In a weekend wrap-up post, Dave makes a passing reference to one of the more uncomfortable aspects of basketball:
Early in the day, I happened upon an NIT game on TV, where Mississippi State was playing someone. While I was watching, I saw a quick, aggressive Bulldog guard drive through the defense for an impressive layup. The kid was Ben Hansbrough, Tyler’s little brother. That got me thinking. It’s one thing to be 6’9″ and play college basketball. Sure, you have to be somewhat athletic, really how many people are you beating out for that spot? But to be 6’3″ or so and play college ball, you have to be a hell of an athlete. And that’s Tyler’s brother.
Later, when Carolina was playing, they showed his dad and mentioned that he had high jumped as a student at Missouri and had once cleared 7’2″. 7’2″!! So, Tyler’s little brother is a D-1 guard and his dad was an elite track and field athlete. Hmmm, maybe Tyler’s not quite the sub-athlete so many say he is. He’s constantly praised for his motor, his aggressiveness, his work ethic and his hands, but never for sheer athleticism. Do you think maybe he’d be talked about differently if he were black instead of white?
It’s common knowledge that an outstanding basketball player who happens to be black will frequently be praised as a “great athlete” (often with an extraneous syllable– “ath-uh-leet”– to make the speaker sound extra ignorant), while an outstanding player who happens to be white will be praised for knowledge of the game, and other intellectual attributes. Hansbrough is an example of the slightly less common trend of downgrading the athleticisim of outstanding white players.
It’s an uncomfortable situation, of course, because the outstanding feature of his game really is his aggressiveness and work ethic– as a big guy, when I watch basketball, I tend to focus a lot on the post players, and Hansbrough is, in fact, notable for his general hustle. The guy hardly ever stops moving, and always goes after the ball. The ugly business in the Duke game a few weeks back is as much a testament to his hustle as anything else– he chunked a free throw with his team up twelve with under twenty seconds remaining, and he got the rebound under the basket, despite the fact that it really didn’t matter, and there were four Duke players between him and the rim when he put the shot up.
Of course, the world being what it is, it’s hard to praise those qualities without coming off as a racist goober. And even attempting to defend his athletic ability tends to come off a little weird. When people run him down as an unathletic clod, I’ve said things like “Actually, if you watch him play, he’s pretty agile for a 6’9″ guy,” but it’s hard not to hear a parenthetical “(white)” between the last two words. Because, you know, that’s the sort of thing that gets said.
(To some degree, Hansbrough’s game invites this sort of thing. As Dave’s commenter william notes:
Watch him on the inside when he shoots and watch how he uses that angles to score. Maybe it is due to superior vision or hand-eye coordination, but he seems to make more of what I will call “impure” shots than anyone else.
A pure shot is either intended to go in from straight on or is based upon a clear and easy banking angle. Hansbrough makes many of these of course, but he also nails a lot of shots which seem to bank in from very strange angles (acute?) or that seem to rim in from the back rim. After two years of doing this, it seems clear that it is not just luck. He seems to understand the geometry of making shots to a degree far greater than any other player. Compare him to B. Wright, who seems to either swish, dunk or miss.
(I think that’s one of the things that gives him the appearance of not being a great athlete. Where a lot of players would make some sort of move to get a simpler angle for a shot, he just takes what’s there, and hits the shot from a weird angle. Those kind of shots frequently look really awkward and unathletic, but they count the same as the graceful ones…)
I don’t actually have anything all that deep to say about this, other than that I hate it. It’s not just that it makes it difficult to talk accurately about the game– if I say I admire Hansbrough’s hustle, I’m not saying it because he’s white, I’m saying it because I really do appreciate the way he plays the game– but also the fact that there really are people out there who use “cerebral player” to mean “white guy.” When I’m watching or reading about basketball, I don’t want to have to carefully parse everything for subtext, I just want to watch some freakin’ basketball.
And as long as I’m referencing Dave’s post the the discussion in the comments there, let me note that this old profile of the Hansbrough brothers really is an excellent example of the form. (It also makes Tyler Hansbrough seem like the quintessential Roy Williams player– not only is he a slightly goofy-looking guy who hustles like crazy, he could go ten rounds with ol’ Roy in a cornpone throwdown…). Amusingly, the fan site referenced in the article (which is a couple of years old) is still going, though it’s not all that recently updated…