Here’s what LeBron’s email probably looks like (spoof):
h/t Grantland
The Stephen Jackson email destroyed me.
Michael Kazin, “Why Baseball is the Best—And Least Exploitative—American Sport” at The New Republic
I guess this is true if you ignore every other “externality”, including the relationships and academies that clubs have abroad in Latino América, and maintain a lily white belief that what happens in the world of sports within this nation remains in the world of sports within this nation. I mean, you honestly have to make an effort to ignore all of the aforementioned or have no heart.
Asian-American male writers talk about how they do and do not see themselves in Jeremy Lin
Lin’s Appeal: Faith, Pride Points - Michael Luo, The New York Times
Lin-Glorious Bastard - Chuck Leung, Slate
Jeremy Lin and the limits of the ‘hardworking Asian American’ narrative - Edmund Lee, Capital New York
Person of Interest: Jeremy Lin - Jay Caspian Kang, Grantland
Actually, the best thing I’ve read on Jeremy Lin I actually read a year ago on what I think was FreeDarko. By “best thing” I really mean the thing I liked the most, so it’s not really about basketball but about being Asian American.
Jeremy and Jin - Jay Caspian Kang (yes again and this essay is better)
If we, indeed, tell ourselves stories to live, the children of immigrants find themselves with the odd task of having to make one up as they go along. The stories projected upon me by my parents were episodic and told in a language of destinations. On the first page, my sister and I sit with the other pilgrims at the tabard. On the next page, we arrive at the Archbishop of Harvard’s door. What happens between those two markers is what a friend of mine once referred to as, “our leg in the blind sprint towards whiteness.” For him and me and the Asian-American kids I grew up with, the verbs and the adjectives in our narratives are disposable, circumstantial. What matters is the tyranny of nouns. If we see another Asian kid in the classroom or in the workplace, we simply assume that they got there the same way we did. Why bother asking? We are the Son-at-Harvard or Nephew-at-Columbia or the Son-who-works-at-Goldman or the Daughter-who-just-got-into-Stanford Medical School. When the weight of our common hyphens forces us into naming some other connection, we summon the only metanarrative we know, collected from our own memories and the commonalities we assume—fathers who are computer programmers or dry cleaners, insane mothers who only shop at Costco, piano lessons, Asian Church, pickled immigrant foods and 1500s on the SATs. For the most part, the metanarrative is enough.
The only stories that might make us pause and reconsider the paradigm of endings are the ones that provide us with an alien set of destinations—the stand-up comedian, the police chief, the mass murderer, the potential first round pick in the NBA Draft. In other words, those stories that belong to other races.
The hero basketball needs? @BetoDuran
But the conflict also reveals something profound about the way the issues supposedly resolved in the new Collective Bargaining Agreement are still unsettled. The lockout was never as much about money as it was about power and who would be allowed to exercise it. There were three contenders, contesting for power: big market owners, small market owners, and the players. We now see that the CBA, done in the name of small-markets teams but still with loopholes aplenty for the big markets, didn’t settle the question.
Stern, in attempting to assert control, weighing in on behalf of the small-market owners, looks like a tin-pot dictator, restricting player movement in a ham-handed, paternalistic, and possibly illegal manner. Most troubling for the NBA is not the griping of Laker fans but the fact that many players took to twitter to express their disbelief. The most noteworthy was Pacers All-Star Danny Granger who tweeted, “Due to the sabotaging of the LA/NO trade by david stern, and following in the footsteps of my athlete brethren Metta World Peace and Chad Ochocinco, I’m changing my last name to “Stern’s Bi#&h” #effectiveimmediately”
By not resolving the question of power, the CBA also didn’t resolve the critical issue at the heart of lockout: the zeal of small market owners - in the wake of Lebron and Chris Bosh joining the Miami Heat - to restrict, own and distribute the talents of their employees. It’s a question at the heart of sports labor conflicts: whether the “talent” on the court is labor, or a product of labor and owned by others. This is why players, always to media outrage, turn at times to the metaphor of slavery and a plantation to explain their predicament. Not because they are comparing themselves to those who suffered under bondage but because owners constantly contest whether they are in fact the masters of their own talents. For players, it’s unclear if they are the occupier of their own gifts and hard work or whether they are the occupied. The NBA’s decision to nix the Chris Paul deal shows that they have perfect clarity on the question. They own the talent and by definition can assert the right of occupation. The only certainty is that, CBA or not, this sets the stage for more conflicts to come.
”Chris Paul: The Occupier and the Occupied by Dave Zirin [The Nation]
