It is genetics combined with tutorship and money just like in other sports. In baseball, think about the Bonds family, the Griffey family, the Boone family, the Guerrero family and the Bell family.
There weren't that many father-son baseball dynasties before the last few decades of the 20th Century. The Boones
Some of it was that the base of players was expanding: first to the white South, then to Catholic immigrants, then to African Americans, then to Latins.
There aren't any pre-World War Two family acts that I know of. Perhaps because there wasn't a lot of money in baseball- unless you were a star like Ruth or Williams- until the 70s. Same with baseball and basketball. Joe Namath signing with the Jets right out of Alabama in 1965 for 3 years $427,000 and a new car was astounding.
Steve mentions basketball's Grant twins. Two of Harvey's kids played in the NBA, one still playing (Jerami) and pretty good, the other now a star in Europe (Jerian), and another also played pro overseas (Jerai). All played for Maryland/DC area Catholic powerhouse DeMatha.
A friend’s son just retired after having won the motorcycle Flat Track championship ten times. He was never rich, but his dad had him on a motorcycle at age 4.
Ernie and Kiki Vandeweghe are probably the first father-son NBA dynasty. Ernie was on several early Knicks teams that came close to winning NBA titles. Kiki was a prolific scorer for UCLA, Denver, Portland and the Knicks but never came close to an NBA title but I am sure you know that.
I think the first were dolph and Danny schayes? Is no one talking about the reversion to the mean? I think it is notable that there are so few father son legacies.
In many cities the Catholic parish and CYO were the transitional vehicle from street ball to college and often the NBA. Except for UCLA and a few others of note USF, with Bill Russell, Seattle U with Elgin Baylor and other great small Catholic schools Xavier, Villanova were always well represented in the early March Madness. Those schools are still competing but the money of the major conferences has begun to dominate college basketball.
Guess I’m just not with it anymore but I tried to watch the NBA final game, got bored with it and fell asleep. Just not the same game.
Watching the NBA draft right now. 5-6 players of the top 20 picks are biracial. There seem to a disproportionate amount of biracial nba players compared to the US population
It definitely seems like a lot more pro men end up marrying women who were collegiate athletes, and that also expands the network of people who might take an interest in their progeny’s athletic development.
As an aside , Kang has become a more interesting writer these last few years. He previously seemed obsessed with race and lefty politics but I seem to recall one of his last pieces at the NYT questioning the race uber alles orientation of his party.
I'm reminded of the Kelsey Plum towel throw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7_HNB5-W4s). Forget about the genetics, imagine just having a mum who could teach you to throw like that.
I know very little about sports but I do know most physical skills are better learned young. If one kid starts training a skill at six and does it religiously until he is twenty, he will always be better than someone who started at 18.
I'm fascinated by the idea the author expressed about it making the sports better, more polished, but boring. That's very much a problem in movies and TV. So much study and training has gone into perfecting it that in most cases the soul has been sucked out. It's all predictable and boring/ My mom said she doesn't bother reading any more.
It's happening in every sport. In baseball it used to be thought that you couldn't train to throw harder, or not much, but that's wrong and now most pitchers throw at least 94 mph. And it was thought that you couldn't learn to hit home runs but that was wrong too and now many more players hit home runs by making contact out in front of the plate and hitting the ball in the air more. In hockey the one timer has become much more common because it's so effective and tips and deflections are far more common, and the slap shot from the wing is a rarity. This is all because sports have been so thoroughly analyzed and optimized that suboptimal strategies have largely disappeared. And players enter their pro careers knowing much more about these ways of doing things because they've been taught them already in youth sports.
As far as soccer is concerned, obviously there's a lot of skill and coaching involved (it's surely more of a nurture tilt compared to basketball), but America's biggest problem is that the best athletes don't gravitate toward soccer. The development pipeline runs through pay-to-play academies rather than public schools. Obviously there's been an explosion of private coaching, travel leagues, etc. in just about every sport, but a poor kid with a knack for football has a darn good chance of making it to the NFL. If every American kid played soccer, we wouldn't need Ajax's academy system. We would be odds-on favorites to win the World Cup every four years.
What I find especially interesting is the kids of pro athletes who have had success in different sports. There have been a fair number of NBA dads with college volleyball daughters. There's NBAer Popeye Jones and his NHL sons.
And perhaps most interesting vis-a-vis the nature-vs.-nurture argument are the jocks who have knocked up a woman, had zero involvement in their kids' lives, and yet saw those kids grow up to be great athletes. The two that come to mind are Karl Malone, who at the age of 20 impregnated a 13-year-old who grew up to be NFL offensive lineman Demetress Bell; and Julius Erving, whose affair with a sportswriter produced Alexandra Stevenson, a tennis player who peaked at #18 in the world and had a run to the Wimbledon semis in 1999. Surely there must be more examples.
I’ve never understood this argument. Our best athletes play sports other than soccer, so we a country of 350 million people can’t get 11 guys to compete at the World Cup? Given that 90% or more of pro athletes are 6’0 or taller, could t we field a lineup of Messi wannabes under 6 foot.
Height matters far less in soccer than most sports, but you typically want at least a few somewhat tall soccer players on a team. And while a lot of pro athletes are tall, you could easily be 5'9" and be an NFL RB, CB, or WR. So an average height kid who's also a great athlete isn't going to quit playing football, because he still has a chance at the NFL. It's not as if we're completely terrible at soccer, we just don't dominate like we would if soccer were far and away the #1 sport, as it is in most European countries.
"So there now seems to be more assortative mating for athleticism and height than before when fewer women knew that much about sports, so jocks were less likely to marry jockettes in the old days."
Except that it still goes on. HOF NY SS Derek Jeter, for instance dated many Hollywood starlettes, models, etc. When he finally decided to settle down and marry, he didn't marry a jockette; he married a model.
Future HOF NE QB Tom Brady didn't marry a jockette either; he married a model.
While future HOF GB QB Aaron Rodgers has hooked up with Dannica Patrick, for the most part, he has hooked up with models/starlettes.
If anything, being a successful athlete makes it easier for men to attain models, starlettes, women that are known to be attractive (e.g. 8's, 9's, and the rare "perfect 10's"). Perhaps it should be amended to read: IF the athletes aren't Alist (or transcend their sports) then perhaps they'll more willingly hook up with jockettes because, realistically speaking, that's all they're gonna get. Whereas superstar athletes in their sports aren't going to go for jockettes, because they don't have to. Their status ensures that they'll get the cream of the crop re: looks dept. (and not all jockettes are blessed with super model looks).
A final example: Eldrick didn't hook up with a LPGA player; for the most part, he has dated (and married) models and starlettes.
For example, while Steve was at UCLA there was an actress who gained worldwide fame named Bo Derek. I will assume that most famous athletes of the era wouldn't have minded that she knew zilch about sports but definitely would've done anything to hook up with her.
I'm going on the theory that male athletes are still men first, and men like to look and hang around pretty things and faces. If the attractive woman is also a jockette, that's more of an added bonus, and not necessarily a conscious decision on his part. But if she's not a jockette but happens to look like Christie Brinkley, then the male athlete can still be okay dating and hooking up with her.
For male athletes (and pretty much all males in general) looks trump how well she does in sports. So Bo Derek and Christie Brinkley definitely will trump a jockette any day of the week, especially if she isn't all that in the looks department compared to Bo Derek and Christie Brinkley (or their modern female superstar model 2025 counterparts).
Assortative mating was a major theme of The Bell Curve, was it not? Doctors now marry doctors instead of nurses; lawyers other lawyers rather than secretaries. Even Universalist ministers seem to marry Episcopalian ministers these days.
Anyone who has a good gig wants to get their kids in on it too, that’s just human nature.
The problem with a driveway is the dimensions. My family’s driveway extended about 8 feet to the left and right into the bushes. To this day I couldn’t hit a corner three to save my life. I doubt many driveway kids make it to the NBA or even Division #1.
The Lopez brothers were kinda liminal in this. First they were the typical 7 foot lummox, drop step and all. Then they went to shooting camp, where the optimal arc was mathematically figured out by some quant.
Being 7 feet tall shot is really hard to block (myself being 16 inches shorter, I could never doing it on my best day).
It is genetics combined with tutorship and money just like in other sports. In baseball, think about the Bonds family, the Griffey family, the Boone family, the Guerrero family and the Bell family.
There weren't that many father-son baseball dynasties before the last few decades of the 20th Century. The Boones
Some of it was that the base of players was expanding: first to the white South, then to Catholic immigrants, then to African Americans, then to Latins.
There aren't any pre-World War Two family acts that I know of. Perhaps because there wasn't a lot of money in baseball- unless you were a star like Ruth or Williams- until the 70s. Same with baseball and basketball. Joe Namath signing with the Jets right out of Alabama in 1965 for 3 years $427,000 and a new car was astounding.
The racing dynasties may be nature, but they're also certainly nurture and nostalgia.
The DiMaggios.
That's right. Dom was an excellent player as well. Vince was the older brother and not a star like Joe and Dom.
Oh and the Deans, Dizzy and Paul.
Steve mentions basketball's Grant twins. Two of Harvey's kids played in the NBA, one still playing (Jerami) and pretty good, the other now a star in Europe (Jerian), and another also played pro overseas (Jerai). All played for Maryland/DC area Catholic powerhouse DeMatha.
Yes, the Deans. And the Grants. One Grant got to play with the Bulls and the other got stuck with the Bullets. What rotten luck.
The Unser family in auto racing is another example. The Andrettis, Pettys, the Earnhardts, etc.
Auto racing, because of the expense, tends to have many dynasties. The Allisons are another dynasty. Duane and Pancho Carter.
A friend’s son just retired after having won the motorcycle Flat Track championship ten times. He was never rich, but his dad had him on a motorcycle at age 4.
Ernie and Kiki Vandeweghe are probably the first father-son NBA dynasty. Ernie was on several early Knicks teams that came close to winning NBA titles. Kiki was a prolific scorer for UCLA, Denver, Portland and the Knicks but never came close to an NBA title but I am sure you know that.
I think the first were dolph and Danny schayes? Is no one talking about the reversion to the mean? I think it is notable that there are so few father son legacies.
Right. Dolph and Danny Schayes.
Abolish legacy preferences!
In many cities the Catholic parish and CYO were the transitional vehicle from street ball to college and often the NBA. Except for UCLA and a few others of note USF, with Bill Russell, Seattle U with Elgin Baylor and other great small Catholic schools Xavier, Villanova were always well represented in the early March Madness. Those schools are still competing but the money of the major conferences has begun to dominate college basketball.
Guess I’m just not with it anymore but I tried to watch the NBA final game, got bored with it and fell asleep. Just not the same game.
It would've been a much better game had Halliburton not gone down early in the game with a torn Achilles.
True. I just don’t appreciate today’s game.
Watching the NBA draft right now. 5-6 players of the top 20 picks are biracial. There seem to a disproportionate amount of biracial nba players compared to the US population
Also should have mentioned ex Bull / Clipper, Ron Harper’s son got drafted #2 bolstering your point.
It definitely seems like a lot more pro men end up marrying women who were collegiate athletes, and that also expands the network of people who might take an interest in their progeny’s athletic development.
As an aside , Kang has become a more interesting writer these last few years. He previously seemed obsessed with race and lefty politics but I seem to recall one of his last pieces at the NYT questioning the race uber alles orientation of his party.
I'm reminded of the Kelsey Plum towel throw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7_HNB5-W4s). Forget about the genetics, imagine just having a mum who could teach you to throw like that.
Cooper Flagg's mom played four years of college basketball and knows a huge amount about the game.
I know very little about sports but I do know most physical skills are better learned young. If one kid starts training a skill at six and does it religiously until he is twenty, he will always be better than someone who started at 18.
I'm fascinated by the idea the author expressed about it making the sports better, more polished, but boring. That's very much a problem in movies and TV. So much study and training has gone into perfecting it that in most cases the soul has been sucked out. It's all predictable and boring/ My mom said she doesn't bother reading any more.
It's happening in every sport. In baseball it used to be thought that you couldn't train to throw harder, or not much, but that's wrong and now most pitchers throw at least 94 mph. And it was thought that you couldn't learn to hit home runs but that was wrong too and now many more players hit home runs by making contact out in front of the plate and hitting the ball in the air more. In hockey the one timer has become much more common because it's so effective and tips and deflections are far more common, and the slap shot from the wing is a rarity. This is all because sports have been so thoroughly analyzed and optimized that suboptimal strategies have largely disappeared. And players enter their pro careers knowing much more about these ways of doing things because they've been taught them already in youth sports.
As far as soccer is concerned, obviously there's a lot of skill and coaching involved (it's surely more of a nurture tilt compared to basketball), but America's biggest problem is that the best athletes don't gravitate toward soccer. The development pipeline runs through pay-to-play academies rather than public schools. Obviously there's been an explosion of private coaching, travel leagues, etc. in just about every sport, but a poor kid with a knack for football has a darn good chance of making it to the NFL. If every American kid played soccer, we wouldn't need Ajax's academy system. We would be odds-on favorites to win the World Cup every four years.
What I find especially interesting is the kids of pro athletes who have had success in different sports. There have been a fair number of NBA dads with college volleyball daughters. There's NBAer Popeye Jones and his NHL sons.
And perhaps most interesting vis-a-vis the nature-vs.-nurture argument are the jocks who have knocked up a woman, had zero involvement in their kids' lives, and yet saw those kids grow up to be great athletes. The two that come to mind are Karl Malone, who at the age of 20 impregnated a 13-year-old who grew up to be NFL offensive lineman Demetress Bell; and Julius Erving, whose affair with a sportswriter produced Alexandra Stevenson, a tennis player who peaked at #18 in the world and had a run to the Wimbledon semis in 1999. Surely there must be more examples.
I’ve never understood this argument. Our best athletes play sports other than soccer, so we a country of 350 million people can’t get 11 guys to compete at the World Cup? Given that 90% or more of pro athletes are 6’0 or taller, could t we field a lineup of Messi wannabes under 6 foot.
Height matters far less in soccer than most sports, but you typically want at least a few somewhat tall soccer players on a team. And while a lot of pro athletes are tall, you could easily be 5'9" and be an NFL RB, CB, or WR. So an average height kid who's also a great athlete isn't going to quit playing football, because he still has a chance at the NFL. It's not as if we're completely terrible at soccer, we just don't dominate like we would if soccer were far and away the #1 sport, as it is in most European countries.
"So there now seems to be more assortative mating for athleticism and height than before when fewer women knew that much about sports, so jocks were less likely to marry jockettes in the old days."
Except that it still goes on. HOF NY SS Derek Jeter, for instance dated many Hollywood starlettes, models, etc. When he finally decided to settle down and marry, he didn't marry a jockette; he married a model.
Future HOF NE QB Tom Brady didn't marry a jockette either; he married a model.
While future HOF GB QB Aaron Rodgers has hooked up with Dannica Patrick, for the most part, he has hooked up with models/starlettes.
If anything, being a successful athlete makes it easier for men to attain models, starlettes, women that are known to be attractive (e.g. 8's, 9's, and the rare "perfect 10's"). Perhaps it should be amended to read: IF the athletes aren't Alist (or transcend their sports) then perhaps they'll more willingly hook up with jockettes because, realistically speaking, that's all they're gonna get. Whereas superstar athletes in their sports aren't going to go for jockettes, because they don't have to. Their status ensures that they'll get the cream of the crop re: looks dept. (and not all jockettes are blessed with super model looks).
A final example: Eldrick didn't hook up with a LPGA player; for the most part, he has dated (and married) models and starlettes.
For example, while Steve was at UCLA there was an actress who gained worldwide fame named Bo Derek. I will assume that most famous athletes of the era wouldn't have minded that she knew zilch about sports but definitely would've done anything to hook up with her.
I'm going on the theory that male athletes are still men first, and men like to look and hang around pretty things and faces. If the attractive woman is also a jockette, that's more of an added bonus, and not necessarily a conscious decision on his part. But if she's not a jockette but happens to look like Christie Brinkley, then the male athlete can still be okay dating and hooking up with her.
For male athletes (and pretty much all males in general) looks trump how well she does in sports. So Bo Derek and Christie Brinkley definitely will trump a jockette any day of the week, especially if she isn't all that in the looks department compared to Bo Derek and Christie Brinkley (or their modern female superstar model 2025 counterparts).
Assortative mating was a major theme of The Bell Curve, was it not? Doctors now marry doctors instead of nurses; lawyers other lawyers rather than secretaries. Even Universalist ministers seem to marry Episcopalian ministers these days.
Anyone who has a good gig wants to get their kids in on it too, that’s just human nature.
Except for the Universalist/Episcopalian mix: they still need a sperm donor.
The problem with a driveway is the dimensions. My family’s driveway extended about 8 feet to the left and right into the bushes. To this day I couldn’t hit a corner three to save my life. I doubt many driveway kids make it to the NBA or even Division #1.
The Lopez brothers were kinda liminal in this. First they were the typical 7 foot lummox, drop step and all. Then they went to shooting camp, where the optimal arc was mathematically figured out by some quant.
Being 7 feet tall shot is really hard to block (myself being 16 inches shorter, I could never doing it on my best day).
They have played forever.
Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer Marilyn Monroe to Mia Hamm.