boston progress radio

Ahhh the NBA All-Star Weekend approaches. A mostly pointless, yet strangely relevant annual occurrence. What will be the storyline this year? Some of the standouts from my lifetime have been the year Magic Johnson retired and revealed he was HIV positive, and then played in the All-Star game, and won the MVP; he was hitting almost every shot he took, and Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas took turns guarding him, and everyone was all smiles. It was a signal to a lot of sports fans that AIDS was not leprosy. That may sound mad ignorant to us nowadays, but that’s what a lot of people used to assume.

Or there was the year Kobe Bryant represented the West at the game in his hometown of Philadelphia, where his teammates kept feeding him and feeding him so he was the clear choice for MVP of the game. And as he received his award, he got booed by the Philly crowd. I think on that day, we witnessed the beginning of Kobe’s conversion from wannabe nice guy K-O-B-E to F everybody Black Mamba.

And after years of boring boring boring, the Slam Dunk contest is back! When I was a kid, legitimately great players like Jordan and Dominique Wilkins vied for the title each year. But eventually it became a show for one-trick ponies like Harold Miner, Isaiah Rider, and Cedric Ceballos (wackest dunk ever). But recently, we been seeing studs like Jason Richardson, Amare Stoudamire, Nate Robinson, and Dwight Howard competing, which makes me feel like a kid again. (Weird for me that I’m like older than all those dudes.)

This year, one of the plotlines was markedly anti-immigrant. Apparently, due to the popularity of Internets voting in China, New Jersey Nets Yi Jianlian was making a run at one of the two starting forward spots for the East team. In a division where LeBron James, Kevin Garnett, Chris Bosh, Paul Pierce, Danny Granger, Tayshaun Prince, Josh Smith, Shawn Marion, and Rashard Lewis play, Yi is clearly not among the top 2 forwards – he’s probably barely top 22.

So the fact that he was challenging LBJ and KG and CB4 for one of the starting slots apparently outraged American fans so much that calls for a restructuring of the voting system went up all over the place. Jeff Van Gundy said the other night that they should change the system so fans votes had less influence, and players and coaches and fans who attended games carried the load for selecting the teams. Other enlightened folks all over the Internets were calling to ban Internet votes (weird right?), or even more offensive, to ban voting from China.

Is it true that fans who attend games are more knowledgeable? Or are they just wealthier?

And is it true that Chinese fans simply vote for Chinese players, and if so, what’s wrong with that?

Is it any different than the fact Portland fans have voted for Greg Oden? Or Oklahoma City fans for Nick Collison? Surely nobody actually believes they are better than Yao Ming or Shaquille O’Neal? And who the hell is voting for Luke Ridnour?

But nobody is up in arms about those votes – because there aren’t enough people voting in Portland or Oklahoma City or Milwaukee to sway the balloting that much.

But there is definitely an anti-Chinese tinge to the conversation. Chinese fans are being blamed for Yi’s placement in the balloting process and also for Tracy McGrady’s current standing as a potential starting guard for the West. T-Mac has been injured for a good chunk of the season, and its a commonly-held belief that his vote total is boosted by heathen Chinese votes since he plays on the same team as Yao Ming.

But it’s an All-Star Game! In the grand scheme of life – no actually not even – in the grand scheme of the NBA, it really does not matter. It’s a cute and fun little distraction. Do we really have to be OK with the anti-China rhetoric here too? Why is that going on unchecked?

But in the end, the sniffling was academic as Yi fractured his finger and won’t be able to play in the All-Star Game after all.

All the hullabaloo got me thinking though, about how it’s similar whenever non-mainstream folks get excited about something – the mainstreamers want to ruin their good time.

Why would you care about Asian American music/film/art? We have perfectly good regular art here!

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Tags: basketball, China.