs for themselves. He said this in his typically inelegant fashion, but he was honest.

CBS had good reason to feel edgy about Snyder's comments on this score. The National Basketball Association may be three-quarters black, but the CBS broadcast team consists of Dick Stockton, Billy Cunningham, and Pat O'Brien, all of whom are white.

"If CBS is so concerned about the race problem," Ray Greene, football coach and athletic director of Alabama A&M, told the Associated Press, "why don't they hire more blacks in their upper echelon?" William Raspberry, the Post columnist, made this point as well in one of the more thoughtful of the Greek commentaries.

None of this makes Snyder's statements, taken together, defensible. Only that, perhaps, some measure of forgiveness was in order. But I was totally unprepared for the view expressed by Ali from Roxbury. And he wasn't alone.

Greene of Alabama A&M, for example, said that Snyder "was speaking the truth."

"You can't change history," Greene said. "He was accurate about the breeding process." I heard numerous other comments along this line. Like many whites, I had vaguely supposed the whole subject to be inherently racist. Yet here were blacks treating it as a simple matter of historical inquiry. Perhaps we are more ready to discuss such issues than we give ourselves credit for.

It's not a pleasant subject. In fact, it is one of the most shameful chapters of our national history. But there is just enough historical basis to the breeding notion to see how the street theories of a Jimmy the Greek get started. Frederick Douglass is one former slave who described these practices. In his autobiographical Narrative, Douglass describes a young landowner named Covey, just starting out in life, who could only afford one slave. So he bought a woman named Caroline, "a large able-bodied woman about twenty years old."