What does the term Great White Hope mean?
Great White Hope, sometimes plain great white hope, may refer to several things: * It originally referred to James J. Jeffries (1875-1953), a white boxer who came out of retirement in 1910 in an attempt to dislodge the first black world boxing heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. * The 1970 film The Great White Hope, based on an earlier play by Howard Sackler, was a fictionalized biopic of Jack Johnson’s life. In the film, the hero’s name is Jack Jefferson. The African-American actor James Earl Jones was nominated for Best Actor in a leading role at the Academy Awards. * By a further analogy, the phrase came to be used in the sport of cricket to describe certain white cricketers emigrating from southern Africa in an attempt to qualify for the English team, notably Robin Smith, Allan Lamb and Graeme Hick. Although Kevin Pietersen has lately been thought of in this category, he has always been a British subject, and therefore eligible to play for the England cricket team. In fact, many cr
