The Return of the Great White Hope

In the 1980s, white athletes for some Americans came to represent white excellence in a sports world dominated by black athletes. Matt Andrews illustrates this through the stories of three white sports legends-NBA player Larry Bird, boxer Gerry Cooney...and fictional fighter Rocky Balboa.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place,
world history examined and science explained. This is one day
university Welcome, and we're back on the untold history of

(00:28):
sports in America. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Today we
revisit a classic and timeless sports mythology, the Great White Hope.
It's been a few decades. It's about time we had
another one. This time around. It's Larry Bird, the hic
from French Lick. His NBA rivalry with Magic Johnson saved

(00:49):
the league and revived the great American pastime of rooting
for the white guy to beat all the black athletes.
U s A, U s A. Here's Matt with Moore,
one of my childhood heroes, someone who, yes, I know,
wasn't real. As a kid, I went to the movies

(01:10):
and I was in trance with a gritty, working class
Italian American boxer from Philadelphia, the Italian stallion Rocky Balboa.
The first Rocky film came out in nineteen seventies six,
America's two dred Birthday, and it was awarded the Academy
Award for Best Picture in nineteen seventy seven and Rocky
Balboa became one of the cultural icons of the era.

(01:33):
He's definitely the most famous sports character in American movie history.
The film Rocky struck a chord with Americans, and on
the one hand, why not. It's the classic underdog story,
the tale of a down on his luck, seemingly washed
up pugilist, his boxing careers hanging by a thread. But

(01:54):
then Rocky gets his big break in a publicity stunt.
The heavyweight champion of the world, Apollo Creed, And what
a name, Apollo Creed. He gives this no name fer
a chance. In America's bi centennial, Rocky Balboa is given
the opportunity to fight for the title and sees the
American dream. But here's what I now understand about Rocky.

(02:18):
Rocky is not just a sports film. Rocky is a
movie about race and American history. Sitting in the movie
theater in V six and watching Rocky, and then going
back and seeing Rocky two three years later, and then
Rocky three three years after that, I thought I was
watching a film about the underdog who gets the girl

(02:40):
and wins the big fight. But what I now realize
about these early Rocky films is that they are not
realistic depictions of the boxing world or or or gritty
urban American life. These films are actually a fantasy. The
Rocky films are White America's revenge fantasy against Muhammad Ali.

(03:03):
This lecture is titled The Turn of the Great White Hope,
and I am going to tell you the story of
three white athletes from the nineteen eighties, Larry Bird, Jerry Cooney,
and Rocky Balboa, two boxers and a basketball player. Two
real athletes and one fictitious character. All three competed in
sports that in the nine eighties were being dominated by

(03:26):
Black Americans. You know, a lot of what we've been
talking about in our course is how black athletes have
been significant racial symbols, Joe Lewis and Jackie Robinson and
Wilma Rudolph symbolizing the promise of integration, Muhammad Ali as
the embodiment of black power. Historically speaking, this has been

(03:48):
both the power of the black athlete, but also the
burden of the black athlete. The black athlete always seemed
to be representing more than just him or herself. Well, now,
in the nineteen eighties, the script was flipped. Now it
was white athletes like Larry Bird and Jerry Cooney and

(04:10):
Rocky Balboa, who came to represent something bigger than themselves.
They came to represent white excellence in the black world
of sport. And more than that, as I'm going to argue,
they came to represent a white ideal that many thought
was losing ground in society at large. And so many

(04:30):
white Americans rooted for these three white athletes with uncommon passion.
For many white Americans, these white athletes real and fictional,
they were their great white hopes. Okay, what was going
on in America that caused many white Americans to invest
so heavily in these athletes. Well, this takes us to

(04:53):
the phenomenon of a white backlash to the civil rights
and black power movements. For two decades, the civil rights
and black power movements, they had been gaining steam beg d.
In the nineteen fifties, black Americans started to score some
major civil rights victories. They dramatically protested Jim Crow and
the culture of racism. It's something we explored when we

(05:16):
discussed Tommy Smith and John Carlos in Well. By the
nineteen seventies, there were many white Americans who felt as
if they had become victims of this civil rights surge.
There was a growing belief among some white Americans that
the nation was overly fixated on the problems facing Black

(05:36):
Americans and not the problems that they were facing. One
problem here was that everyone's status was sliding in the
nineteen seventies. This was a decade that saw a steep
economic downturn in the United States, and this was due
to a number of factors. There was the high cost
of the Vietnam War, the rising price of oil coming

(05:57):
out of the Middle East, the fact that American companies
were sending their jobs overseas. But rather than look at
and blame these complicated global factors, many white Americans blame
their sliding economic status on people of color. You know,
their status seems to be going up while mine is

(06:18):
going down. It's their fault. Affirmative action policies were very
much part of this calculus. Beginning in nineteen federal and
state governments began implementing affirmative action, and the idea here
was that in order to combat the legacy of racism

(06:38):
and Jim Crow segregation, schools needed to take affirmative action
and admit more applicants of color. The government needed to
take affirmative action and award contracts to black owned businesses. Well,
without a doubt, many white Americans saw affirmative action as
the opposite that they saw it as a total negative.
As they saw it now they were being victimized by

(07:01):
the government. They were being treated unfairly. Affirmative action, they said,
was just another term for reverse racism. If there was
one arena in American life where African American gains were
most obvious at this time, it was in the world
of sports. There's no doubt about it. The sporting world

(07:25):
was becoming blacker that we have been charting that transformation
in this course, and more and more the white athlete
was in the minority. And this was especially true in
one sport in particular, basketball, and in one sports league
in particular, the NBA. The NBA was created in nineteen

(07:47):
forty six, and it was an all white league until
nineteen fifty when Earl Lloyd debuted for the Washington Capitals.
So in nineteen fifty the NBA was desegregated, and by
the mid nineteen sixties, half of the players in the
NBA were African American and most of the league's stars
were black, and some NBA insiders thought that this was

(08:10):
a problem. We have discussed this in this course. People
like to see representations of themselves on the field of play,
you know, in the boxing ring, on the baseball diamond,
on the basketball court. And so for many Americans who
thought of themselves as white, professional basketball was no longer
providing that opportunity, especially in the nineteen seventies. By the

(08:36):
end of the nineteen seventies, three out of every four
players in the NBA were African American. And here's the result.
Here is the indisputable truth about the NBA. At this time,
in the nineteen seventies, the NBA was not popular with
white Americans. One basketball historian calls the nineteen seventies in

(08:58):
the NBA. He calls it the dark Ages of the league.
And this is both a reference to the league's unpopularity
and it's a reference to race. The perception among many
was that the league was too black. White Americans were
losing interest. And then came two basketball players, one white

(09:18):
and one black, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. You can't
really talk about Larry Bird without talking about Magic. The
standard line when talking about these two is to say
that the NBA was going to die had it not
been for Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. But that is
an overstatement that the NBA would have figured out how

(09:38):
to make their league work eventually. But what is remarkable
here is that Magic and Bird entered the league in
nineteen seventy nine and they transformed the NBA almost immediately.
The NBA sword in popularity in the nineteen eighties, and
it was almost entirely because of Magic and Bird. Magic

(10:00):
Johnson a brilliant, immensely charismatic black basketball player, Larry Bird,
a brilliant white basketball player. This was the winning combination
that helped the NBA overcome it's so called blackness problem.
And there's a definite paradox here. A sport or a

(10:21):
league that is seen as quote unquote to black is
seen by many as a problem. But a league that
can be fueled by white versus black competitions, well, that
sells an American sports We have talked about it. The
evidence is overwhelming, whether it's the Jack Johnson Jim Jefferies fight,
or that horse race between Isaac Murphy and Snapper Garrison,

(10:44):
or the fact that Jackie Robinson's first season in the
Major leagues was the year that saw the most patrons
ever at Abbott's Field. Race based rivalries and tensions in
sports intrigue and excite American sports fans. Magic and Bird
first faced each other in the n c A champ

(11:05):
and Hip Game in nineteen seventy nine, when Magic's Michigan
State Spartans they defeated Larry Bird's Indiana State Sycamores. This
is the game that made the n c A A
tournament the popular sporting spectacle that it is today. In fact,
to this day, that nineteen seventy nine game is still
the highest rated game in the history of televised college basketball,

(11:29):
and people tuned in because it was a game between
two superstars, one white and one black. After this nineteen
seventy nine game, these two players, players who were already
seen as opposites. They then entered the NBA on opposite coast.
Magic went to Los Angeles, Bird went to Boston. Larry

(11:51):
Bird had actually been drafted a full year earlier in
seventy eight by the Boston Celtics, even though he had
made it clear he was returning to Indiana State for
his senior year of college. The Celtics said that's Okay,
We're willing to wait. And a lot of people thought
that it was no coincidence that the Boston Celtics would

(12:12):
use a draft pick and wait a full year for
a great white player. They said, this just seems to
fit with the racial outlook of the city. So now
here's where all of the stories, all of the things
I've been talking about come together. Let's talk about Boston
and white backlash for a moment. In the late nineteen seventies,

(12:36):
it was Boston that was the city most associated with
the white backlash. I began with and and in Boston,
the trigger issue was busting. In the nineteen seventies, the
federal courts were trying to desegregate public schools. The courts
were ordering the black students from segregated neighborhoods be bus
to white neighborhood schools in order to achieve or or

(12:59):
engineer racial integration. And these policies sparked intent and sometimes
violent opposition. And it was Boston, with its white Irish
Catholic neighborhoods. They were often the center of that opposition.
As busses carrying black students rolled into these white neighborhoods.

(13:20):
White students and parents. They stood their ground. They they resisted.
They met these busses and they threw rocks, They threw bananas,
they yelled racial slurs and held up signs bussom back
to Africa. These white Bostonians did not want these black
children coming into their neighborhoods. These were their schools, and

(13:44):
they wanted the black children kept out. Whites have rights too,
they said. I think that's one of the more striking
aspects of this white backlash movement, the way that the
protesters used the rhetoric of the civil rights movement. You
know what about our rights? Everyone is getting special treatment,

(14:05):
attention except us. We've been left behind. Whites have rights too. Look,
this wasn't just happening in Boston. I mean very famously,
was happening in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was happening in
many cities, but Boston seemed to be where the attitudes
were most ferocious. And so into Boston, the city that

(14:29):
was seething with racial conflict in white backlash in the
nineteen seventies, here comes that great white basketball player, Larry Bird.
And Larry Bird immediately turned the Celtics into winters. The
Celtics won twenty nine games the year before without Larry Bird.
Bird arrives in seventy nine and they win sixty one.

(14:52):
It's a remarkable turnaround. Larry Bird was voted the eight
rookie of the Year in the NBA, and he led
the Celtics all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals.
It's actually Magic Johnson and the Lakers who won the
title that year. But the next year it was Bird's
turn and he led the Celtics to the championship. And

(15:13):
that was the NBA in the nine eighties, Bird and Magic,
the Celtics and the Lakers, and as many saw it,
and as sportswriters wrote about it, white versus Black. How
good were these two? Magic and Bird? They were each
voted the m v P of the league three times.

(15:34):
Birds Celtics. They were in the NBA finals five times,
they won three. Magic's Lakers were there eight times and
won five. From a basketball standpoint, we could have an
argument over who was the better player. I say it
was Magic, but that's a fun, though not terribly important argument.
But let me make the case that from the perspective

(15:57):
as an American sports historian, Larry Bird is the more
historically significant player, and that's because Larry Bird was the
racial outlier. He was a white man excelling in that
black game. Larry Bird was the perfect sports hero for
white Americans who felt like they were being ignored and

(16:19):
and and looked down upon, for those who felt like
Black Americans were gaining at their expense. And I want
to be very clear here. I once had a student
in one of my classes raised his hand and asked me,
Dr Andrews, are you saying that if you root for
Larry Bird in the Celtics, that you're a racist? And
the answer is emphatically no. I'm not saying that that

(16:42):
would be cheap and easy and uncomplicated. I know this.
People root for teams and athletes for all sorts of reasons.
But I am saying that the national fervor for Larry Bird,
this this great white star in a black league, That
fervor was partially fueled by the feelings that many white

(17:02):
Americans had that they were unfair. Back on their heels
after the break, boxing's last great white hope of the
twentieth century. Professional basketball was and continues to be one

(17:32):
of the great racial dramas in American popular culture. But
and I have said this before, no sporting event is
fueled by the passions of racial identity more than a
big time boxing match and one of the most revealing
and I'm going to say troubling sports spectacles of the
nineteen eighties. It was a boxing match. It took place

(17:54):
in the Caesar's Palace parking lot in June when Larry Holmes,
was black, fought Jerry Cooney, who is white, for the
heavyweight championship up of the World. And it turned out
to be heavyweight boxing's last big black versus white contest
in the twentieth century. And it's the last boxing story

(18:15):
I'm going to tell you in this course, so savor it. Okay.
Larry Holmes, who again African American, he was the heavyweight champion,
and Holmes was a great champion. He was a big
man with tremendous skill. He had fast hands that delivered
a hard, heavy punch. And when he fought Jerry COONEYO

(18:39):
his record was thirty nine and oh undefeated. Jerry Cooney
was the challenger. Cooney was white. He was an Irish
American from New York who rose to fame for two
main reasons. First, like Larry Holmes. Jerry Cooney was a
powerful puncher. He ended many of his fights with knockouts.

(18:59):
The second reason for his fame and there are just
no two ways about this. Jerry Cooney was very popular
because he was white. After decades of heavyweight boxing being
dominated by black fighters Sunny Liston, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frasier,
and now Larry Holmes, here was a white possibility. Here

(19:22):
was a great white hope. The Larry Holmes Jerry Cooney
fight took place in June, and in a very interesting coincidence,
there was a blockbuster movie that summer, Rocky three. And
so now let's go back to Rocky. The first two

(19:42):
Rocky movies, Rocky and Rocky two, there are films in
which a white Italian American boxer, Rocky Balboa, he fights
a brash, talkative black heavyweight champion named Apollo Creede. Rocky
is a heavy underdog in the first film, and he
loses in a split decision. Oh sorry, spoiler alert, I

(20:02):
guess I'm guessing most of you have seen it. In
the first sequel, Rocky Too, Rocky wins the big fight
when he knocks out Apollo Creed in one of the
most implausible boxing scenes ever filmed. But these were both
very popular movies. Of the first Rocky one the Academy Award.
As I told you, But as I also told you,
the Rocky movies are more than just sports movies. These

(20:26):
are movies about race and American history. The Rocky Balboa
and Apollo Creed are fictional characters, these fighters are clearly
supposed to represent real people. Apollo Creed is Mohammad Ali.
He's brash, he's cocky, He's black. That's who Apollo Creed

(20:47):
is supposed to remind us of the great but controversial
black fighter Mohammed Ali. Rocky Balboa is a combination of fighters,
but first and foremost, he's clearly supposed to evoke the
memory of Rocky Marciano. I mean, he has the exact
same name. Rocky Marciano was the last white American to

(21:09):
be heavyweight champion. Rocky Marciana was forty nine and oh
over his career. He was the heavyweight champion from nineteen
fifty two to nineteen fifty six, and he never lost
a professional bout. Like He's the only heavyweight champion to
ever end his career undefeated. And when Mohammed Ali was
dominating the boxing spotlight in the sixties and seventies. There

(21:32):
were always people out there who said, yeah, well, he
wouldn't beat Rocky Marciano. If only there was a time
machine where we could somehow transport Rocky Marciano into the
future so he could do battle with Mohammed Ali. Well,
that time machine is called Hollywood, and we get that
fight Rocky Marciano versus Mohammed Ali in the first two

(21:56):
Rocky films. And so the way that I read the
Rocky movies is this, Rocky is white America's revenge fantasy
against Muhammad Ali. Rocky Balboa, this working class, humble Italian
American who sounds like and resembles Rocky Marciano. He takes

(22:17):
the title and shuts the mouth of the brash black
fighter Apollo Creed, who was really Muhammad Ali. Listen to this.
When Rocky two came out in the Chicago film critic
Roger Ebert, he sat down with the real Muhammad Ali
and they watched the film together. And when the film

(22:39):
was over, when the white fighter Rocky had defeated the
black fighter, the Ali like Apollo Creed. Here's what Muhammad
Ali said about the film it's both boastful. I mean,
it's Muhammad Ali after all, and it's very interesting. Ali
said this. For the black man to come out superior

(22:59):
would be against America's teachings. I have been so great
in boxing. They had to create an image like Rocky,
a white image on the screen to counteract my image
in the ring. America has to have its white images,
no matter where it gets them. Jesus Wonder Woman Tarzan

(23:21):
and now Rocky Wow. Jesus Wonder Woman Tarzan and Rocky
Ali is saying great white hopes, all of them. Two
Larry Holmes Jerry Cooney fight. It took place just three
weeks after the summer premiere of Rocky three, when Rocky

(23:44):
Balboa fights and even more brash and and even more
menacing black fighter named Clubber Lang, a role brilliantly played
by Mr t and fight promoters linked Jerry Cooney with
Rocky Balboa that summer. These two white fighters, one reel
and one fictional. They were on the cover of Time
magazine just weeks before the fight. Two great White hopes

(24:06):
on the cover of Time. You know, even though Larry
Holmes was the champion, undefeated thirty nine and oh all
of the publicity revolved around Jerry Cooney, the white challenger.
Just in case the general public missed the message of
what this sporting event was all about. The fight's promoter,
Don King, he spelled it out playing He said, this

(24:29):
is a black and white fight. Larry Holmes got so
tired of all this great white hope talk. He snapped
at a press conference and he called Jerry Cooney the
great white hoax. The fight took place in Las Vegas
on jo in front of spectators and millions more watching

(24:51):
on pay per review. I was one of them. Here
are some very interesting facts from that night. Very interesting
fact number one. Tensions before this fight were so high
that the Las Vegas East Department ring the roof of
the arena with snipers. White supremacist groups had announced they

(25:12):
would shoot Larry Holmes if he won the fight. Black
Militant organization said they would be armed and in attendance
in case Larry Holmes was attacked. Oh boy, starting to
sound a little bit like Johnson versus Jeffrey. Very interesting.
Fact number two. Jerry Cooney's dressing room had been equipped

(25:33):
with an outside phone line so he could receive a
call from President Ronald Reagan if he won. There was
no such phone line put in the dressing room of
Larry Holmes. I think about that the President wanted to
congratulate the white fighter if he won. He had no
interest in congratulating the black fighter. Very interesting fact number three.

(25:55):
Once both fighters were in the ring, the ring announcer
introduced Larry Holmes the champion first. Now, hold on, it
is a boxing tradition that the champion be introduced last.
The champ is always introduced last, but for some reason,
on this night, Jerry Cooney was given that honor. I

(26:16):
cannot remember this happening before or since. That fight. Jerry
Cooney received a much louder ovation. It was definitely a
pro Cooney crowd. The two fighters came together for the
instructions and when the referee was done speaking, they touched
gloves and Larry Holmes just despite all the racial stuff

(26:39):
swirling around this about, he said, let's have a good fight.
And it was a good fight. Larry Holmes knocked Cooney
down in the second round with a quick one to
combination that his jab cross, but Cooney made it out
of that round and he fought what many considered to
be the best fight of his career. In between the

(27:01):
middle rounds, to inspire his fighter, Jerry Cooney's trainer shout
it at him, America needs you. I suppose that's very
interesting fact number four, because I think what he was
really saying was white America needs you. Well Alas, in
the end, Larry Holmes was too good. Larry Holmes was

(27:23):
both a skilled boxer and a slugger. Jerry Cooney had
turned out was really just a slugger. And but by
the twelfth round, Cooney was so tired he had trouble
keeping his punches up, and he hit Larry Holmes square
in the groin on two different occasions. Twice Larry Holmes
doubled over in pain and points were deducted from Cooney's score.

(27:47):
I will never forget it. After one of these punches,
there was a break in the action so Holmes could recover,
and his trainer reached into Holmes's shorts with two hands
and he vigorously massaged his fighters genitals. I was thirteen
years old and watching it on pay per view, and
I tell who, seeing Larry Holmess trainer reach into his

(28:07):
shorts and do that, well, I became a man that night. Finally,
in the thirteenth round, Homes knockdown Cooney again. Cooney stumbled
to his feet, dazed and confused, and his trainers through
in the towel. They stopped the fight. Holmes was the
winner and still champion. Look, Jerry Cooney was a decent fighter.

(28:29):
He wasn't a hoax, but so much of the attention
and support that came his way was due to hope
and hype, white hope and white hype. That's all for now.
Next time on the Untold History of Sports in America,
presented by One Day University, Air Jordan's School of Humans,