I was in the Poconos with some friends last weekend when the AFC Championship Game came on. I don’t care much for football these days, but when I did care about it I always enjoyed watching the Patriots play (except if they were playing the Giants) because I found Bill Belichick’s meticulous gameplans fascinating. There are very few coaches I can recall who have gotten so much production out of other teams’ castaways. So it was surprising to me when I realized that literally all of my friends were rooting for the Baltimore Ravens. It’s an interesting cultural dichotomy – a team of relative underdogs have managed to become the most hated team in football. I had to ask: why is everyone rooting for the Ravens? One of my friends responded, “I feel like the Patriots are a white team.”
I had never thought of it this way until now, but the Patriots are, sort of, a collective embodiment of the sportswriter’s wet dream: they’re smart, they make hustle plays, they have undersized players who play well beyond their physical skillset. The Patriots aren’t a white team in terms of complexion – like any other NFL team, they roster a large number, if not a majority of, black players – they’re a white team because of the narrative which surrounds them. Danny Woodhead and Wes Welker will never be confused for Adrian Peterson or Calvin Johnson, but Bill Belichick utilizes them in such a way that he’s optimized their production to the point where they aren’t just valuable players, but – in Welker’s case – legitimate stars. The way we talk about our modern athletes is through a sort of racial code of adjectives and terms. The Patriots are a white team because we define them as “smart” or “professional,” we say Tom Brady has “intangibles,” or we define Danny Woodhead as “gritty.” Meanwhile we define Adrian Peterson or Calvin Johnson as “freakishly athletic” or “talented.” These aren’t terms which are used solely in football, though, they’re pervasive throughout the entire sporting world.
During the week of August 11-17, 2011, Adam Felder and Seth Amitin coded every Major League Baseball broadcast (over 200 games) to document how broadcasters would describe players of different races and nationalities. What they had discovered was that:
[F]oreign-born players—the vast majority of whom are Latino—are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to receiving praise for intangibles. Latino players are almost 13 percent less likely to be praised for intangibles than their white counterparts. Announcers are nearly 14 percent more likely to praise a US/Canadian-born player for intangibles than they are their international counterparts.
While there is no difference between race or nationality when it comes to performance-based descriptions, effort-based and character-based descriptions make a big difference. Players born in the US or Canada are 10 percent more likely to be praised for their effort. White players are 10 percent more likely to be praised for their character.
Indeed, it is not so much that announcers are unwilling to praise non-white players, but the terminology they use in so doing falls into a set of pre-defined “code words.” For example, if a player is described as being a “guy next door,” or “regular guy” there is a greater than 80 percent chance that player is white. If a player is described as “impatient” or “over-aggressive,” there is a greater than 50 percent chance that player is not white. This echoes the findings of similar research in the field of print sports journalism.
We’ve created narratives around our athletes based on their skin color and/or nationality, which have changed our perceptions of them. We classify white players as “hard workers” and we appropriate them with intangible qualities, while non-white players are “gifted” or “naturally talented.” The truth is, though, that anybody who makes it to the highest level of their sport has worked their ass off to get there, and worked even harder to stay. Which is why it is, frankly, lazy when sportswriters define black and Latino ballplayers as “lazy” or some other unflattering description. Every player doesn’t sprint down to first base on every weakly hit groundball, and yet it seems as if it is consistently blacks and Latinos who are derided for their “lack of hustle.”
bhavin's mind grapes. 