"A paucity of blacks"

It's a very slow time in the world of sports radio call-in shows. So Grunt Bumbel's commentary the other night has proven a godsend for them. In between complaining that the Winter Olympics are boring (they are), I've heard nothing but outrage from all of the hosts on WFAN over his comments, which went like this:

Count me among those who don’t care about them and won’t watch them. In fact, I figure that when Thomas Paine said that “these are the times that try men’s souls,” he must’ve been talking about the start of another Winter Olympics. Because they’re so trying, maybe over the next three weeks we should all try too. Like, try not to be incredulous when someone attempts to link these games to those of the ancient Greeks who never heard of skating or skiing. So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world’s greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the winter games look like a GOP convention. Try not to point out that something’s not really a sport if a pseudo-athlete waits in what’s called a kiss-and-cry area, while some panel of subjective judges decides who won.

Mike and the Mad Dog are outraged, OUUUUUUTRAGED, that he'd say something like that (Russo seems particularly enraged about the GOP comment, as it apparently got his Family Britches of New Canaan shorts all in a knot). What would happen, they sneer (over and over), "if a white guy said something about the 'paucity' of whites in the NBA?"

What would happen, you morons? Apparently nothing. 'Cause you just said it.

I think Gumbel would have made a far stronger point if, instead of a "paucity of blacks," he'd simply said, "a paucity of color." Because, like Major League Baseball prior to Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers, how could you say that the game was the best it could be if an entire population wasn't invited to play? In the case of the Winter Olympics, truth is, an entire hemisphere just isn't participating.

UPDATE: Turns out that the southern hemisphere is represented (sorry, Times$elect).

HE shivered as he spoke in the swirling snow, cried as he recounted the time past, the money spent, the marriage lost, the father he buried two weeks ago.

His parents raised 11 children but only one Olympian, and the old man, on his deathbed for almost a year, under hospice conditions in Orange County, Calif., at least heard his son say that he had qualified once more, a fifth time, a run remarkable for persistence, if not for performance.

Connie Kinch died knowing that his boy, Arturo, was going to ski again for Costa Rica, where he was born and lived until he left for college, a soccer player with World Cup aspirations before he hit Colorado and saw the mountains.

Go find longevity spread across the decades like Arturo Kinch's. At 49 years 10 months, he was young enough to finish the men's 15-kilometer cross-country sprint yesterday — despite falling out of his skis at the start — and old enough to place himself in the Olympic downhill at the Lake Placid Games.

"I was 41st" at Lake Placid, said Kinch, the one-man Costa Rican team here, 26 years later. "My Olympic best."