Robert Bryce is a freelance writer in Texas.

A review of: Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth ofRace by John Hoberman Houghton Mifflin Company, $24.95

Kevin Little is an oddity. The 29-year-old sprinter garnered a great deal of media interest in March when he won the World Indoor Championships in the 200 meter sprints. The reporters weren't much interested in Little's time -- even though it tied the American record of 20.40 seconds -- they were interested in Little's color. With the victory, Little became the first white American to win a major sprint title since 1956.

Sprinting past stereotypes

Little's victory was historic because it bucks the notion that blacks are superior to whites on the athletic field. His win came just a few weeks before Tiger Woods won the Masters and baseball celebrated the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's breakthrough entry into the major leagues.

Americans are embracing black athletes like never before. Woods and Michael Jordan have become self-contained multinational corporate marketing juggernauts. But is their success and the success of other black athletes relegating other, non-athletic blacks, to the back of the bus?

John Hoberman thinks so.

In his book, Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race, Hoberman, a professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas, contends that "the cult of black athleticism continues a racist tradition that has long emphasized the motor skills and manual training of African Americans." This "sports fixation" says Hoberman is "emblematic of an entire complex of black problems, which includes the adolescent violence and academic failure that have come to symbolize the black male for most Americans."

Good intentions, disturbing implications

Hoberman's book is a challenging treatise on race relations delivered at a time when Americans seem disinclined to delve deeply into divisive issues, particularly ones that might lower the pedestal of superstars like Jordan. But Hoberman believes that a critical analysis is essential. In a recent interview in his full-to-overflowing office on the UT campus, he told me, "there's this constant temptation, especially for whites with good intentions, to inflate the significance of black athletes because in terms of prominent African Americans, they are most of what we've got. I say this is something less to celebrate than to be very disturbed about and to try to redress."

Hoberman points out that Robinson was both a political activist and an athletic hero. Why then, wonders Hoberman in his book, are current black athletes so politically uninvolved? Why given their huge numerical advantages -- 80% of the players in the National Basketball Association are black -- don't black athletes flex their political muscle and agitate for more black coaches, owners and club presidents? "Arthur Ashe answered one such question by correctly asserting that `advertisers want somebody who's politically neutered,'" writes Hoberman. "That black athletes have been willing to conform to this standard is borne out by their conspicuous political quiescence."

Hoberman makes many provocative statements in his book. And the fact that he is white has made him something of a target. He has been sharply criticized by a few black academics, one of whom told Hoberman that what blacks need is "fewer white people telling us what to do." Hoberman has written about sports for some 20 years and has published three other books on sports, including one on the Olympics and another on the science of athletic performance.

While much of Hoberman's book focuses on the role of blacks in modern sports, he also offers an extensive history of black athletics, including accounts of some of the earliest contests between black teams and white teams.

Bogus biology

And there is an extensive review of the history of racial biology, the pseudo science which attempts to explain and quantify the physiological differences between blacks and whites. In one example of the use of "science" to perpetuate racism, Hoberman recounts the story of the Tuskegee airmen, the all-black aviators who were nearly prevented from flying combat missions during World War II. He says that the concept that blacks were "physiologically unsuited for military aviation" was argued on the basis that blacks carried the sickle cell trait and that "this disorder could endanger the carrier and fellow crew members under hypoxic conditions." Hoberman says this "biological" fact persisted until 1981, when the Air Force finally modified its policies.

Blacks and whites alike have used racial biology to argue that blacks are superior when it comes to athletics. Hoberman notes in the book that many black athletes including "O.J. Simpson, Joe Morgan, Carl Lewis and Barry Bonds have made public statements to the effect that black success in sports is due to the fact that blacks are physically superior to whites."

In his book, Hoberman refers to this idea as the "vital black" versus the "depleted white." And that's what makes Hoberman's book so provocative. The author points out that in the decades following the Civil War and in the early parts of this century, it was the blacks who were considered "depleted" and the whites who were thought to be "vital." Now, those roles have been reversed.

Little, the world champion sprinter, acknowledged to reporters earlier this year that he had to overcome the presumed superiority of blacks in order to succeed. "It took a long time for me to get to the point where that wasn't an issue," said Little. In Darwin's Athletes, Hoberman challenges readers to look for meaning and racial context beyond the latest Nike ads. Hoberman's work is like a laser beam that cuts through the vapidness of most sports reporting and asks readers to consider the symbolism and unspoken racial issues that loom just behind the headlines of the sports page.