African-American athletes are viewed differently than other athletes. That is a known fact. Anyone can see the racial overtones that are applied to Black Athletes from time to time. I follow all of the major sports leagues for the most part. From what I read online and from what I hear on sports talk radio, the NBA seems to be the most polarizing professional sports league in the world.
The racial demographics of the NBA are as follows: 76 percent of the players are African American, 20 percent are white, 3 percent are Latino, and Asians are at 1 percent. Based on those numbers one can figure out that the NBA has more African-Americans players than any of the American professional sports leagues.
A player in the NBA can make $473,604 at the league minimum while $25.2 million is given annually to the NBA’s highest paid player Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant. Words like “Thug” “Gang banger” and “Felons” are often applied to NBA basketball players. Other adjectives such as “Lazy” and “Overpaid” are often used to describe the NBA. No other professional sports league gets beaten up by the uneducated masses like the NBA and its player do. Even an announcer in another pro sports league bashed the NBA. Montreal Canadiens defenseman P.K. Subban is known as being “brash” and “flashy”. (We have heard those words applied negatively to black athletes haven’t we?) One NHL critic even said that Subban plays the game like he plays in another “sport.”
When I first heard about what Northwestern head football coach Pat Fitzgerald said on Twitter I was incensed (@coachfitz51: There's finally a NBA player who plays hard and says the right things off the court.). Later I found out that the tweet was actually made on Fitzgerald's account by Cody Cejda, NU Director of Football Operations.
All of this makes me think why do some sports fans dislike the NBA so much? It might be that so many African American males are doing well financially while the rest of the country is not doing so well. Mr. Cejda sweeping generalization of all NBA players shows that America has a problem with the NBA and its players. That “problem” has a lot of people saying a lot of stupid things.
Side note: You may have noticed I did not mention New York Knicks guard Jeremy Lin. I chose not to mention him because it is not of Lin’s doing that so many have a deep-rooted hatred of the NBA.
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