Fresno State has taken itself out of the postseason because of an academic scandal. Georgia head coach Jim Harrick is under fire, his son and assistant, Jim Jr., already dismissed in an academic and financial scandal. The University of Rhode Island, the Harricks’ previous employer, is looking into similar charges involving them there, and recently settled a sexual harassment suit against the elder Harrick.
St. Bonaventure players boycotted the last two games of the season after one of them was declared ineligible because he’d received a welding certificate, not a degree, from his junior college. The transfer had been personally approved by the president of the university, who overruled the school official charged with complying with NCAA rules.
That was the news from college basketball this week.
It’s not hard to conclude that big-time college sports are in trouble. Cheating, fraud and academic improprieties are rampant. The only thing surprising about this week’s flurry of scandals is that nobody seems to be surprised by them. It’s business as usual.
Or is it education as usual? That’s the question at the center of college athletics: Is it a business or a part of the educational process? The NCAA, which governs intercollegiate athletics, argues vehemently that it’s in charge of an amateur enterprise, a student activity. But with television contracts in the billions of dollars and athletes allegedly collecting six-figure payments from boosters while never going near a classroom, the argument is getting harder and harder to make.
And it may be time to stop making it. Athletic scholarships provide for room, board, tuition and books. The idea of going beyond that, of letting athletes share in the revenue they produce, has been batted around for a long time. Lately, it’s gained some traction.
Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers made the papers by introducing a bill that would force the University of Nebraska to pay players on its powerhouse football team a $100 weekly stipend if three of the six other states in the Big 12 Conference passed similar legislation. Chambers got a similar bill passed in 1988, but it was vetoed by Gov. Kay Orr. This time, Gov. Mike Johanns has said he’d sign the bill if it passed.
In Texas, a Big 12 state, Sen. Ron Wilson introduced a bill in the state Senate that, like other bills he’s authored in the past, would give all scholarship athletes in every sport at state schools $200 a month. Larry Eustachy, the basketball coach at Iowa State, another Big 12 member, went so far as to say he would be willing to donate part of his $1.1 million annual salary toward paying players.
The NCAA, meanwhile, which governs intercollegiate athletics, says that any player in Nebraska or anywhere else who accepts payment would be declared ineligible, regardless of any state’s law.
But something of a drumbeat to pay players is developing, and why not? “They are unpaid workers, and in big-time college athletics, not just football, there are no amateurs,” Chambers told National Public Radio. “What I want is the athletes to have some spendable money.”
Chambers is talking about athletes whose labor, in the case of Cornhusker football players, generates $16 million in annual profit. That’s more than $188,000 profit per scholarship, or more than 10 times the value of a scholarship at a state school.
The idea of the college athlete as exploited worker was most famously illustrated by Chris Webber’s claim, first made in Mitch Albom’s 1994 book “Fab Five,” that while he was a star at the University of Michigan, replica Chris Webber jerseys were selling for top dollar in the same mall where the real Webber couldn’t afford a Big Mac.
“I remember reading that and thinking, ‘That is total bullshit! Chris Webber is getting a pretty good amount of money to play at Michigan, as are the rest of the Fab Five,’” says Murray Sperber, an Indiana University professor who has written extensively about college sports. And he was thinking that before anyone knew about charges that Webber had accepted $288,000 from a booster, a case in which Webber is now under indictment for allegedly lying to a grand jury. “I just knew the way the Michigan program worked,” Sperber says. “He not only could have afforded to buy dinner at McDonald’s, he could have bought the McDonald’s franchise.”
Having said that, Sperber believes college athletes should be paid, but not because they’re exploited workers. He says paying athletes, treating them as university staffers who, like any secretary or clerk, had the option of attending classes for free but wouldn’t have to, would end the corruption that plagues the college sports world.
“It seems to me the advantage of these staff contracts and professionalization is that all the stuff you’re reading in the paper about, like, in Georgia, the Harricks, and the various other paying athletes under the table, all this bullshit ends,” Sperber says. “The NCAA rule book, which is the size of the Manhattan phone book at this point, shrinks to a tiny thing.”
The NCAA has a bewildering welter of rules preventing athletes from making money during their sport’s season and limiting them to $2,000 of income in the offseason, though there’s no limit to what an athlete can make during school vacations, as long as it’s not made as a result of prowess in his or her sport.
Of course, athletes in big-time programs also get state-of-the-art training facilities, first-class travel, food and road accommodations, general adulation and the opportunity to rake in a fortune — both legally, by turning pro, and less so, by playing footsie with rich boosters.
But only as long as athletic eligibility remains. Kendall Youngblood, a radio advertising salesman and former Utah State point guard, co-founded the fledgling Former College Athletes Association in Salt Lake City to try to help former players make the sometimes difficult transition to life after sports. He says he has mixed feelings about paying players, pointing out that when he was in college a decade ago he had trouble managing the small amount of cash he had access to.
“But maybe that money is put aside to where they get it when they graduate, they get it when their eligibility is up,” he says. “I think that’s what you need to do. I don’t think you say, ‘OK, here’s your $5,000 a month.’ But you give them incentive.”
Peter Roby, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University in Boston, says that despite popular perception, it’s mostly a myth that college athletes are an exploited class who are kicked to the curb as soon as they can’t help the team anymore.
“I think there’s plenty of high-profile examples of that,” he says. “Maybe that makes people think that every athlete that goes to a Division I program gets exploited and they don’t end up getting an education. The majority of people that go through Division I schools are actually getting a very good education.”
Roby, who played basketball at Dartmouth in the late ’70s and later coached there and at Stanford, Army and Harvard, says that education is the forgotten part of the discussion of paying athletes. The center helps former athletes by running the National Consortium for Academics and Sports’ Degree Completion Program, in which the 217 member schools agree to waive tuition for athletes who return to school to finish their degree, in return for community service.
“We can’t forget that the reason that institutions of higher education even exist is because people are supposed to be going there to get an education,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be a minor league for the NFL. So to suggest that because they’ve built this thing into a monster, now they have to do something else to compensate the players — why don’t they scale it back instead? Why don’t they make it less taxing on the athletes so that they can in fact go to school? They’re throwing bad money at bad money, and that to me is not the answer.”
Michael Kinney got an education at Southwest Missouri Baptist University, where he also played football in the mid-’90s. He parlayed his book-learning into a job as a columnist for the Sedalia (Mo.) Democrat, and in a column Sunday endorsing the idea of paying college players, recalled being so broke in school that he couldn’t afford gas for his “smooth Geo Prism.”
“As valuable as an education is,” Kinney wrote, “the blood, sweat and tears that most football players shed during their tenure is more priceless. Besides that, you can’t put a scholarship in a gas tank.”
“The point I was trying to make is that, yes, athletes do get that scholarship, but they’re not allowed to participate in the rest of college life,” Kinney said in a phone interview this week. “Other people are allowed to do, you know, going out, late night, have a bite to eat or something like that. A lot of athletes may come from lower income families, and that money’s just not there for them to be able to do that. So in my mind, that’s something that — I’m not looking for two or three thousand dollars or anything like that, but $100 a week or even $50 a week would be a little more helpful.”
If you’ve never sat down and thought this through — and there’s no reason why you should have — you probably don’t realize how complicated things can get when you start talking about paying college athletes even nominal sums. The obvious question is: Where does the money come from? Perhaps only programs that show a profit should have to pay their players. But anyone who’s taken Accounting 101 or is a fan of the movies or major league baseball knows how easy it is to hide a profit. If only revenue-producing athletes, who are almost all male, get paid, then Title IX issues arise.
Paying athletes opens universities up to all sorts of questions — which is to say lawsuits — regarding worker’s compensation law, labor law, antitrust law, tax law. In short, it would very likely turn athletes into employees of their university, rather than students participating in an activity, as the NCAA strenuously, and so far successfully, argues is the case. Cross that line and everything would be different.
It would no doubt fall to the courts to decide whether a tailback who sprains his ankle is eligible for workman’s comp. (Sperber tells in his book “Onward to Victory” about how the term “student-athlete” was coined by the NCAA to replace the professional-sounding word “player” in response to losing workman’s compensation claims to injured athletes in the 1950s.) The value of an athletic scholarship might become taxable income. Athletes could win the right to unionize and strike. Unions have struck over smaller matters than an entire industry, college sports in this case, limiting the salaries of an entire class of employee at an artificially low level, called an athlete’s stipend.
And don’t forget that, as the NCAA warned after Chambers’ Nebraska bill moved out of committee, any school that pays its athletes runs afoul of strict eligibility rules. Those rules might seem arbitrary and draconian when considered individually — why is it, again, that athletes can’t hold down a job or accept a ride to the airport? — but they work pretty well at squelching precisely this type of debate before it can really get started. They’ll probably render the bills in Nebraska and Texas, even if they pass, moot. The NCAA didn’t get to control college sports by being dumb. An argument can be made that the NCAA’s main reason for existing is to act as a cartel to maximize profits for its members, partly by limiting wages for players.
Sperber, the Indiana professor, says the problem the NCAA doesn’t seem to want to face is that college sports are pretty much already a professional arena. He points out that, contrary to popular belief, an athletic scholarship is not a guaranteed “free ride” through school. “In fact, they’re one-year contracts, they’re renewed every July, basically at the behest of the coach, and coaches often renew for athletic reasons, not academic reasons,” he says. “And when scholarships are like that, you’ve got to say these are contracts, and how is this different from professional sports?”
The answer might be that it’s different only in the imaginations of fans. “Some of the marketability of college athletics, a part of the reason people like college athletics, is they like the idea of amateurism,” Missouri basketball coach Quin Snyder told the Associated Press. “I think that’s kind of a myth. But it’s a myth that’s very popular.
An unscientific fan poll by Yahoo Sports this week found that a slight majority opposed paying college players.
Another argument against paying players is that most athletic departments lose money, even if they have successful football and basketball programs, since they also have to fund sports that don’t bring in any income. If they had to pay their players, they’d lose even more. NCAA spokesman Wally Renfro pointed out that the NCAA’s $6 billion television contract with CBS would not come close to paying every scholarship athlete $2,000 a year.
Many schools would be forced out of the big-time sports business if they had to pay their athletes a stipend, never mind market rates. That would create a smaller group of schools that could compete at the top level.
“Don’t you think it’s already like that right now?” asks Kinney, the football player turned columnist. “You don’t see too many schools who are constantly in that top 10 or top 15 range, battling for a national title.”
“It might be very salutary,” Sperber says, “because it would seem to me the landscape of higher education would be divided between those schools that are in big-time college sports, paying the players, and are essentially in the entertainment business, and all the rest, who are essentially in the education business. And parents would have a pretty clear idea where to send their kids.”
Sperber envisions that vast majority of schools that don’t want to play in the big arena dropping down to Division III or club status, where scandals are rare.
So how likely is such a scenario? As far-fetched as it seems, it might not be so far off. While it’s hard to imagine the legislative efforts in Nebraska and Texas having much impact because they’re so isolated, the idea of amateurism in big-time college sports may meet its Waterloo in the courts.
What if Chris Webber, angry over his allegedly unsated hunger for a Big Mac, had sued the University of Michigan, claiming that the value of his scholarship was chump change in comparison to the profits he created for the basketball program? It’s not so hard to imagine a court agreeing that Webber was a paid professional whose salary was artificially limited to the cost of a scholarship. There is precedent in a successful class-action lawsuit against the NCAA by so-called restricted coaches, entry-level assistants. The courts found that an NCAA salary cap for restricted coaches violated antitrust law.
A player winning such a suit would change everything, should that victory survive NCAA appeals that would undoubtedly be fierce and sustained.
“It seems to me it would cut through the bullshit,” Sperber says.
About two weeks ago, my son asked me how a team with an imposing lineup like the New York Knicks could possibly have a losing record. “Because they have no point guard,” I said. They played like strangers. Either nobody wanted the ball or everybody did. Long intervals would pass without the Knicks putting up a decent shot — although being NBA players they often made enough bad ones to stay close.
Well, as the world knows, they have a point guard now. The feel-good story of Jeremy Lin, the underdog Chinese-American player from Harvard, has made NBA fans of millions who scarcely know the 24-second clock from a goaltending call. Here’s hoping they stick around, because it’s a heck of a show. Meanwhile, how about if we dialed down the ethnic sensitivity meter until the kid settles in?
As a lifelong basketball guy married to a coach’s daughter, I’m bewildered by people who say they love the college game but dislike the professionals. Around our house, the end of the NBA owner’s lockout was cause for celebration. It was going to be a long winter without “Da lig” as ESPN’s Hubie Brown pronounces it.
Does my sainted wife ever wish I didn’t watch a NBA game most nights? Absolutely. But I’d also bet you $20 she can name the Boston Celtics’ starting five. As for my sons, well, freeloading off dad’s NBA Season Pass helps keep us together. Some families argue about politics and religion; we bicker about LeBron James and the Miami Heat.
Anyway, from a strictly basketball perspective, what’s not to like about Jeremy Lin? The kid’s got a nice all-around game and an ideal point guard’s temperament; he’d sooner pass than shoot. He’s aggressive, but rarely forces plays that aren’t there. He’s got terrific court awareness and tactical smarts. He makes adjustments.
If Magic Johnson says Lin’s the real thing, that’s good enough for me. Magic’s always diplomatic, but he doesn’t lie.
However, Lin also commits too many turnovers. His on-ball defense is suspect. The New Jersey Nets’ Deron Williams recently lit him up for 38, shooting threes over him at will. Lin’s no Derrick Rose, Steve Nash or Rajon Rondo yet. We’ll see how his stamina holds up through a full NBA season; he’s wondered aloud about it himself. The Knicks need to find a backup; if Lin keeps playing 46 minutes every game, he’ll get hurt.
As for the hype, if the Knicks had Ricky Rubio, the brilliant 20-year-old Spanish point guard for Minnesota, Spike Lee would be sitting at courtside in a bullfighter costume, and people would be writing dopey articles about the link between flamenco rhythms and basketball. It’s just New York being New York.
“Linsanity” ain’t necessarily good for its object. There may be days when Lin wishes he could change places with Rubio.
Few NBA fans are astonished at an Asian-American player achieving stardom. It’s been an international league for years. (Ivy Leaguers aren’t unknown in the NBA either. Remember Bill Bradley? He ran for president.) There are NBA players from all five continents and Australia. One could put together an all-star team from Spain, Germany, Turkey, France, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Serbia and Great Britain that could compete against an all-American squad.
All racial and ethnic theories of basketball are bunk.
Religious ones too. Maybe the most absurd commentary came from the New York Times columnist David Brooks, who pronounced Lin an “anomaly” as “a religious person in professional sports.” Brooks, who evidently doesn’t own a TV set, has somehow missed all those jocks thanking their Lord and personal savior for hitting home runs and throwing touchdown passes, silly boys.
Look, Jeremy Lin is a fellow fortunate enough to make a handsome living putting an inflated rubber ball through an iron hoop, as millions of his clumsier brethren dreamed of doing in our youth. Watching him gives the rest of us a playground break, sometimes with adult beverages and cute cheerleaders. It has no transcendental meaning. It’s a ballgame.
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady probably said it best.
“Look at the attention I get,” he said. “It’s because I throw a football. But that’s what society values. That’s not what God values. God could give a [bleep] … He didn’t invent the game. We did. I have some eye-hand coordination, and I can throw the ball. I don’t think that matters to God.”
Meanwhile cueing up the MSNBC fake-outrage machine over a dumb ESPN headline about “a chink in the Knicks’ armor” doesn’t advance racial harmony. It impedes it. The phrase is what we pedants call a “homonym” — two unconnected words with identical pronunciation. It’s a hoary sports cliché having nothing to do with ethnicity.
The dope who wrote it in a 2:30 a.m. haze has apologized, and Lin was gracious enough to accept. So should everybody else.
Last week, I wrote a Salon essay about my experiences with racial bullying growing up in northern Minnesota; particularly, a pair of girls who decided to sing “ching-ching-a-ling” and pull their eyes into slits when they saw me in seventh-grade gym class. It was painful to write, and — from the responses I received — pretty painful to read, especially by anyone who had experienced bullying. Thus, it felt almost as if counteracting forces in the universe were acting to promote Jeremy Lin’s farm-team-to-bench-to-global-superstar ascent in the basketball world. Finally! Being Asian American was cool, not something to be bullied over.
I happened to be in New York at the apogee of Lin hysteria, and I stopped into a sports store near Times Square in hopes of scoring his jersey as a Valentine’s Day present for my husband. After swimming through a chaotic but amiable crowd, despite it being near midnight, I was dismayed to find only unwanted XXXXXXXL sizes. A clerk confirmed there were no more; in fact they’d just gotten their first shipment — and it had been decimated by feral shoppers.
Lin’s appeal has been decoded for two weeks now, and much of what has been said is true: As an Asian American, my ethnic pride has me following his career when I don’t even like basketball. He went to Harvard. A handshake with a teammate involves books, glasses and pocket protectors. One signature of his game is that he passes to teammates and makes everyone better; he isn’t a lonewolf showboater. Lin not only upends the nerdy Asian stereotypes, he owns them.
Yet I also hear white males unabashedly talk about weeping while watching him play. Other friends who, like me, don’t usually follow basketball know that he had a game on such-and-such night and scored more points that Kobe Bryant. The sports-store crowd in which I was displaying my Tae Kwon Do shopper skills was decidedly multiracial, multi-generational, multi-aged. We all want our Lin.
No athlete of late — particularly an Asian American athlete — has caught our American imaginations like this. To be Lin-spired is to watch Jeremy Lin on the court and want a little bit of that for yourself — you don’t want to be him, necessarily, you want to be a little more yourself. That’s why, as opposed to the recent editorials crowing the tired, ready-made (and implicitly condescending) narrative that he “transcends” race, the reality is quite the opposite. He’s not an Asian American Tim Tebow. His appeal comes from his unapologetic owning of who he is, whether that encompasses being Taiwanese American, a baller, a Harvard grad, economics major, a Christian, a nerd. He projects his specific Lin-ness with such grace and aplomb, it’s impossible not to be a little awed by that, to want a little Lin-spiration for yourself.
As a person who shares little of the above (just the nerdiness and the economics major) with Lin, when I watch him play, something deep inside me resonates, almost as if I am the one leaping like a gazelle and whisking in a three-pointer in the nail-biting last seconds of a tied game. This is I, graceful, unpressured, even as a person who cannot tie my shoes properly if someone is watching me.
What ties me to Lin is seeing that he is doing what he is good at and exactly what he wants to be doing. Which is what we all strive to do. Watching the ferocious joy — and the peace — that suffuses his face as he plays, this is the same feeling I have when I, a professional writer, am writing a great sentence. Flannery O’Connor, when asked why she writes, explains, “because I’m good at it.” What is life if not to find our purpose, our skill, pursue it, and to go for broke, as Jeremy Lin has done?
This week, the bloom is slightly off the rose. Not for Lin — he’s still on fire, still passing to his teammates. But deeply entrenched anti-Asian sentiments that lurk beneath the tectonic plates of society have to burp to the surface at some point (can we take a moment to remember that in the wide swath of American history, Japanese Americans were the only group ever to be interned on the basis of race/ethnicity?). There was ESPN’s sad and sadly predictable straight-from-the-bullies’-playbook “Chink in the Armor” headline about Lin done twice, both on its web site and spoken by an anchor. There was FoxSports.com’s Jason Whitlock’s “Some lucky lady’s gonna feel a few inches of pain” tweet, MSG’s airing the image of Lin’s head coming out of a fortune cookie, sportswriter Buzz Bissinger’s ingenious idea that Lin and Michael Vick should start a dog-meat (“Vietnamese-style”) restaurant, and the seemingly positive but still racially based “AMASIAN!” New York Post’s headline (just try substituting any other racial/ethnic group in there and see how that feels).
But ironically, these events have only strengthened the Jeremy Lin magic. He gracefully forgave the ESPN commentators, accepting their explanation of an “honest” mistake (while to me, it sounds just like my bully claiming she had amnesia during junior high and thus could not remember bullying me). Perhaps even more importantly, ESPN took it seriously, fired the headline writer and suspended the commentator. This is a seismic change for Asian America. It was in 1982 when Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American out for his bachelor party in Detroit ended up dead, pelted by racial epithets, his head bludgeoned by a baseball bat by some out-of-work autoworkers who were mad at Japan (“It’s because of you … that we’re out of work!”). The two murderers served no time, and were fined $3,000. It is easy for white males like Buzz Bissinger to say racial epithets are no big deal, that Lin continues to play well despite them — but racial epithets are only a verbal expression of the poison that exists inside.
I don’t necessarily feel ESPN hustled to punish the “Chink in the Armor” perpetrators out of a sense of racial justice, but even if not, Jeremy Lin, with his talent, popularity and his humanity has forced the people who cheer him on to acknowledge that he’s a person, as opposed to the way Asian Americans are so frequently seen as Wesley Yang wrote in New York magazine last year: “a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.”
I endured months of racial bullying, two girls to my one. It wasn’t until some “tough” girls took it upon themselves to stop the bullying, that I realized how pernicious my internalizing of the “ching-a-ling” trope. I thought I was ignoring the bullies, but what I was doing was not defending myself. By their action, the tough girls showed me I was worth defending. Just yesterday, as I have been continuing to muse publicly on the sad spectacle of racism following in the wake of Jeremy Lin’s rise, I received an angry note from a white man saying “Be like Jeremy Lin and GET OVER IT!” Now, I can tell him, yes, I try, but somehow I just can’t get over racism. Or having white men telling me how I should feel.
But perhaps Lin-spiration can help us see we are all special selves, worthy of nurturing, cheering on, and defending. Indeed, it might take you from thinking, “…I wish I were a baller… I wish I were taller…” to a place where you might find a little more joy in being yourself, just a little bit better.
David Brooks had to write a column about something, and his deadline was fast approaching, so he glanced at the sports page and saw something about New York Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin, and he was like, yeah, that works. Next stop, most-emailed list!
Lin is a point guard who rocketed to near-instant celebrity when he came off the bench and had a series of monster games, dragging the Knicks to a .500 record while their two biggest superstars were sitting out games. His celebrity then became a “mania” in part because he’s Asian-American and a Harvard graduate, two rarities in the NBA. It also obviously doesn’t hurt that he plays for the dominant team in the nation’s biggest media market (also it’s the fallow period between football and baseball). That’s basically the whole deal, and if you’d like to learn more read Andrew Leonard’s account of the early social media explosion and Alexander Chee’s take on Lin and Asian-American identity. Whatever you do, don’t read David Brooks’ take on the Lin phenomenon, because David Brooks doesn’t understand basketball or social media or race or religion or American society in general.
Here is Brooks’ first paragraph:
Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.
Here is the next sentence:
We’ve become accustomed to the faith-driven athlete and coach, from Billy Sunday to Tim Tebow.
Haha OK. This is the point where you hit “select all” and then “delete” and start your column again. Brooks must’ve started this thing like 10 minutes before his deadline. (No time to edit it!)
So, yes, a “religious person in professional sports” is like the least anomalous thing in the world, besides maybe “a racist comment under a YouTube video.” Or “an old white guy in political punditry.” (Also, minor note, but: I think there’s actually a decent number — enough to make Lin not particularly “anomalous” — of prominent Asians and Asian-Americans in professional sports, unless you’re only defining “Asian-American” as “of East Asian descent” and you’re only counting the “big four” leagues as “professional sports.” And you’re not really counting baseball.)
While Lin’s Christianity is obviously of great importance to Lin, it honestly has barely anything to do with what made him an instant superstar, except for when hacks want to compare him to Tim Tebow, which is dumb, because Lin is suddenly famous because he’s really good at his sport while Tebow’s whole shtick is succeeding despite being awful at being a quarterback. (If Lin had been a college superstar and high draft pick who was famously inept at the fundamentals of his position, the Tebow thing would be an accurate comparison, but Lin is in fact the opposite of that.)
Having contradicted his own faulty premise five sentences into his column, Brooks rambles on about how he has noticed that being good at sports and being pious is sort of contradictory, because being good at sports doesn’t involve much “humility” or “self-abnegation.” Then we have some boilerplate theological musings, about how sports is like modern society and how Abrahamic religious values contradict modern cultural values, especially regarding individual achievement. (YAWN.)
But even while grappling with the tension between religious values and contemporary cultural values, which is basically well within Brooks’ wheelhouse, he demonstrates a hilarious misunderstanding of sports, and what sports are “about,” because Mr. Brooks has been spending far too much time in his cloistered elite liberal media ivory tower munching on brie and arugula and not enough time among Real Americans in their “Sporting Taverns” watching “The Big Game” over a pint of mass-market domestic lager.
For many religious teachers, humility is the primary virtue. You achieve loftiness of spirit by performing the most menial services. (That’s why shepherds are perpetually becoming kings in the Bible.) You achieve your identity through self-effacement. You achieve strength by acknowledging your weaknesses. You lead most boldly when you consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause.
I could be wrong, but “consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause” is basically step three of “how to be good at team sports,” after “be gifted physically” and “practice a lot.” (And acknowledging your weaknesses? Like when Magic would spend the off-season practicing “the weakest part of his game” until he improved it?)
The “two moral universes” of religion and societal achievement may be “irreconcilable” — I am not a religious person and hence don’t care — but that has very little to do with Jeremy Lin, or basketball, or politics, which Brooks for some reason brings up in the last paragraph, because he wants to pretend this column has been about something other than extended free-associative riffing on the fact that a famous person is religious.
In conclusion, the New York Times should probably consider having someone take a quick glance at David Brooks’ columns before they publish them.
Lin-sanity has broken out all over the world. The kid nobody in the NBA wanted, from an ethnic group about as associated with the NBA as bullfighters are with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, had just broken Shaquille O’Neal’s league record for the most points in his first five games as a starter. Adoring fans are holding up signs saying “To Lin-finity and beyond.” The Lin-ternet has broken under the strain of millions of tweets, many of them featuring even worse puns than “Lin-ternet.” Sports Illustrated put him on its cover.
And, of course, Asian-Americans are going wild.
I’m one of them. As a half-Japanese, half-white ex-jock, I’ve always followed and rooted for that tiny number of Asian-Americans who make it in any of my three favorite sports, the all-American Big Three of football, basketball and baseball. (There are lots of Asian baseball players, but not many Asian-Americans.) Half-Japanese players get even more points. The triumphs of Olympic speed skater Apolo Ohno had me feeling my half-breed oats. And when former Giants’ hurler Atlee Hammaker, a hapa like me, melted down in the 1987 playoffs, my inner mulatto got a lot more tragic.
There’s no great mystery why I root for Asian-American jocks. It’s the same reason any member of a minority group pulls for one of their own: racial pride and solidarity. There are so damn few of “us” in the big leagues (I’m an “us” with an asterisk) that when one makes it, it’s cause for celebration.
The first thing to note about Lin-mania is that America is basically just fine with it. The mainstream media features photos of Asian fans wearing Lin T-shirts and runs stories in which they are quoted as expressing racial pride. It is all deemed benign and heartwarming, a multicultural Cinderella story in which everyone wins. The Asian kid overcomes impossible odds and racial stereotypes – if white men can’t jump, Asian men are not even supposed to be able to hop – to make it in the NBA. Horatio Alger meets the Statue of Liberty in the land of the melting pot.
But race is such a minefield in American society, and honest conversation about it is so constrained by politically correct politeness, that even the Lin story makes people tongue-tied, as if they thought that admitting that yes, people root for players because of their race would cause the Ku Klux Klan to rise again.
Case in point: an ESPN panel’s reaction to boxer Floyd Mayweather’s now-notorious tweet in which he said, “Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise.” The latter part of Mayweather’s comment, implying that black players are not praised the way Lin has been because of racism, is a total crock, another one of Mayweather’s heavy-handed attempts to provoke a race controversy. But his comment that the hype over Lin is because he’s Asian is clearly true. Not all the hype, but most of it – and the most interesting part of it – is precisely because Lin is Asian. Does anyone think SI would put Lin on the cover if he were black or white?
This is so obvious that it strains credulity to think that anyone would even try to dispute it. And yet when four panelists on ESPN’s First Take were asked to comment on Mayweather’s comments, only one of the four, Bomani Jones, was able to forthrightly acknowledge it. Absurdly, sports reporter Beto Duran actually denied that Lin’s race had anything to do with the hype, saying it was simply because “he’s balling.” Eventually, they all admitted that race played a role in the hype, but their reluctance to go there spoke volumes about how radioactive all discussions of race in sports continue to be.
And the Lin story is the most non-threatening possible race-in-sports story, one involving a societal minority group that is also so underrepresented in the NBA as to be positively exotic. If America has trouble admitting that it’s OK for Asians – or members of any other race, for that matter – to root for Jeremy Lin because he’s Asian, just imagine how it deals with the issue of white people rooting for athletes because they’re white. Even to suggest such a thing is considered way out of bounds.
But there’s nothing wrong with it. I’ve been doing it for years. And it’s completely racially innocent.
Just as the Asian part of me celebrates the unlikely success of Jeremy Lin, the white part of me celebrates the almost equally unlikely success of New England Patriot running back Danny Woodhead. Rooting for white players who break out of racial stereotypes is harmless. It does not mean rooting against black players or those of any other race. It’s fun. And I suspect a lot of other people do it, too.
I’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh and his followers, most of whom I suspect are bigots who are rooting against black players as much as they are rooting for white ones. (In a brilliant, half-crazy 2003 essay in the New York Review of Books, “The White Man Unburdened,” Norman Mailer argued that one of the reasons Americans supported Bush’s Iraq war was that so many reactionary white men needed to regain a masculinity threatened when their white sports stars were replaced by blacks.) I’m talking about people who are able to acknowledge the reality that white running backs and cornerbacks are almost as rare as Asian point guards, and are sufficiently free from racial uptightness or self-consciousness to root for them for precisely that reason.
I’ve never agreed with the quasi-official view, expressed in endless “diversity” seminars held by big corporations and piously promulgated in schools and universities, that everyone is to some degree a racist and needs to engage in constant Maoist “constructive self-criticism” to become more racially enlightened. That ortho-liberal view has always struck me as a sterile guilt-trip, a recipe for racial constipation that only breeds more racial animosity and misunderstanding. However, it does contain a grain of truth. Everyone is not a racist, but everyone is aware of race. Unfortunately, much of the time this awareness is lugubrious and heavy, both because of America’s long and painful history of racism and because we haven’t come up with any lighter ways of dealing with race. Sports offers one of those ways.
When I root for white NFL players like Danny Woodhead or retired New York Giants’ cornerback Jason Sehorn, or white 2004 Olympic 400-meter gold medalist Jeremy Wariner, I’m not rooting against black athletes. In fact, the very fact white running backs or cornerbacks or 400 runners are so rare is a testament to the sheer dominance of African-American athletes at those ultimate bad-ass positions. It just makes my white-boy self happy to have a few Caucasians in that Olympian company. It’s exactly the same attitude expressed by Charles Barkley when he says, “Steve Nash is one bad white boy.” Is acknowledging this really going to make Lester Maddox rise from the grave, baseball bat in hand?
I suspect that many of those white fans who do root for unlikely white stars are uneasy about acknowledging it for the same reason that they (rightfully) believe that only blacks can use the n-word. It’s the liberal racial double standard, which is predicated on the fact that racism, in particular bigotry against black people, is still very much alive. (Have you checked out the GOP primaries lately?) Charles Barkley is allowed to say “Steve Nash is one bad white boy,” but white people are not, because when they do, it could be construed as racism. White talk about race in America is governed by a priori semiotic censorship: Any statement that could be interpreted as racially suspect is ruled out.
This prior restraint on white speech makes sense in some areas. If someone goes around complaining that white people are all discriminated against and black people get all the breaks, and celebrates some white businessman for that reason, he’s either a fool, a racist or a demagogue. (See above comment about the GOP primaries.) But cheering for white running backs or cornerbacks is different. They aren’t discriminated against. It’s just that 99 percent of the time, they aren’t good enough to play the position. That’s a fact. And when they do make it, it’s fun to identify with them.
It would be stupid to make too big a deal out of this. It’s strictly lighthearted. It’s a holiday from racial politeness, a bit of benign tribalism. I don’t usually hold with tribalism, but we all have a little of it in us, and as long as it’s innocent, we might as well enjoy it from time to time. Besides, as someone who has covered three Olympics, I can attest that national tribalism trumps racial or ethnic tribalism. Every red-blooded American, of whatever race, watching the finals of the 4×100-meter relays at Sydney or Athens was for that moment an honorary black person.
And anyway, it’s all changing. When I saw Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang win the 110 meter hurdles in Athens, I knew that the world of sports would never be the same again. Races and ethnicities are mixing more and more, old athletic stereotypes are dying, and great athletes are popping up in the most unexpected places. Right now, the Jeremy Lin show has captured the world. Tomorrow, a black hockey player will challenge Wayne Gretzky as the Great One, or a heavyweight champion will come from Iceland. The infinite diversity of the human race is displayed in all its glory in sports, and there’s nothing wrong with appreciating every last part of it. Even if it means rooting for a bad white boy.
I have never cared about basketball, ever. Not once. Yet inside of the last two weeks I have learned what a point guard is, what he does and why it matters. I had a roller-coaster night Saturday, when I wanted to watch a New York Knicks game for the first time, then learned that a squabble between Madison Square Garden and Time Warner has left about 1 million fans without MSG Channel (including me). I didn’t even know how to start finding a bar with the game on — something I’ve previously resented, in fact — so I contented myself by watching the video diaries on Lin’s YouTube channel.
Days later, sometime yesterday, in fact, when I caught myself reading a post about the couch Jeremy Lin slept on before his first night as the Knicks’ new star point guard, I had two reactions. First, it didn’t look big enough for him. The next one: Wait, who am I — and more important, what is happening to me? It was like I was in a “Portlandia” sketch about Linsanity.
The gated community that was the NBA has had a crasher arrive and jump the fence: JLin, the Linja, the Linsanity, Super Lintendo, the Yellow Mamba to Kobe Bryant’s Black Mamba. (Kobe learned this the hard way the other night, when the Knicks beat his Lakers, right after he had asked “Who is this kid?”) That nickname alone is as good a place as any to begin. Before Jeremy Lin arrived, there was not even the thought of a Yellow Mamba. There was no major Asian American NBA star who captured the hearts of fans. There were no fans wearing cutout masks of an Asian American player courtside as a group. Houston Rockets center Yao Ming may have been a forerunner, but he was an import, the beloved alien.
The NBA, much like America’s conversation about race, has been something of a black and white ball — and Asian American stars were simply not invited to the dance. Consider the college coaches who overlooked him because they “didn’t have a frame of reference” for his talents, or the NBA teams that released Lin, suddenly red-faced as the moribund Knicks win six straight.
Whatever screen you’re watching on, your phone, computer or TV, it’s the Jeremy Lin show now, and the whole country is tuning in. The boxer Floyd Mayweather insisting that Lin’s only getting attention because he’s Asian — do we think Floyd knows anything about basketball? There are Pinterest posts of his sixth-grade class photo and endless online nickname contests. He’s everywhere you look. When was the last time you saw a bigger crush of people trying to nickname a new star?
This urge to nickname Lin is an effort by people to act like they know him. What we’re learning, however, is that he’s as difficult to pin down culturally as he is on the court. He continues to defy expectations. Maybe you thought there were no tall Asians, didn’t know about Asian Christians or didn’t think Asians could play basketball. Maybe you never cared about basketball, never cared about the Knicks. Or maybe you didn’t need a crash course on what a point guard does. Maybe you thought you were done with Christian sports figures. Either way, chances are you’ve learned something new watching Jeremy Lin, about him, yourself and other people.
My first thought on seeing Jeremy Lin was that he reminded me of my cousins. Like many, I felt like I knew him. He’s a kind of kid I’ve seen my whole life — funny, smart, quick and brave. And Asian American. When I heard he was a Harvard grad, I thought: Of course, the first Asian American NBA superstar also had to go to Harvard and get better than a 3.0. And then: Way to raise the stakes on the Asian American overachiever. It’s still true that whatever color you are in America, if you’re not white you have to be twice as good to get half as far. But the Jeremy Lin paradox is that this champion — this skinny kid just out of college, this overlooked smiling Taiwanese American kid with, as we say, ‘the good Asian hair’ that is thick and stands straight up — he is making room for the rest of us. Part of the Jeremy Lin moment is America looking at an Asian American and realizing he’s just an American, too.
The great irony to his moment is that Jeremy Lin as a national figure is so much better than anyone I might have dreamed up as a possible solution to a problem with a body count: Asian Americans are currently the No. 1 most bullied demographic in America. The same invisibility that kept Jeremy Lin outside the “frame of reference” of coaches also kept the two different units who hounded Cpl. Harry Lew and Pvt. Danny Chen to suicide last year with constant racist taunts and physical abuse from realizing they were well outside the limits of respectful internal military discipline.
It would be laying way too much on Jeremy Lin to ask him to help turn this around, as if he didn’t have enough to do as point guard for the Knicks. But we don’t have to ask him — it is already just happening. Jeremy Lin’s getting slapped around a lot at Madison Square Garden, but it’s all love — when he drained that game-winning three-pointer in the last half-second against Toronto Tuesday night, he was covered in punches — the kind you can only give the hero who pulls it out of the bag. I still have a strange impulse when I see him, like I want to run out there, help on defense — me who has never played basketball! — or yell “Back up off the skinny kid!” even when they rush him with love. It’s just from a whole lifetime of watching bullying happen, a lifetime of people — white, black, Latin — coming up to me, my brother, my sister, my cousins, muttering under their breath “Ching Chong Ching Chong,” the prelude to a beating. But it’s only post-traumatic stress disorder; it’s not the present. No one on the Knicks is saying that to him. He has this.
And while Jeremy Lin may not single-handedly make all of the bullying go away, somewhere in America, at least one Asian American kid right now is getting invited into a pick-up game instead of cornered and beaten. That’s the game that matters, more than anything you’ll see during a Knicks game. And Lin is helping win that one, too.
(Credit: Reuters/Eduardo Munoz) 
Jeremy Lin (Credit: Reuters/Adam Hunger) 
David Brooks 
Why so excited? (Credit: Reuters/Mike Cassese) 
Fans of Jeremy Lin hold up signs during the second half of the New York Knicks/Toronto Raptors game on Tuesday. (Credit: Reuters/Mike Cassese) 
