Flipped

It's hard to imagine that Duke guard J.J. Redick, possibly the best pure shooter on the planet, is only a junior. Can it really only have been three years that we've been watching him unconsciously sinking free throws and silencing opposing crowds with dagger-like three-pointers? If it seems like he's been at Duke forever, there's a simple explanation. He has.

As described in last week's Sports Illustrated, Redick is just the most recent in a long line of hated Blue Devils, a distinguished club of pretty boys who have relished in the role of public enemy number one. According to the article (I think you might have to be a subscriber to access the link), Redick embraces his role as the villain and most hated player in the ACC, but writer Grant Wahl raises an interesting point:

Yet there's something more at work here, something Redick is well aware of. Over time several Duke players have passed along the public-enemy title like a crown of thorns: Christian Laettner, Danny Ferry, Bobby Hurley, [Chris] Collins, Steve Wojciechowski. At the same time black Blue Devils stars such as Grant Hill, Jason Williams and Elton Brand have largely avoided becoming such targets. It may be un-PC to say so, but it's hard not to conclude that race is a factor.

This idea had never occurred to me before reading the article, but it makes some sense. Just off the top of my head, I came up with some of players that received the most abuse as they came through Maples Pavilion during my college days. Don McLean, UCLA. Matt Othick, Arizona. Steve Kerr, Arizona. All white.

What's the reason for this? First, there's the obvious racial stereotype that basketball is a black man's game. Blacks have outnumbered whites in the NBA for my entire life, and the idea has become so ingrained in our psyches that maybe it's gone from "blacks are better basketball players" to "white players don't belong."

The Duke players, especially the guards, all fit the same mold. Smart, tough, scrappy, hard-nosed players. Pains in the ass. Years ago these characteristics would've been glorified by racists in the press box and bleachers, implicitly or explicitly held up in direct contrast to the "natural talent" of the black players.

Now, however, everything's been flipped. It seems that those qualities are seen as negative. As a result, instead of acknowledging the brilliance of Redick's shooting stroke while cheering against him, opposing fans make sexual comments about his younger sister while wearing profane t-shirts bearing his name.

I recently had a discussion with a friend about how the traditional American values of hard work and perseverance have begun to disappear. Blue collar workers are scorned, union issues are trivialized, and the idea of slow and steady improvement seems as archaic as the Tortoise and the Hare.

If we look at basketball as a microcosm of our society, the scrappy Duke guards are clearly cast in the role of custodians working for a Forbes 500 company. (What, after all, is more blue collar than a jump shot, repeated thousands of times in the pursuit of perfection?) So what happens when your team is going up against Duke and the custodians are beating you? What does that say about your company?

And so just as a customer in a restaurant might look down upon the bus boy who clears away his dirty dishes, the college basketball fan sneers at these scrappy guards who have been foolish enough to work hard at their game. He curses them as they drain three-pointers, he yells mercilessly as they take charges, and he cries foul as they win games.

Aside from that, I don't have an answer. Do you?

Comments

[EJ]

Huh...I hadn't thought about it in the race context. I always thought it was because those boys were so "pretty" and fit the Duke stereotype of overpriviliged students, whereas the black superstars at Duke (with the exception of Grant Hill) didn't really fit that...but Grant Hill was beloved, so there goes that theory....

Interesting that in the NBA, that doesn't seem to be the case. The scrappy black players are generally the ones scorned -- John Starks, Gary Payton (who yaps a lot, which is probably his source of scorn), Sam Cassell, etc. The white scrappers -- Scot Pollard, for example, or Nash (who's lack of defense may prevent him from earning the "scrapper" label) -- seem to excite no such sense of scorn.

I don't think you can discount the school/team factor. Duke, Arizona, UCLA -- these are schools that may generally just receive more scorn than usual, and it's easy to pick out the oddball. White makes someone odd, frankly, and white and pretty makes them all the greater targets.

Hmmmm....I don't know. These are interesting questions, Cowboy....

[Hank]

Erik:
You may have hit on it. We have a natural tendency to single out those who are different, and when basketball is played at its highest level, the white player is usually the one that's different. Maybe that's all it is. Not necessarily a racist reaction, but just a reaction based on race, if that makes any sense.