The Greek chorus, Jimmy the Greek got it wrong but so did his critics.

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan
• Position: Jimmy Snyder and his views on pro sports and race

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...