Because You Never Asked

(8/04)

     Although 2004 is an Olympic year, it is not this essay's purpose to dwell into the Olympic experience, an exercise performed previously in these pages on numerous occasions. (See "Sports" category in Table of Contents). But the Athens Games of 2004 provided the basketball venue that spawned the following commentary.

     Basketball is an American game, born and bred from sea to shining sea. It's greatest expression has always come from the gyms and schoolyards of the American Dream, and generally still does. Unlike other sports incubated in North America such as baseball and American football, whose rules, physical facilities, complex equipment, etc., make them somewhat difficult to export, basketball, with its simplistic concept and minimal material needs, has overrun the world like the "Yanqui" army protecting an oil field. Until about 15 years ago, the United States dominated international competition with enough ease to send its collegiate amateurs in defense of its hoops pride. When a Soviet team, spurred on by a controversial officiating blunder, finally defeated them in the '72 Games, it was still easy to rationalize such an unjust, fluke result. But by 1988, when the Soviets handily defeated America's university stars, it was obvious the bar had been raised forever. The United States, with its ego throbbing like an enlarged prostate, decided to set things right once and for all.

     The '92 Barcelona Games saw the coming of the original "Dream Team", a maximum expression of professional talent led by the likes of Bird, Magic, Jordan, Malone, Barkley & Co. This imperial army of athletic dominance put down this foreign round ball rebellion with all the ruthlessness of a colonial power subduing an uprising of third world subjects. Order had been restored. Don't come in here with that crap again. Long live the King!

     The world's only basketball super power went home and got back to sleep.

     Just 11 years later, during the 2003 World Championships in Indianapolis (at home, no less), the giant was rudely awakened. A team full of high name recognition NBA millionaires was not just beaten, but beaten 3 times by Spain, Argentina and Yugoslavia.

     OK, you caught us off guard. The team just showed up and thought it would be easy. We'll be ready the next time.

     The next time arrived at Athens 2004. A similar team full of NBA studs was assembled, certainly not the best team possible, but a formidable group nonetheless. As I write, the team has had to settle for a bronze medal, having lost to Italy in a preparatory game and 3 times in the Olympic tournament to Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico!), Lithuania and Argentina. (The populations of the former two countries combined could not fill New York City.) With the exception of winless Angola, they have been seriously challenged in every game, dominating nobody.

     If the reader is not one of the approximately 6 billion people who are not familiar with this ever-growing pot of chicken soup philosophy, you already know that this writer never writes about anything without there being a grander purpose beyond the more obvious. With this in mind, this essay will now dwell much less on the sporting aspects of this Olympic basketball trauma and move more into the sociological terrain. It's about to get ugly.

     American teams competing in international play are either all or almost all Afro-Americans. Athens and Indianapolis showed nary a white body amongst its pedigree. The teams that have begun to compete successfully against them, with the exception of Puerto Rico's mulatto-like racial hodge-podge, have been very white. The Great White Hope, which is a concept that assumes a degree of racism, has arrived.

     Racism is a disease the United States has struggled with nobly over the last ½ century (see essay "Racism"). The fact that the race issue has been overtly absent in America's scalding critique of its fallen basketball Demi-Gods, is some indication of the progress made in this sensitive socio-segment of life's travails. But lurking lightly on the breath of most fans and pundits is a halitosis of residual racism the sensitive nose begins to smell with regularity. This racism comes in 2 varieties: 1) the usual denigration of people of color, and 2) a subtle form of reverse racism that most people afflicted with don't even know is present.

     America's discontent --- one might even say anger --- with this latest edition of its basketball pride, sports a fairly consistent array of oft-repeated mantras. Both fan and pundit alike blame much of the disappointing results on an assorted collection of character flaws attributed to the players. As I get ready to enumerate these alleged character flaws, I remind the reader --- and beg forgiveness to the Redundancy Gods --- that these much maligned American players are all black while their opposition is very white.

     Much of the criticism has been ripe with insinuations that the Americans are lazy, unmotivated, that they lack pride and don't want to really work hard. Many have said that they lack the guts to dig deeper when things get tough, that they have no self-esteem, they are sloth-like and shiftless . that they just don't care. Even worse is a repetitive accusation that they are just a bunch of punks, thugs or gangsters, with their tattoos, corn rows, shaved heads and other assorted hip-hop accessories. The poster boy for this kind of defamation has been the team's captain, Alan Iverson, who has never been seen in a blue blazer or topsiders, even though the powers to be exploited his athletic talents for 2 years at Georgetown "blue blood" University.

     If you are not able to see some nexus between these kinds of comments and the team's racial makeup, there's a bridge I own that connects Brooklyn with Manhattan that I can sell you cheap.    

     But when it comes to analyzing the disappointing performance of Dream Team 2004, there is one comment that is conspicuous for its absence. It is almost impossible to find anyone giving credit to the opposition for their athletic skill. It's as if this had nothing to do with anything.

     And that brings us to the more subtle kind of reverse racism referred to above.

     Most basketball fans will surely remember one Nolan Richardson. Richardson is a black man who made his fame coaching at the University of Arkansas, where he won a National Championship while building the program into a perennial powerhouse. He never had any trouble speaking his mind, a trait that eventually got him run out of Arkansas . but that's another story.

     In any event, Richardson had a pet peeve when it came to how black coaches were perceived. It annoyed the hell out of him that they were always praised for being good recruiters, or excellent motivators, or that they related well to the modern player, etc., but were never given credit for being good tacticians or strategists, for being good bench coaches or X's and O's men. In other words, they were never given credit for being smart coaches.

     Like all statements of this kind, there is probably some degree of truth and exaggeration mixed together in its formulation. It is not this essay's purpose to further dwell into the matter. Its relevance here is as follows:

     As I listened to the endless commentary dissecting the American failure, I began to realize that Richardson's bitch was being played out in reverse. The poor performance of the Dream Team was due to the other teams' better preparation, or smarter play, or more mature attitude, or greater pride in playing for their country, or greater attention to detail, or superior fundamentals, or less egotistical teamwork, or, or, or . or anything but their athletic ability. It was as if a white man could not be a great athlete, could not run fast enough, jump high enough, or have the skills necessary to actually compete with a team of black men, unless it had something to do with guile, intelligence or intangibles of one sort or another. For the black sports pundit in America expressing such views (and there were many), I remind you that you are not only unfairly minimizing the athletic qualities of the teams beating your countrymen, but girl slapping yourselves for being outsmarted or outworked by them. In a sense, you are perpetrating the fraud of your own intellectual deficiency.

     I don't mean to sound too critical or pessimistic here.  As the world becomes a smaller, more connected place, all these misconstrued racial-ethnic-cultural profilings that linger on as the familiarization process continues, will slowly --- and not without some pain --- fade away. Someday, if people like the Bush Crime Family don't lead us to some kind of apocalyptic setback, we will all be making babies with one another and all this racial trauma will be reserved for the history books. I write this essay in hopes of moving that process along.