The Convergence of Media, Sports, Race, and the Arts
The signs all are there. The end of a news cycle. The end of a coaching tenure. The end of focused, team basketball in New York.
The end, that is, of Linsanity. And, for many reasons, the end of watchable professional basketball.
Jeremy Lin, Mike Woodson and Carmelo Anthony.
Ugh.
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Bad taste
I don’t even have to sample Ben & Jerry’s limited-edition, Jeremy Lin-inspired flavor to know that it is tasteless.
After the furor the past week over race and ethnic profiling in over-the-top media coverage of the breakout star of the New York Knicks, for something like this to happen not only is inexcusable, it’s arrogant and incredibly stupid.
Ben & Jerry’s has apologized, but it seems they replaced the fortune cookie bits in the new ice cream flavor mainly because customers complained they got soggy.
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This headline on ESPN's mobile website was removed.
During the hours before the “chink” references at ESPN, I was convinced that many Asian Americans were willing to overlook Floyd Mayweather, Jason Whitlock, the New York Post’s “Amasian,” and myriad other public indignities in order to experience something so joyous and so spectacularly surprising as Jeremy Lin that even we, the people who are like him, have been conditioned to never have expected it.
Less than a week ago, in trying to explain what Lin means to Asian Americans, I wrote on ESPN.com that his feel-good run in the NBA would be a test of ”an Asian American’s ability to take the bad with the overwhelming good.”
We couldn’t be allowed to have even a fleeting, rapturous moment without the bad-good equation being utterly turned on its head by such a torrent of racially motivated indignation and political-correctness backlash that feels, in some ways, like open season has been declared on Asian Americans. I feel stupid and ashamed, true to my cultural conditioning, I suppose, that I ignored the reality of living in HaterNation, a place where the meek are allowed to rise because the mighty so enjoys shooting them full of holes during the inevitable fall. The past few days have taken us beyond that.
That “Chink in the Armor” happened is so unbelievable to me, it still feels like a bad dream. But it wasn’t the end of Linsanity; it hasn’t even been the worst part. Americans who are not of Asian descent are hijacking the discussion of how Asian Americans would like to be talked about, and that is the real kick in the groin.
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What comes around, goes around.
Where and when I grew up, we’d say that so often, it became a way of life, a way of thinking and believing. A lot of NBA players come up in similar circumstances, so I can’t imagine that they didn’t also hear that bit of wisdom uttered a time or two.
LeBron: What Comes Around
I don’t know the guy. He came after I stopped covering the NBA. After 17 years, it had become, for me, a league of antics. You know what I mean: Whenever there’s a crowd of adults, some kid runs up to the hot microphone and starts singing, or some boy throws a frog into a flock of girls. After starting out knowing Larry Bird, Earvin Johnson and Michael Jordan as genuine people, the league for me had devolved into a silly show with its players clamoring for more and more attention, as if all the dollars weren’t enough.
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The headline to this post is one of the greatest lines ever uttered to me during an interview. You probably don’t even have to guess from whom it came.
Shaq: "When you're a freak, freaky things happen."
I could go on a Shaqilicious rampage here, but I had my time and so did Shaquille O’Neal. Since he announced his retirement from pro ball, appropriately enough on Twitter, there already has been much written about his place in NBA history and his abundant nicknames. I just wanted to drop a few personal memories and acknowledge that it required Shaq’s retirement to prod me out of my mini-retirement from the blogosphere.
Way back when I was still a newspaper writer, I wrote a large piece about Shaq as an emerging crossover star (see Welcome to ShaqWorld). He hadn’t even won his first NBA title, though he’d dropped his first recorded verse and filmed an ill-fated movie. This was during a time when a writer could earn big-time access to superstars, and I hung around him for a few days in El-Lay.
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