Jeremy Lin has been a great player over the last week and he has scored more points in his first 4 NBA starts than anybody in the history of the NBA. More than LeBron, Kobe, Michael, Hakeem, Lou, Wilt, Magic; The Most!! Of course, he is not the best player in NBA history, and in all likelihood he will come off his high really soon, but for now it is fun to watch him. He very well could be the PG of the future for the Knicks, or any other team, and at worst it looks like he'll be a serviceable backup for his career.
Of course, a certain moron boxer has decided that race is the main argument in this debate. Floyd Mayweather is suffering from a serious case of foot-in-mouth-disease.
“Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise,”
Well, once again, we average folk are forced to consider the delicate balance of race when all we want to do is watch sports.
So I guess, by Mayweather's logic, we shouldn't have made a big deal about Jackie Robinson because, after all, white people do the same thing every night. Maybe Doug Williams and Warren Moore should have been ignored because, after all, White QBs had done that every night. Maybe we shouldn't have made a big deal about Barack Obama because, after all, a bunch of other white people had been elected President before.
And you know what, Mayweather is right, we shouldn't make a big deal about race anymore. We can move beyond that because the hard division between all of us are more or less erased, certainly in sports. This is what makes Mayweather's comments even more unbelievable. Let things be and don't always look for the racial undertones in the story. Trust me, there are for more blatant offensives to deal with. (See Luis Suarez and Patrice Evra)
We are not praising Lin because he is of Chinese descent, we praise him because of the underdog story. And you know what, if he was White, Black, of Hispanic, we would be doing the exact same thing.
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