Seahawks Draft Two Lunchpail Guys, Five Natural Athletes, and a #DIV/0
Nowhere is racial bigotry more starkly communicated than during coverage of the NFL draft.
If you're interested in the race of a recently-drafted player, you don't need to glance up to look at the guy's photo. No, just listen to the commentators: White draftees are "lunchpail guys" who have "motors that won't quit." Black players are "natural athletes" with "character issues."
Then we move on to the narration of the game film where we see white players "fight through blocks," while black players "seem to glide to the ball."
It's amazing that in sports, which has the most racially diverse workforce this side of political campaign ads, these reflexive racial stereotypes are so persistent. But persist they do.
Which is why we wish we'd been watching when the Seahawks picked Jordan Kent. Kent's father, Ernie, (Oregon's hoops coach), is black. His mother, Dianna, is white.
We're curious to see whether Kent gets lumped into the "natural athlete" category--he's certainly that, he lettered in football, basketball and track at Oregon, the first NCAA Division I player to do that in five years--or the "lunchpail guy" world--he's that too, he was a whirling dervish of defense and rebounding as a Duck basketball player.
The thing that's so ridiculous is that you simply can't play in the NFL, or any professional sport, without being a jaw-dropping athlete. Dave Barry captured the experience of actually trying to play a sport with a professional in a profile of Heat backup center Grant Long (a consummate lunch-pail guy).
Even the most marginal NBA player is an absurdly better athlete than an ordinary person. When basketball people say that Grant Long can't shoot, can't pass, can't dribble, what they mean is: He can shoot, pass and dribble better than you, better than anybody you know, better than all but a few hundred people in the world. Long's jump shot is so bad, by NBA standards, that his team never runs a play designed to set him up for it; but you could practice your jump shot every day forever and still never beat him in a game of Horse.Our point is, describing a black NFL prospect as a great "natural athlete" is not only marginally bigoted, it's totally stupid. These commenters obviously don't have anything intelligent to say, so they fall back on lame, meaningless stereotypes. They aren't really racist, they're just lazy. Talk about not bringing your lunchpail.One day Long and I were standing on the floor of the Miami Arena, talking. I was bouncing a basketball, and suddenly Long flicked his hand out, stole the ball, and started dribbling it. I tried to steal it back. I tried hard to steal it back, for about 30 seconds, and I never once touched it, despite the fact that Long, nearly a foot taller than I, was bouncing it to the height of my chest, and was making no effort to back away from me, or use his body as a shield.
The problem was that I was operating in Normal Person Time, which is slow motion for an NBA player. Long would be bouncing the ball so that it passed a foot from my hand, and I'd make my craftiest, slickest, lightning- quickest move for it, and Long - looking at me, not the ball - would casually alter the dribble, flick the ball through his legs, pick it up on the other side, leaving me lunging at air, time and again. But in the NBA, this is a guy whose ball-handling skills are considered to be zero. This is a guy who, if everything went according to the Heat game plan, would not dribble the ball once.
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