Playing While White

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted June 15, 2005.

It wasn't too long ago that Miami Herald columnist Dan Le Batard, a sportswriter covering Shaquille O'Neal's team beat, recently and infamously argued that the race was a determining factor in the NBA's selection of the undersized white point guard Steve Nash for its coveted Most Valuable Player award.

This was a scant few games before the diminutive Nash went about leading his run-n-gun steamroller to the Western Conference Finals while the hulking Shaq spent most of his time wondering whether or not he was ever going to be able to get up off the stretcher and help his team win a game. The fact that Shaq's team lost, like Nash's, in its own Conference Finals has done less to cement Le Batard's conspiracy theory than it has to convince most everyone that the NBA made the right decision; after all, it was loss of Shaq's teammate Dwayne Wade that spelled doom for the Heat, not Shaq himself. So much for the debate over who's the most valuable player in the league.

But Le Batard's cranky screed is still relevant, because there was no shortage of shrift tossed Nash's way on his path to league respectability. For example, Le Batard's called Nash's selection "unprecedented." But Boston Celtics guard Bob Cousy, a player of similar stature and stats, won the award back in 1957. Then there was the accidental slam by NBA legend and announcer Bill Walton, always a rich source for blanket generalizations, who called Steve Nash the "least athletic point guard in the NBA" during a televised game to the total on-air surprise of fellow commentators Mike Tirico and Steve Jones. And this is taking into account that Walton picked Nash for MVP on ESPN as far back as early April.

So what's the problem? Well, in a sports league that's dominated by black athletes but owned by a stifling majority of whites, race -- and intimations of racism - is always the straw that stirs the coffee, especially when it comes to provocative sportswriting. In fact, Le Batard used Malcolm Gladwell's lightweight Blink as research material for his column, putting forward the not-so-groundbreaking thesis that white people, car salesmen in this case, subconsciously discriminated against blacks without knowing it. Or, as he inelegantly frames the analogy, "car salesmen weren't doing this with a conscious part of their brain any more than the MVP voters might have been."

Score one for the rigorist.

By telling us something that we already know -- namely, that NBA players are predominantly black and it's suspicious when a white guy wins the MVP -- Le Batard doesn't actually take us anywhere we haven't been already, especially if his chaser is that it is all being done beneath the veil of conscious thought. By removing the issue to the subconscious, Le Batard skips out on the responsibility of answering the questions he asks in lieu of playing the race card with zero interest in reaching an endgame. The truth of the matter is that race has everything to do with sports at every juncture, not just when a white guy wins an award.

"I think it would be difficult to find a situation in the NBA that does not carry a racial dimension to it," argues Amy Bass, editor of the recently released collection In the Game: Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century, "but does that mean that Nash's MVP is a particularly racialized moment? That is a different question, and in many ways the questions being asked about the Nash MVP moment reveal more than any of the answers."

"There's this notion of whites overcoming the superior athleticism of blacks when they succeed -- Bird, McHale, Stockton and Nash come to mind -- which is ridiculous on both sides," explains Adam Mansbach, author of the recently released race satire Angry Black White Boy, in which his white protagonist Macon Detornay, like Nash, enjoys a problematic spotlight in another black man's game, hip-hop. "Everybody in the gym is a superior athlete, and most are smart players, too, or they wouldn't make it that far. But there's also a corollary that comes with the so-called 'smart' black athlete, which the press tends to treat as anomalous. Ditto when a kid from the hood has discipline and his head on straight; that's treated as a human-interest story in itself. Whereas the social habits of white players seldom even get talked about, and certainly not in the same way, or with the same set of assumptions."

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared in Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, AOL and others.

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