Originally posted by TheGoldStandard:
Originally posted by WillistheWall:
Originally posted by TheGoldStandard:
If you're black you're out of prison, if you're right you're in a band, got it.
Not sure how being a rocker who plays music his dad didn't like is a compliment... besides he only said if they had long hair. If they had no hair he probably saw they were a skin head.
I honestly just don't know why you guys are making such a big deal out of this. It's a somewhat inflammatory comment made by 1 writer in 1 article out of a whole country's media. Not to mention that whether you guys think it's racist or not you'd have to be naive not to see that the USA basketball had an image problem with the rest of the world stemming from the early 2000s, when guys like Iverson and Marbury were playing street ball basically, and you had players showing up to the games and press conferences in oversized jeans and t shirts and a bunch of jewelry.
If the perception that a white person tatted up belongs to a band, while a tatted black man belongs to prison or a gang does not offend you, so be it. As a black man it offends me greatly, but to each his own.
"guys like Iverson and Marbury were playing street ball basically..."
And there's the difference of perception. In 200x Iverson was a hero to your average street kid. The NBA has an image problem because it has to sell black players to a white audience. It really is not a complex issue.
The NFL just sold a Super Bowl with a accused rapist as one of the starting Quarterbacks, but it's the NBA has the "ghetto" stigma. . There is nothing "ghetto" about Lebron James, at all. Going to prep school and achieving world-wide fame by age 16 is not what one would consider ghetto, but he's black and has tattoos and that is all that matters to some people.
Bob even went on to say in his next post his dad had a white guy with short hair and tattoos checked out because he "must have gotten out of prison". Dont think he really meant anything racist, just that if its a white guy with long hair they fit a stereotype of a rocker.
IMO you can't really expect Europeans or South Americans to be able to differentiate between these guys real well because they dont see all the games we do or know the back stories of the players. So of course if these guys look similar to them they are not going be able to compare them fairly. These people didnt think MJ was ghetto, he was a world wide hero, but he also was a professional who always looked professional. MJ didnt have any tats and he dressed in a professional manner.
And just because AI was a hero to your average street kid doesnt mean that he didnt help start the perception of "ghetto basketball". I was somewhat of an AI fan but even I can realize that people could percieve him like that, or would percieve him like that, because he dressed in the "gangster fashion" and played 1 on 1 ball with fancy dribbling and not a great 3 point shot, and didnt play great defense and didnt share the ball very much. He definitely fit the perception of an And 1 type of player even though in his prime he was one of the 5 or 10 most skilled players in the world.
It might bother you that people are percieved like that but white players have the same perception problem when it comes to athleticism. Jimmer Fredette tested out as one of the most athletic guys at the NBA combine but people "have questions whether this guy is athletic enough to play in the NBA". Adam Morrison was supposed to be the next Larry Bird because he was a tall white guy who could shoot well enough to score a lot of points, despite the fact that he was nowhere near the passer or ball handler or rebounder or defender or overall scorer that Bird was. People said that Dirk and Pau were soft because they were European, even though those guys have played on the last 3 championship teams and play on pretty good defensive teams. People are always going to stereotype pretty much and you just have to get passed it and make your own assessments, not get overly offended every time someone does it. If you do that you will be pissed for most of your life.