OK, let's see if we've got this straight: Fisher DeBerry thinks black athletes run fast and he wants more of them to play for his Air Force Academy football team.
This is news?
For this, he gets treated like David Duke?
For this, media types waxed indignant and the Air Force Academy sent DeBerry to his room without supper?
For what? For echoing sentiments shared by almost every collegiate coach in America and even the most casual observer of sports?
If you were trying to figure out what DeBerry said that was considered so inflammatory, maybe you had to read his comments several times just to see if you missed something.
After Air Force lost to TCU 48-10, DeBerry said TCU "had a lot more Afro-American players than we did, and they ran a lot faster than we did. It just seems to me to be that way. Afro-American kids can run very well. That doesn't mean Caucasian kids and other descents can't run, but it's very obvious to me that they run extremely well."
DeBerry also said the academy needed to recruit faster players and noted, "you don't see many minority athletes in our program."
Is that offensive to an entire race of people? Yes, if you're Caucasian. But that isn't why people were hyperventilating. That isn't why Air Force officially reprimanded DeBerry.
DeBerry said blacks "run extremely well." He said he wants more of them on his team. This is an insult for blacks?
Some critics said DeBerry's comments implied that blacks don't work hard and win only with physical superiority. Where did he say that? That's reading way too much between the lines. If you want to read between the lines, DeBerry said — despite his disclaimer — that Caucasians aren't as fast as blacks and that you have to have black athletes to win.
This is not exactly new ground. Most coaches feel this way, even if they won't say so publicly. A few years ago, Norm Chow, who was coaching USC at the time, sized up a white high school receiver (whom he was not recruiting) this way: "He's a good player. He's only got one thing going against him; he's white. That's reality. I don't like it, but that's the way people think."
Fred Graves, the former University of Utah assistant coach now with the Detroit Lions, echoed those sentiments years earlier when he told Bryan Rowley, a white All-American receiver at Utah, that he would have to be twice as good as black receivers to make it in the NFL.
Rick Majerus, the University of Utah basketball coach at the time, once lamented that his Utes looked like a ski team. Translation: Too white. Imagine if he had complained that his team looked like a rap group?
Is there a double standard here? No doubt about it.
Look, there's no ignoring the evidence. It has been reported that the top 200 times in the 100-meter dash are owned by black athletes.
Blacks dominate pro and collegiate rosters in basketball and football.
And yet no one is allowed to talk about it or acknowledge it publicly in any way, as DeBerry did. Political correctness has turned Americans into a bunch of nervous twits afraid of their own shadow.
There were even questions about whether DeBerry, an outstanding coach for 22 years, would keep his job. Air Force athletic director Hans Mueh trotted out the obligatory quote regarding DeBerry's remarks: "It was a seriously, seriously inappropriate comment."
What nonsense. Talk about overreaction. Will everybody just take a deep breath and calm down? At least not everyone took the party line.
"We, as a team, didn't think he meant anything by it," said Air Force receiver Jason Brown, who is black. " . . . I personally wasn't offended."
No one else should have been offended either.
E-mail: drob@desnews.com