Showing posts with label NBA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NBA. Show all posts
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Shaq O'Neal To Cavs to Get LeBron James A Ring
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Thunder has struck. Shaq O'Neal is going to the Cleveland Cavaliers to help "The Golden Child", "The Chosen One", LeBron James, get his ring. That was a massive trade. Goodbye Ben Wallace, who's big hair and playing style have seen better days. Goodbye losing attitude. Say hello to The Diesel, king of The Gorilla Dunk bad rap, and NBA championships.
To say that Shaq changes the forecast for the Cavs is an understatement; they've got to be penciled in as next season's contender. Now, a final pitting the Los Angeles Lakers versus the Cavs will be the wish of fans now more than ever, even last season. Why? It's not just Kobe v. LeBron, it's Kobe v. Shaq all over again.
You know Shaq's thinking, "Great. I helped D-Wade (Miami Heat star Dwayne Wade) "Great. I helped D-Wade (Miami Heat star Dwawne Wade) get his ring. I got three for Kobe. Now, I'll get one for the Golden Child." I can't wait for the season to start; it's fun all over again. I know NBA Commissioner David Stern was involved here somewhere, had to be, it's too perfect for an NBA that needed a new injection of "star drama." Enter Shaq. Perfect.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Lakers Win! Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson gain redemption
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After a long time without a ring, a seven year drought that saw a number of unfortunate events for LA Lakers star guard Kobe Bryant, he and "the zen master" , his coach Phil Jackson, who had to wonder if he's ever see the winning side of an NBA Finals contest, won the NBA Championship in fine fashion, defeating the Orlando Magic in five games, winning the last one tonight 99-86. It's the Lakers' 15th NBA title, Jackson's 10th, and Bryant's fourth, and certainly the sweetest.
Kobe gets his ring!
First, hats off to the Magic, who made it thrilling with two overtime games and heroic play down the stretch from center Dwight Howard, but in the end, the Lakers will was too much for the Magic to overcome.
The Lakers, and indeed, Bryant and Jackson, wanted to erase all of the bad feelings from the total beat-down the Boston Celtics gave to them last year and from the equally abusive talk aimed at Bryant from former teammate Shaq O'Neal, who left the Lakers and almost immediately won a title with the Miami Heat, then rubbed it in Bryant's face, almost on an annual basis.
No more.
Bryant played with a scowl on his face and something to prove. And he did. That he's a complete player. A mature person. A father. A community leader. And a nice person. That he did it with Phil Jackson as his coach comes as no surprise, but for a time it seemed Jackson was to be religated to the "used to" bin, as in, "he used to be a great coach." Hey, let's give credit to Lakers General Manager Mitch Kupchek for the acquisition of Pau Gasol who filled in the missing piece as "enforcer" and for adding Derek Fisher, who's clutch "threes" were the difference in two finals games, but Jackson put them all together then stepped back and let them play.
Fisher said it best about Jackson after the last game on ABC: "He let's players play." Jackson doesn't try to control his players, he treats them as men and as talented athletes. He gives them an open canvas on which to paint, and his players created a masterpiece of a win. It's for that reason Jackson's the greatest coach in NBA history.
The zen master is back.
UPDATE: on his (verified) Twitter account twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ, Shaq O'Neal was active to be sure. After the Lakers won he posted this:
O'Neal also tweeted that he's not leaving the Phoenix Suns for Cleveland and Le Bron James.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
LEBRON JAMES DUNKS FROM THE FREE THROW LINE IN NBA GAME
You've got to see this video and watch carefully. Cleveland Cavs star Le Bron James litterally launches himself from the free-throw line and heads right for the basket -- dunking the ball. Man. That's one for the ages by "the Chosen One" -- now if he can only bring a title to Cleveland that nickname will stick without derision.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Le Bron James | Vogue - Le Bron James, Wake Up To Racial Stereotyping
Hey Le Bron James. You asked "Who cares" in reaction to charges that your appearance on the cover of Vogue playing to fears of Black men.
Well, Le Bron James, I care and I'm a Black Man.
I saw your cover photo in a local store and my first though was "What this hell was he thinking."
But then I realized that given how young you are, you may not have been thinking about anything other than sex and money. Sex in that you're taking a photo where you've got a hot blonde in your arms, and money because you were paid for it. I don't think the fact that Annie Lebowitz was taking the shot meant much to you because you don't understand how huge she is separate from the photo; you're too young to know.
But that's not what I'm writing about.
Dude, you need to wake up. Fast. And before someone else uses you for some racially-insenstive reason. The Vogue cover didn't represent me well because you're a Black Man like me, and because of our minority status in America, all of us are impacted by what a high-profile brother like you does. We're historically seen in America in the same kind of animallstic way you've portrayed and I for one don't like that one bit.
Wake up Le Bron James.
If you're confused over the possible social impact of a magazine shoot in the future, ask me what it could be. I'll tell you. Because its sure as hell obvious that whomever's advising you know doesn't know what the hell they're doing. I'm tired of brothers like you working to keep brothers like me down. I mean that.
It's time for you to take a serious look at your responsibilities in life outside of Basketball. They're bigger than you realize.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
NBA Officials Call Fouls On Black Players More Than White Players - NY Times
This is a terrible revelation, but logical considering the nature of prejudice.
May 2, 2007
Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls
By ALAN SCHWARZ
An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well.
A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.
Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, found a corresponding bias in which black officials called fouls more frequently against white players, though that tendency was not as strong. They went on to claim that the different rates at which fouls are called “is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game.”
N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern said in a telephone interview that the league saw a draft copy of the paper last year, and was moved to do its own study this March using its own database of foul calls, which specifies which official called which foul.
“We think our cut at the data is more powerful, more robust, and demonstrates that there is no bias,” Mr. Stern said.
Three independent experts asked by The Times to examine the Wolfers-Price paper and materials released by the N.B.A. said they considered the Wolfers-Price argument far more sound. The N.B.A. denied a request for its underlying data, even with names of officials and players removed, because it feared that the league’s confidentiality agreement with referees could be violated if the identities were determined through box scores.
The paper by Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price has yet to undergo formal peer review before publication in an economic journal, but several prominent academic economists said it would contribute to the growing literature regarding subconscious racism in the workplace and elsewhere, such as in searches by the police.
The three experts who examined the Wolfers-Price paper and the N.B.A.’s materials were Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, the author of “Pervasive Prejudice?” and an expert in testing for how subtle racial bias, also known as implicit association, appears in interactions ranging from the setting of bail amounts to the tipping of taxi drivers; David Berri of California State University-Bakersfield, the author of “The Wages of Wins,” which analyzes sports issues using statistics; and Larry Katz of Harvard University, the senior editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”
Mr. Berri added: “It’s not about basketball — it’s about what happens in the world. This is just the nature of decision-making, and when you have an evaluation team that’s so different from those being evaluated. Given that your league is mostly African-American, maybe you should have more African-American referees — for the same reason that you don’t want mostly white police forces in primarily black neighborhoods.”
To investigate whether such bias has existed in sports, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined data from publicly available box scores. They accounted for factors like the players’ positions, playing time and All-Star status; each group’s time on the court (black players played 83 percent of minutes, while 68 percent of officials were white); calls at home games and on the road; and other relevant data.
But they said they continued to find the same phenomenon: that players who were similar in all ways except skin color drew foul calls at a rate difference of up to 4 ½ percent depending on the racial composition of an N.B.A. game’s three-person referee crew.
Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a vocal critic of his league’s officiating, said in a telephone interview after reading the paper: “We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others.”
Asked if he had ever suspected any racial bias among officials before reading the study, Mr. Cuban said, “No comment.”
Two veteran players who are African-American, Mike James of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Alan Henderson of the Philadelphia 76ers, each said that they did not think black or white officials had treated them differently.
“If that’s going on, then it’s something that needs to be dealt with,” James said. “But I’ve never seen it.”
Two African-American coaches, Doc Rivers of the Boston Celtics and Maurice Cheeks of the Philadelphia 76ers, declined to comment on the paper’s claims. Rod Thorn, the president of the New Jersey Nets and formerly the N.B.A.’s executive vice president for basketball operations, said: “I don’t believe it. I think officials get the vast majority of calls right. They don’t get them all right. The vast majority of our players are black.”
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price spend 41 pages accounting for such population disparities and more than a dozen other complicating factors.
For the 1991-92 through 2003-4 seasons, the authors analyzed every player’s box-score performance — minutes played, rebounds, shots made and missed, fouls and the like — in the context of the racial composition of the three-person crew refereeing that game. (The N.B.A. did not release its record of calls by specific officials to either Mr. Wolfers, Mr. Price or The Times, claiming it is kept for referee training purposes only.)
Mr. Wolfers said that he and Mr. Price classified each N.B.A. player and referee as either black or not black by assessing photographs and speaking with an anonymous former referee, and then using that information to predict how an official would view the player. About a dozen players could reasonably be placed in either category, but Mr. Wolfers said the classification of those players did not materially change the study’s findings.
During the 13-season period studied, black players played 83 percent of the minutes on the floor. With 68 percent of officials being white, three-person crews were either entirely white (30 percent of the time), had two white officials (47 percent), had two black officials (20 percent) or were entirely black (3 percent).
Mr. Stern said that the race of referees had never been considered when assembling crews for games.
With their database of almost 600,000 foul calls, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price used a common statistical technique called multivariable regression analysis, which can identify correlations between different variables. The economists accounted for a wide range of factors: that centers, who tend to draw more fouls, were disproportionately white; that veteran players and All-Stars tended to draw foul calls at different rates than rookies and non-stars; whether the players were at home or on the road, as officials can be influenced by crowd noise; particular coaches on the sidelines; the players’ assertiveness on the court, as defined by their established rates of assists, steals, turnovers and other statistics; and more subtle factors like how some substitute players enter games specifically to commit fouls.
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined whether otherwise similar black and white players had fouls-per-minute rates that varied with the racial makeup of the refereeing crew.
“Across all of these specifications,” they write, “we find that black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2 ½-4 ½ percent) when the number of white referees officiating a game increases from zero to three.”
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price also report a statistically significant correlation with decreases in points, rebounds and assists, and a rise in turnovers, when players performed before primarily opposite-race officials.
“Player-performance appears to deteriorate at every margin when officiated by a larger fraction of opposite-race referees,” they write. The paper later notes no change in free-throw percentage. “We emphasize this result because this is the one on-court behavior that we expect to be unaffected by referee behavior.”
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price claim that these changes are enough to affect game outcomes. Their results suggested that for each additional black starter a team had, relative to its opponent, a team’s chance of winning would decline from a theoretical 50 percent to 49 percent and so on, a concept mirrored by the game evidence: the team with the greater share of playing time by black players during those 13 years won 48.6 percent of games — a difference of about two victories in an 82-game season.
“Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you’d win a few more games,” Mr. Wolfers said.
The N.B.A.’s reciprocal study was conducted by the Segal Company, the actuarial consulting firm which designed the in-house data-collection system the league uses to identify patterns for referee-training purposes, to test for evidence of bias. The league’s study was less formal and detailed than an academic paper, included foul calls for only two and a half seasons (from November 2004 through January 2007), and did not consider differences among players by position, veteran status and the like. But it did have the clear advantage of specifying which of the three referees blew his whistle on each foul.
The N.B.A. study reported no significant differences in how often white and black referees collectively called fouls on white and black players. Mr. Stern said he was therefore convinced “that there’s no demonstration of any bias here — based upon more robust and more data that was available to us because we keep that data.”
Added Joel Litvin, the league’s president for basketball operations, “I think the analysis that we did can stand on its own, so I don’t think our view of some of the things in Wolfers’s paper and some questions we have actually matter as much as the analysis we did.”
Mr. Litvin explained the N.B.A.’s refusal to release its underlying data for independent examination by saying: “Even our teams don’t know the data we collect as to a particular referee’s call tendencies on certain types of calls. There are good reasons for this. It’s proprietary. It’s personnel data at the end of the day.”
The percentage of black officials in the N.B.A. has increased in the past several years, to 38 percent of 60 officials this season from 34 percent of 58 officials two years ago. Mr. Stern and Mr. Litvin said that the rise was coincidental because the league does not consider race in the hiring process.
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price are scheduled to present their paper at the annual meetings of the Society of Labor Economists on Friday and the American Law and Economics Association on Sunday. They will then submit it to the National Bureau of Economic Research and for formal peer review before consideration by an economic journal.
Both men cautioned that the racial discrimination they claim to have found should be interpreted in the context of bias found in other parts of American society.
“There’s bias on the basketball court,” Mr. Wolfers said, “but less than when you’re trying to hail a cab at midnight.”
Pat Borzi contributed reporting from Minneapolis and John Eligon from East Rutherford, N.J.
May 2, 2007
Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls
By ALAN SCHWARZ
An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well.
A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.
Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, found a corresponding bias in which black officials called fouls more frequently against white players, though that tendency was not as strong. They went on to claim that the different rates at which fouls are called “is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game.”
N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern said in a telephone interview that the league saw a draft copy of the paper last year, and was moved to do its own study this March using its own database of foul calls, which specifies which official called which foul.
“We think our cut at the data is more powerful, more robust, and demonstrates that there is no bias,” Mr. Stern said.
Three independent experts asked by The Times to examine the Wolfers-Price paper and materials released by the N.B.A. said they considered the Wolfers-Price argument far more sound. The N.B.A. denied a request for its underlying data, even with names of officials and players removed, because it feared that the league’s confidentiality agreement with referees could be violated if the identities were determined through box scores.
The paper by Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price has yet to undergo formal peer review before publication in an economic journal, but several prominent academic economists said it would contribute to the growing literature regarding subconscious racism in the workplace and elsewhere, such as in searches by the police.
The three experts who examined the Wolfers-Price paper and the N.B.A.’s materials were Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, the author of “Pervasive Prejudice?” and an expert in testing for how subtle racial bias, also known as implicit association, appears in interactions ranging from the setting of bail amounts to the tipping of taxi drivers; David Berri of California State University-Bakersfield, the author of “The Wages of Wins,” which analyzes sports issues using statistics; and Larry Katz of Harvard University, the senior editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”
Mr. Berri added: “It’s not about basketball — it’s about what happens in the world. This is just the nature of decision-making, and when you have an evaluation team that’s so different from those being evaluated. Given that your league is mostly African-American, maybe you should have more African-American referees — for the same reason that you don’t want mostly white police forces in primarily black neighborhoods.”
To investigate whether such bias has existed in sports, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined data from publicly available box scores. They accounted for factors like the players’ positions, playing time and All-Star status; each group’s time on the court (black players played 83 percent of minutes, while 68 percent of officials were white); calls at home games and on the road; and other relevant data.
But they said they continued to find the same phenomenon: that players who were similar in all ways except skin color drew foul calls at a rate difference of up to 4 ½ percent depending on the racial composition of an N.B.A. game’s three-person referee crew.
Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a vocal critic of his league’s officiating, said in a telephone interview after reading the paper: “We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others.”
Asked if he had ever suspected any racial bias among officials before reading the study, Mr. Cuban said, “No comment.”
Two veteran players who are African-American, Mike James of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Alan Henderson of the Philadelphia 76ers, each said that they did not think black or white officials had treated them differently.
“If that’s going on, then it’s something that needs to be dealt with,” James said. “But I’ve never seen it.”
Two African-American coaches, Doc Rivers of the Boston Celtics and Maurice Cheeks of the Philadelphia 76ers, declined to comment on the paper’s claims. Rod Thorn, the president of the New Jersey Nets and formerly the N.B.A.’s executive vice president for basketball operations, said: “I don’t believe it. I think officials get the vast majority of calls right. They don’t get them all right. The vast majority of our players are black.”
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price spend 41 pages accounting for such population disparities and more than a dozen other complicating factors.
For the 1991-92 through 2003-4 seasons, the authors analyzed every player’s box-score performance — minutes played, rebounds, shots made and missed, fouls and the like — in the context of the racial composition of the three-person crew refereeing that game. (The N.B.A. did not release its record of calls by specific officials to either Mr. Wolfers, Mr. Price or The Times, claiming it is kept for referee training purposes only.)
Mr. Wolfers said that he and Mr. Price classified each N.B.A. player and referee as either black or not black by assessing photographs and speaking with an anonymous former referee, and then using that information to predict how an official would view the player. About a dozen players could reasonably be placed in either category, but Mr. Wolfers said the classification of those players did not materially change the study’s findings.
During the 13-season period studied, black players played 83 percent of the minutes on the floor. With 68 percent of officials being white, three-person crews were either entirely white (30 percent of the time), had two white officials (47 percent), had two black officials (20 percent) or were entirely black (3 percent).
Mr. Stern said that the race of referees had never been considered when assembling crews for games.
With their database of almost 600,000 foul calls, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price used a common statistical technique called multivariable regression analysis, which can identify correlations between different variables. The economists accounted for a wide range of factors: that centers, who tend to draw more fouls, were disproportionately white; that veteran players and All-Stars tended to draw foul calls at different rates than rookies and non-stars; whether the players were at home or on the road, as officials can be influenced by crowd noise; particular coaches on the sidelines; the players’ assertiveness on the court, as defined by their established rates of assists, steals, turnovers and other statistics; and more subtle factors like how some substitute players enter games specifically to commit fouls.
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined whether otherwise similar black and white players had fouls-per-minute rates that varied with the racial makeup of the refereeing crew.
“Across all of these specifications,” they write, “we find that black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2 ½-4 ½ percent) when the number of white referees officiating a game increases from zero to three.”
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price also report a statistically significant correlation with decreases in points, rebounds and assists, and a rise in turnovers, when players performed before primarily opposite-race officials.
“Player-performance appears to deteriorate at every margin when officiated by a larger fraction of opposite-race referees,” they write. The paper later notes no change in free-throw percentage. “We emphasize this result because this is the one on-court behavior that we expect to be unaffected by referee behavior.”
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price claim that these changes are enough to affect game outcomes. Their results suggested that for each additional black starter a team had, relative to its opponent, a team’s chance of winning would decline from a theoretical 50 percent to 49 percent and so on, a concept mirrored by the game evidence: the team with the greater share of playing time by black players during those 13 years won 48.6 percent of games — a difference of about two victories in an 82-game season.
“Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you’d win a few more games,” Mr. Wolfers said.
The N.B.A.’s reciprocal study was conducted by the Segal Company, the actuarial consulting firm which designed the in-house data-collection system the league uses to identify patterns for referee-training purposes, to test for evidence of bias. The league’s study was less formal and detailed than an academic paper, included foul calls for only two and a half seasons (from November 2004 through January 2007), and did not consider differences among players by position, veteran status and the like. But it did have the clear advantage of specifying which of the three referees blew his whistle on each foul.
The N.B.A. study reported no significant differences in how often white and black referees collectively called fouls on white and black players. Mr. Stern said he was therefore convinced “that there’s no demonstration of any bias here — based upon more robust and more data that was available to us because we keep that data.”
Added Joel Litvin, the league’s president for basketball operations, “I think the analysis that we did can stand on its own, so I don’t think our view of some of the things in Wolfers’s paper and some questions we have actually matter as much as the analysis we did.”
Mr. Litvin explained the N.B.A.’s refusal to release its underlying data for independent examination by saying: “Even our teams don’t know the data we collect as to a particular referee’s call tendencies on certain types of calls. There are good reasons for this. It’s proprietary. It’s personnel data at the end of the day.”
The percentage of black officials in the N.B.A. has increased in the past several years, to 38 percent of 60 officials this season from 34 percent of 58 officials two years ago. Mr. Stern and Mr. Litvin said that the rise was coincidental because the league does not consider race in the hiring process.
Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price are scheduled to present their paper at the annual meetings of the Society of Labor Economists on Friday and the American Law and Economics Association on Sunday. They will then submit it to the National Bureau of Economic Research and for formal peer review before consideration by an economic journal.
Both men cautioned that the racial discrimination they claim to have found should be interpreted in the context of bias found in other parts of American society.
“There’s bias on the basketball court,” Mr. Wolfers said, “but less than when you’re trying to hail a cab at midnight.”
Pat Borzi contributed reporting from Minneapolis and John Eligon from East Rutherford, N.J.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Don Imus - Problem Of White Racism Masked By Talk About Black Rappers
The Don Imus matter has opened a sore in American society and demonstrated to me that racism still exists and more to the point White Racism. In fact, this form of mental illness is so persistent that those who either practice is or support those who do have worked to steer the focus away from the identification of and reduction of White Racism and on to ....Black rappers.
Wow.
What's all the more upsetting is that Jason Whitlock and Carol Swain -- both Black writers -- have allowed their own self-hate of Blacks to spill over into their appearance on CNN and The Today Show to talk not about White Racism but Black Rappers.
And in Jason's case, his Black self-hatred even caused him to treat a Black family at the Las Vegas Airport like they were animals to be feared and challenged, rather than people who deserved respect.
I'm really disppointed in them. But the task remains -- Racism is a mental illness and White racism must be stamped out. Now, since Whites are the majority and have majority economic power, any talk of Black racism in some weird attempt to even the argument is plain nuts. Plus, Whites are 77 percent of the U.S. population. That's almost eight of every ten people. You can't argue that racism is an "equal" problem if there are more Whites and Blacks, or anyone else!
Plus, the decades past since the passasge of the civil rights amendment have seen African Americans struggle with an inferiority complex that says "You're not good enough because you're not White and were enslaved."
Both ideas are not true, but they're borne of the extreme prejudice that Blacks in America have suffered; a prejudice that comes from White Racism. It's not a Black problem or a White problem; it's our problem.
Lest you think this division between Black and White views is not along color lines, research Technorati by typing in "Jason Whitlock" and reading the difference. Many African Americans don't like what Jason wrote, whereras many Whites do. It's a wake up call for those who think America's grown. It's got a long way to go. Also, it's was shown in a recent study that Whites react more negatively to Blacks than to Whites.
The seeds of what drive Don Imus to make the comment he did, are right there. This pattern of thinking must be unlearned or the problems that stem from it will continue.
Also, by writing this, I'm not referring to everyone who's White or Black, so don't even try to water down the argument with that presentation. Anyone an everyone knows there's a problem.
There's not so much Black racism as Black anger over White racism. Thus, when White Racism is eliminated, Black anger too will go away. You can bet on it.
What Don Imus said was pure White Racism. In an effort to deflect the blame from him, he threw up the Black Rapper claim and those who are White jumped at the device Don Imus himself crafted to defend himself. Now they had something to fight back with and turn the matter away from White Racism.
And that's sick, because we're still stuck with the problem of White Racism. The one best way to eliminate it is diversity. Diversity must be a new public policy objective. We must retrain the people of America to expect this, to walk in room full of Blacks or Whites and ask why there are not more different kinds of people in the room? This should be our objective. I certainly know it's mine.
I also know its the objective of many people, White, Asian, Latino, and on. It's just not a matter of national importance and it should be, plus you've got White conservatives like Tucker Carlson launching senceless rants against it when they get the chance.
Now that's one guy I'd love to debate; I'd make him look ridiculous.
Wow.
What's all the more upsetting is that Jason Whitlock and Carol Swain -- both Black writers -- have allowed their own self-hate of Blacks to spill over into their appearance on CNN and The Today Show to talk not about White Racism but Black Rappers.
And in Jason's case, his Black self-hatred even caused him to treat a Black family at the Las Vegas Airport like they were animals to be feared and challenged, rather than people who deserved respect.
I'm really disppointed in them. But the task remains -- Racism is a mental illness and White racism must be stamped out. Now, since Whites are the majority and have majority economic power, any talk of Black racism in some weird attempt to even the argument is plain nuts. Plus, Whites are 77 percent of the U.S. population. That's almost eight of every ten people. You can't argue that racism is an "equal" problem if there are more Whites and Blacks, or anyone else!
Plus, the decades past since the passasge of the civil rights amendment have seen African Americans struggle with an inferiority complex that says "You're not good enough because you're not White and were enslaved."
Both ideas are not true, but they're borne of the extreme prejudice that Blacks in America have suffered; a prejudice that comes from White Racism. It's not a Black problem or a White problem; it's our problem.
Lest you think this division between Black and White views is not along color lines, research Technorati by typing in "Jason Whitlock" and reading the difference. Many African Americans don't like what Jason wrote, whereras many Whites do. It's a wake up call for those who think America's grown. It's got a long way to go. Also, it's was shown in a recent study that Whites react more negatively to Blacks than to Whites.
The seeds of what drive Don Imus to make the comment he did, are right there. This pattern of thinking must be unlearned or the problems that stem from it will continue.
Also, by writing this, I'm not referring to everyone who's White or Black, so don't even try to water down the argument with that presentation. Anyone an everyone knows there's a problem.
There's not so much Black racism as Black anger over White racism. Thus, when White Racism is eliminated, Black anger too will go away. You can bet on it.
What Don Imus said was pure White Racism. In an effort to deflect the blame from him, he threw up the Black Rapper claim and those who are White jumped at the device Don Imus himself crafted to defend himself. Now they had something to fight back with and turn the matter away from White Racism.
And that's sick, because we're still stuck with the problem of White Racism. The one best way to eliminate it is diversity. Diversity must be a new public policy objective. We must retrain the people of America to expect this, to walk in room full of Blacks or Whites and ask why there are not more different kinds of people in the room? This should be our objective. I certainly know it's mine.
I also know its the objective of many people, White, Asian, Latino, and on. It's just not a matter of national importance and it should be, plus you've got White conservatives like Tucker Carlson launching senceless rants against it when they get the chance.
Now that's one guy I'd love to debate; I'd make him look ridiculous.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
CAA Taking A Bath On Sports Division? - Buying Matt Leinart, Tom Condon, and IMG
Someone -- perhaps Leigh Steinberg -- is reading this with glee. But if Hollywood Reporter Nikki Finke's any indication,
Creative Artists Agency , the super-firm of talent agents started by Ron Meyer and Mike Ovitz in 1975, and recently the epicenter of Hollywood's move into athletic talent mining starting with players like Arizona Cardinals QB Matt Leinart, may be losing money in its sports division.
To understand, read this post from Nikki's blog:
If CAA agents this week are looking inconsolable, it's because they now have to give up flying first class. (Those conversations you're trying to overhear at lunch in Century City are the CAA tenpercenters kvetching about it.) So what happened? My sources tell me that CAA called a big all-agents meeting and read the riot act to its spendthrift tenpercenters. To cut expenses by a whopping 20%. To start flying just business class instead of first class. And to take to heart this warning: If you want to get paid, then get your clients jobs.
I hear the motion picture agents are the most upset about the new edicts because they live the high life more and so got hit harder. Look, I've been saying this for a while now: CAA can't keep spending like drunken sailors without having cash flow issues: buying a bevy of agents from other shops and wooing clients by the hundreds, and moving into swank new headquarters while still paying rent back at the I.M. Pei building, and starting a money pit of a sports division where most of the endorsement deal money will be heading back to IMG for years, etc. Now CAA is having the same woes every other agency in town has been having: for instance, William Morris last year asked its departments to slash spending by 20%. What's next? Richard Lovett on Avenue Of The Stars with a metal detector looking for loose change and lost jewelry?
If it's true that CAA's gotten into a deal where it's giving most of its' cash from sponsorship deals back to IMG, then it's officially taking a bath in its sports division. Everyone in the sports business knows its the sponsorship deals that drive the industry, and this is especially true for NFL agents, which are limited to 3 percent takes of an athlete's contract.
By contrast, CAA comes from the world of the 20 percent deal, where they can get as much as that for an actor or actress. So they're giving up 17 percent of a deal, plus a big chunk of endorsement money? Wow. All that plus the fact that CAA and the other Hollywood agencies aren't savvy enough in new media to promote their talents to such an extent they make up for this. One firm I will not name has an extensive website, but you can't find it on Google! (They need to use SBS-ON!)
At first, I thought CAA's foray into sports would restructure the industry and cause a shakeout of some of the small-time -- at least in behavior -- agents. But given the appearance of their business model, I remain skeptical. It's now logical to me why IMG would give up its NFL operation to CAA without the appearance of a fight; they're getting paid! Moreover, it seems everyone, from Leigh Steinberg to Matt Leinart's trainer Steve Clarkson of Air 7 (which has a better website now), to IMG, and Tom Condon (who was lured from IMG to CAA) has been paid by CAA just so it could leap -- head first -- into the sports business without a battle.
In other words, CAA really did create a money pit!
Let's give it five years, and then review. Unless CAA starts making a ton of sports movies with Matt Leinart and Paris Hilton as the stars, they may see the NFL and sports as a waste of money. It's not, really. It's just that they don't really understand what they've gotten themselves into.
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