toml
Nov 13th, 2006, 05:22 PM
Hereís a really dumb article (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15647497/) about Yaoís ìcultureî and how it limits his ability to be a great player.
And hereís a great rebuttal on it.
On Friday, Jonathan Feigen deftly countered a MSNBC story by Michael Ventre which questions Yao Ming's ability (or willingness) to dominate in the NBA. Feigen, who respects Ventre's body of work, tries to put his dissent delicately. I'm not familiar with Ventre's work, but delicacy is not really in order. His MSNBC opinion piece, "Personality, not talent, holding Yao back" is simply embarrassingly short-sighted and displays what I can only describe as laughable cultural ignorance.
Amateurish references such as "[Yao] could become a veritable Gang of Four condensed into one fearless leader," are well enough uninformed but Ventre goes on. "In China," he says, "authorities regularly crack down on Internet access for its citizens. But the NBA's All-Star voting never seems to be affected. Yao gets about a trillion votes each year."
Yes, there's a lot of people in China... we get it. It's a throw-away joke now. It's not even offensive, just a little hyperbole to make some kind of erroneous point about the supposedly weighted All-Star voting. Isn't it supposed to be a popularity contest? The game is clearly global now. Is this an insinuation that the votes of Americans should carry more weight than the millions of Chinese who indentify themselves as NBA fans, too? Yao received 2,342,738 votes last year to lead all vote-getters. The 3.4 million or so Chinese Americans here in the U.S. could have done that... with some absurdly concerted voting, and of course, the NBA's consumption-friendly voting rules.
At least Ventre saved himself from obliviously intimating, like so many before him, that Yao's so-called passive nature is cultural. I can assure you... there are as many Chinese a**holes as everyone else. They may not always arrive in every foreign country having an instant feeling of entitlement and superiority, but they have plenty of bombast and faulty pride to go around.
What's really offensive isn't the veiled xenophobia, but rather how poorly informed Ventre, a supposedly respectable journalist, seems to be about Yao Ming--and the authority with which he purports to speak about him. Feigen, along with his many commenters, for their part, submit their rebuttal effectively, dissecting the article piece by piece and refuting each with concrete examples of the contrary, but he stops short of accusing Ventre of having Yao's overall perception completely misconstrued. It's as if Ventre wrote the article two years ago and decided to publish it now.
Yao may not talk trash and sneer and waddle down the court with arms flailing every time he does something he's excited about--so he may not stand out to the casual fan--but he is on the mind of every opponent and coach he faces (not to mention currently the league's most efficient scorer). I think that's, yes, that's dominance... or one interpretation.
From: http://blogs.chron.com/yaocentral/archives/2006/11/yao_and_the_many_interpretatio.html
And hereís a great rebuttal on it.
On Friday, Jonathan Feigen deftly countered a MSNBC story by Michael Ventre which questions Yao Ming's ability (or willingness) to dominate in the NBA. Feigen, who respects Ventre's body of work, tries to put his dissent delicately. I'm not familiar with Ventre's work, but delicacy is not really in order. His MSNBC opinion piece, "Personality, not talent, holding Yao back" is simply embarrassingly short-sighted and displays what I can only describe as laughable cultural ignorance.
Amateurish references such as "[Yao] could become a veritable Gang of Four condensed into one fearless leader," are well enough uninformed but Ventre goes on. "In China," he says, "authorities regularly crack down on Internet access for its citizens. But the NBA's All-Star voting never seems to be affected. Yao gets about a trillion votes each year."
Yes, there's a lot of people in China... we get it. It's a throw-away joke now. It's not even offensive, just a little hyperbole to make some kind of erroneous point about the supposedly weighted All-Star voting. Isn't it supposed to be a popularity contest? The game is clearly global now. Is this an insinuation that the votes of Americans should carry more weight than the millions of Chinese who indentify themselves as NBA fans, too? Yao received 2,342,738 votes last year to lead all vote-getters. The 3.4 million or so Chinese Americans here in the U.S. could have done that... with some absurdly concerted voting, and of course, the NBA's consumption-friendly voting rules.
At least Ventre saved himself from obliviously intimating, like so many before him, that Yao's so-called passive nature is cultural. I can assure you... there are as many Chinese a**holes as everyone else. They may not always arrive in every foreign country having an instant feeling of entitlement and superiority, but they have plenty of bombast and faulty pride to go around.
What's really offensive isn't the veiled xenophobia, but rather how poorly informed Ventre, a supposedly respectable journalist, seems to be about Yao Ming--and the authority with which he purports to speak about him. Feigen, along with his many commenters, for their part, submit their rebuttal effectively, dissecting the article piece by piece and refuting each with concrete examples of the contrary, but he stops short of accusing Ventre of having Yao's overall perception completely misconstrued. It's as if Ventre wrote the article two years ago and decided to publish it now.
Yao may not talk trash and sneer and waddle down the court with arms flailing every time he does something he's excited about--so he may not stand out to the casual fan--but he is on the mind of every opponent and coach he faces (not to mention currently the league's most efficient scorer). I think that's, yes, that's dominance... or one interpretation.
From: http://blogs.chron.com/yaocentral/archives/2006/11/yao_and_the_many_interpretatio.html