![]() ![]() Teenaged Sonny Liston got sent to prison (where he learned to box) because he wore a bright yellow shirt during a robbery. Of course, part of the training was beating people up, so maybe that's why Tyson was OK with it. But it wouldn't have worked if Tyson wasn't willing to train all the time. I understand Cus D'Amato had Tyson fight all the time because the only way to keep him out of trouble was to have him train. ![]() Liston, young George Foreman, and young Mike Tyson were street criminals and very hard-working boxers. In most athletic pursuits, it's not enough to be talented you also have to work very hard (though Steve is fond of citing Carl Lewis' low workload - sprinting seems to be an exception).īoxing tends (or tended) to pull people from the very bottom. ![]() The kind of people who commit street crime aren't the kind of people who think things through.īlack professional athletes commit crime at a much lower rate than the general male black population in their age range, for a lot of reasons, but I suspect higher intelligence and self-discipline are among those reasons. Michael Brown was also pretty easy to identify. When the cops came looking he was still wearing it. But if anybody ever stumbles upon two such databases, it could be a pretty interesting nature-nurture study of individuals who enjoy very positive nurture due to a semi-random nature factor Pinsen Teenaged Sonny Liston got sent to prison (where he learned to box) because he wore a bright yellow shirt during a robbery. This would be a tricky analysis to carry out because you’d need two big sample sizes of heights, one of the general population and the other of the in-trouble population, to find enough potential NBA height individuals. My hypothesis would be that very tall black men are underrepresented in prison relative to their share of the population. One way to study this might be with prison and arrest records by height. I would hypothesize that high athletic potential black youths are less likely to land in prison, either because they have more legal opportunities and thus avoid joining criminal gangs, or better role models such as coaches rather than pimps, or because important adults pull strings for them (e.g., paying off the coed accusing them of rape) or hiring them a good lawyer (who was, say, a fraternity brother of the judge in their case). A player’s getting a four-game suspension can be a big deal, competitively and financially.”īy the way, I’ve always been interested in the flip side of this question: how much does athletic talent help youths stay out of career-disastrous entanglements with the law? “But it’s important here because when making multimillion-dollar decisions, a small effect can be very meaningful. “The effects are relatively small,” said author Brian Hoffman, an associate professor and chair of the industrial-organizational program at the University of Georgia. Players who scored below the mean in the researchers’ sample were also about twice as likely to be arrested in the NFL as those who scored above it. The second, which is perhaps less obvious and more valuable, was that there was a small but clear correlation between arrests and Wonderlic tests scores. First, that between 20, players with publicly-documented pre-draft arrests were nearly twice as likely to be arrested after reaching the NFL than those who had not been arrested. ![]() There were two NFL draft-related results. Their peer-reviewed work was published this month in the American Journal of Applied Psychology. Using data to predict arrest rates of NFL draft picksĪ group of college professors and researchers has studied that question as part of a paper on off-duty deviance in professional settings. ![]()
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