Uriah

After quarterbacks, I took a look at white golfers that had won the Masters. Of the 24 I could positively identify 70% were blue eyed. My hunch was based on the extremely fair Jack Nicklaus; using Gretzky as inspiration I looked at Hart Trophy winners: 57% were blue eyed.

But here comes the really disturbing part: before I found hard numbers elsewhere I decided to use Presidents as a neutral sample to compare against the QBs. But it turns out Presidents are also overwhelmingly blue eyed https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1988-10-03-8802040884-story.html#:~:text=George%20Washington%2C%20blue%2Dgray%20eyes,%3B%20William%20Henry%20Harrison%2C%20brown ….

In 1988 Bob Greene estimated that 26/39 Presidents had been blue eyed. Since then every Prez except Obama has had fair eyes; in fact every white guy from Trump to Reagan has been blue eyed. This suggests that the blue eyed advantage is not so much athletic as mental.

This is a big subject, so I’ll cut it off now and tweet more later about the underlying mechanism: how some people think eye color is an indicator of behavioral inhibition and the ability to make fast decisions under pressure.

I wonder if the blue-eyed advantage in sports comes from a tendency to not make decisions too fast -- to stay in the pocket waiting, waiting for a receiver to get open and finally pulling the trigger at the last possible tenth of a second.