Shaq--A Racist?

[FuzzieAlum]

I don't think his comments prove Shaq is racist. (On the other hand, that doesn't mean he isn't, either.) Sports has a long history of trash-talking your opponents. Whether it's a high school pre-football game pep assembly, or professional athletes sniping at each other, it's a form of showmanship. Now I'm not saying it's mature or even a good idea! I'm just saying it has a whole lot of precedent.

But if you're going to put your opponent down, what are you going to use? Probably not a thoughtful analysis of strategy - athletes leave that to the sports reporters. And even if you know them well it probably won't be some detail of their life - after all, the point of trash talk is for the public to understand it, too. You're going to use whatever is blatantly and publicly distinctive about that person. If you wanted to put down Dennis Rodman, it would be some smartass comment about weird hair. If it's the Jamaican bobsled team, it's the fact that there isn't any snow in Jamaica. And in this case, since statistically Asian players are a rarity in the NBA, it's race. What else does your average basketball fan even know about the guy?

To my mind, it's a good reason to turn off the ESPN. I personally admire the athlete who succeeds without the bluster.

I just think that Shaq's comment probably falls into the column of Idiotic Macho Sports Talk rather than racism. It's more like "We're going to smack the Polytechnic Engineers with their own slide rules!" than anything. It doesn't mean you actually hate engineers; it means you want your football team to defeat theirs. (And with a lame phrase like that, you can see why I never wrote school assembly skits.)