How bad is the swine flu pandemic? Well, you know it's pretty bad when the world's flu experts start breaking out words that 89 percent of high school seniors probably don't know. (Pandemic means "prevalent over a whole area, country, etc." by the way.) But how's this for perspective: Mexico is shutting down. The whole country. FOR FIVE DAYS. You can now join me in saying, "Holy sh*t!"

But let's not freak out too badly, okay? I mean, unless the world's governments are using this as a cover for a zombie apocalypse -- and I haven't ruled that out just yet -- then the swine flu isn't something we haven't faced before. And beaten. Like back in the 1970s, when the following super-awesome PSA was made. Now, normally I wouldn't give something like this its own post...except for its rather comical juxtaposition of race, which is totally basketball-related.

At the 14-second mark, we are introduced to two young black men, dressed in grubby-looking t-shirts and jeans, playing basketball in what seems to be a schoolyard. One of them takes a quick breather to say, "Swine flu? Man, I'm too fast to let it catch me." (You then see him in bed with a thermometer in his mouth, presumably near death.) Next we see a white man. Or should I say, The White Man. Older, well-spoken, suited up, obviously wealthy and powerful with a huge desk and big comfy office. And he doesn't play some poor man's (i.e., black man's) sport like basketball. He plays GOLF. Every weekend! That's right, GOLF. The rich man's game. The white man's game.

In the big scheme of things, it's not that big a deal. After all, a lot has changed since the 1970s. Disco is dead (except for in certain prominent gay dance clubs), bell-bottoms (dorky!) are now referred to as boot-cuts (cool!), a black man is the best golfer on the planet, and a black basketball player is President of the United States. So, you know, those people in the 70s might as well have been living on Pluto. Which, as it happens, was a planet in 1970 but has since been reclassified as a mere dwarf planet...and only the second-largest one of those in our solar system. But it's still pretty funny to see how laughingly backward our Plutonian forbears were just a few short decades ago.

Labels: race relations, swine flu, zombies

By now you may have already heard/read about this (for instance here, here, or here), but I'll give you a quick summary: The photo shown above -- which features the Spanish men's national basketball team yanking their peepers into a slant-eyed gesture -- ran on the front page of Marca, a Spanish daily sports newspaper with readership of over 2,300,000. It was, apparently, intended as a "good luck" advertisement for Seur, a Spanish courier company.

Not surprisingly, there has been both uproar and condemnation of the picture.

This might be the worst anti-Chinese racist moment since David Carradine was cast as Kwai Chang Caine in the old Kung Fu television series. (For the record, it should have been Bruce Lee...but that's a long and complicated story.) Pretty much everybody involved in this mess showed a shocking lack of, ahem, vision. Mind you, I've never been to Spain and I know very little of Spanish culture, other than that they love them some tomato fights. Maybe the concepts of "racial sensitivity" and "political correctness" have not reached them. But still, you'd think a country with a national motto like "Further Beyond" would be further beyond something like this. Or, at the very least, that they'd be smart enough to avoid it.

One of the Spanish players involved, Jose Calderon, blames the media. "We did it because we thought it was going to be something nice, something with no problem. But somebody wants to talk about it. It is too much of a big deal with you guys (the media) and everybody talking about that." Uh...something nice? Seriously? No way, Jose. It's hard to believe this is the same guy who gave up his starting job to T.J. Ford for the betterment of the team last season.

The Spanish team's coach, one Aíto García Reneses, likened the gesture to making fun of tall people. No, really. Said Reneses: "If I go to play with a taller team and I put here (raising up on the tips of his toes) it is not an offense. I can't understand anything more." It sure was nice of Spain to let a space alien coach their national team only days after he arrived on Earth. But they probably should have waited until he learned more of our customs.

Pau Gasol, best known for being one of the evil Lakers, really didn't want to do it, did it anyway, doesn't think it was offensive, but is very sorry that mocking a billion people upset some people. "Some of us didn't feel comfortable doing it just because to me it was a little clownish for our part to be doing that. But the sponsors insisted and insisted. I think it is just a bad idea I guess to do that, but it was never intended to be offensive or racist against anybody. I didn't find it very funny. I didn't find it offensive, either. I guess some guys didn't mind. To me I don't want to be that way, I guess, to be doing that stuff. If anybody feels offended by it we totally apologize for it. We never meant anything offensive by it."

Okay. Sure. I wonder what they would have done if the Olympics had been held in Africa. Put all the players in blackface maybe? Hey, it's all in good fun!

Honestly, I don't think the Spaniards meant any offense, either. But, man, it sure was stupid, wasn't it? I try to remain almost completely ignorant of foreign relations, but even I know that the Chinese people (or, perhaps more accurately, the Chinese government) are a bit touchy about how they're regarded around the world. Heck, they wouldn't even show the little girl who sang their anthem at the opening ceremonies because she's too ugly.

Oh well. I'm just glad that if there had to be a bunch of thoughtless, insensitive foreign bastards, it wasn't us for a change.

Labels: Olympics, race relations, Spanish national team

Last August, I did an interview with Basil Anastassiou, co-creator of an upcoming documentary called "Ballin' At The Graveyard: A story about life and pickup basketball at one American park." The documentary is still in the editing phase, but several preview clips are available at the official Web site.

The latest clip describes how race plays out at the Graveyard. Which, as Basil put it in an e-mail to me, can be described thusly: "The State of America in 2008: A Black man may finally become President, but white guys (like me) still have to fight for their rights on the court (No justice, No peace!)." Here's the clip.


These sentiments basically mirror what Dennis Rodman said in his 1997 autobiography Bad As I Wanna Be: "When you talk about race in basketball, the whole thing is simple: A black player knows he can go out on the court and kick a white player's ass." It just so happens I'm a white guy who's played a lot of pickup ball over the years. And yeah, that seems to be the prevailing attitude, from north to south, from coast to coast. [SHOCK ALERT!!] Black men see basketball as a black man's game. What's more, white men see it that way, too.

For instance, my pickup league is predominantly white (although we do have some black and Asian players). Every so often, a new black player will show up, and you can see a lot of the white guys immediately getting nervous. Not because they're afraid of them as a threat to their personal safety. It's because they automatically assume that the black player -- any black player -- is better than them, is going to dominate them, is going to upset the fragile balance of talent in the league...in short, that he is going to embarrass them.

Here's a true story involving Evil Ted. One week when our normal pickup league was on a break, we returned to another league we had frequented back in the day. This league was high on physical play but rather low on talent, so ET was anticipating a big night (read that: he was ready to score at will while resting liberally on defense). Right before play started, a couple athletic-looking black men showed up. ET groaned and said: "Great. And here I thought it was going to be an easy night."

The funny thing is, turns out neither of them were very good. They were aggressive and talked a lot of trash -- which intimidated some of the other players -- but they couldn't shoot and seemed disinclined to play defense. (Like I always say, in pickup ball defense is just waiting to get back on offense.) In short, they were on par with just about everybody else there, except that their skin was a little darker.

Still, ET expected them to be good. Better than good, actually. He expected them to shoot lights out and dunk. (Yes, many white guys naturally assume that all black men can dunk, despite a great deal of anecdotal evidence to the contrary.) He expected them to dominate. And you could tell they kind of expected it to.

I run into this all the time. Fortunately for me, I happen to be a white boy who can play (although, much like Larry Bird, I couldn't jump over two sheets of paper). My buddy Statbuster (who, as it happens, is black) has often referred to me as "a 6'3" Dirk Nowitzki," but personally I model myself after Matt Harpring (just being realistic here). Anyway, a few months back I was idly shooting around at my gym when a black teen, probably a senior in high school or maybe a freshman in college, showed up with his girlfriend. As they approached, I heard him kind of chuckle and say to her, "Watch me school this white guy."

I won't bore you with the details, but it didn't happen. Mostly because I play brutal defense (which is rare in pickup ball and even more rare in one-on-one) and because I was bigger, stronger and much more experienced than he was. After he lost the first game 11-2, he immediately challenged me to a rematch, promising "I'm gonna play you this time." (And it's true; he had played rather lackadaisically.) I won the next game 11-4 and now he was becoming visibly frustrated. After I beat him 11-2 again in the third game -- during which he was totally winded -- he just stared at me for few seconds and said, "Damn. You can really play!"

And while he didn't say it, I knew what he meant: He had assumed I couldn't. Because I was white.

Just like the players at the Graveyard like bustin' white guys, I like bustin' black guys. And as with them, it's more a matter of pride than anything else. That's the nature of the game: Someone is trying to take something from you, and you're trying to take something from them. But the sport of basketball is like an onion. There are many layers to it, games within the game. Not every victory -- nor every loss -- is created equal. We weigh or opponents based on size, strength, skill level, experience, and a million other variable that, yes, include race. And based on those unspoken (and maybe only semi-conscious) measurements, we are better able to measure ourselves and judge our approximate worth. Which is just one small part of how we understand the world around us and our place in it.

I'm not an anthropologist, and I don't have a degree in any social sciences, so I'm not trying to make some grand or profound statement on race and basketball. Just thinking in print.

Labels: Ballin' at the Graveyard, pickup basketball, race relations