James Fallows

In response to this recent item, plus this, and my original Atlantic article on "Throwing Like a Girl," many readers have weighed in.

As a reminder, the original contention was that throwing a ball, like riding a bicycle, is a skill that nearly anyone (male or female) can learn, but that everyone has to learn or be taught, since the movements and coordination involved are not innate. Gender differences tell us why the strongest male can throw faster than the strongest female. But the male-female gap in average throwing skill really has to do with the fact that little boys are more likely to spend their time throwing rocks and balls. Now, let's go to the readers. The illustration is explained in due course.

Maybe it's one more chapter in the long saga of American exceptionalism.

It's some support, I think, of the idea that throwing is learned, and culturally determined, that many European men -- or anyone, really, who grows up playing soccer -- throw like girls.  In fact, cricket bowlers throw with a different motion than baseball players (or, say, Americans tossing a tennis ball off a court).  The fastest bowlers are a little slower than the fastest pitchers, but not by much.  Moreover, cricket fielders throw slightly different than bowlers, but not quite like American fielders, either.

What's odd is that you would think the act of throwing was something so basic that we were built for it; in this way it's not quite like riding a bicycle.  It's more like, say, running, even kicking (there's no such thing, I don't think, as "kicking like a girl", or if there is it's not as noticeable).  That is, you would think that the motion was more or less natural -- capable of being improved upon, certainly, but roughly inherent.

Curious problem.

More on the curse of the soccer-playing cultures.

This is a topic I'm interested in because my daughter is a high school softball player who throws very well, and because I spent some time teaching her and other girls on her little league softball teams how to throw.  I have also spent time teaching her younger brother and his baseball teammates.  Based on my experience, I would say that throwing is a skill that can be learned equally well by either sex, and that even boys who have picked it up through trial and error (as I did) can improve through repetition of drills that isolate various parts of the kinetic chain and then put it back together. 

Also, fathers aren't throwing in the back yard with their kids enough, at least in my town.  I've seen boys as old as 12 who throw a baseball like they are shot putting an ostrich egg.  At some point, I'm going to start revoking man cards.
 
Watching the Argentine video of men throwing with their off hands was very interesting. [It is here, and if you missed it the first time, be sure to check it out.] They don't throw like girls as much as they throw like people who've never tried to throw anything at all before.  I've often wondered how well boys or men who grow up in soccer dominated countries throw compared to Americans.  We take it for granted that boys will grow up throwing balls as well as rocks, but in most of the world they grow up kicking them instead (I once read an article by a Frenchman extolling the wonders of soccer who asserted that if you give an infant a ball, the first thing it will try to do is kick it - not over here, Pierre, I thought - an American baby will pick it up and throw it).  You are much better travelled than I - how do you think these guys would have done with their dominant hands compared to the average American male?  How well do men throw in China? Have you seen any comparative studies?

I have not seen such studies. But come to think of it, I have not seen that many people in mainland China throwing, as opposed to kicking, balls. Japan and Taiwan, on the other hand, have big baseball traditions and lots of accomplished throwers.

Now, from a Westerner in China here is more on the ever-popular US-China angle.

I wrote a short poem after seeing the Dodgers and Padres play on March 16, 2008, two days after the Lhasa Uprising, in Wukesong. [JF note: this was in the buildup in to the Olympics, at the baseball stadium where the Olympic baseball games were played.] The teams had played on Saturday, the15th, though the PSB [Public Security Bureau] was in a full flutter and had turned the pre-game activities into a disaster; they were worried sick that a gathering of Americans and other international expats would turn the event into a pro-Tibet rally, not understanding that this was baseball. The 16th was a bit more relaxed. And Jet Li was on the mound to throw out the first pitch. I wrote a short poem on his toss.

"The Second Major League
Baseball Game in China

When I saw Jet Li
throw out the first pitch
I thought, man, he throws
just like my sister
threw
the night she hurled
the rock at my head
and took out
the living room clock.
I was lucky.

Then
I kept my mouth shut
too.

I happened to snap a photo of Mr Li's pitch: . His form is not bad, though his left arm isn't fully extended, and his release timing was off    - an "inside the elbow" as you explain in your piece - producing a low velocity arc that barely made it to the catcher. With his natural athletic abilities, I expect that with a few quick lessons Mr. Li would have been throwing quite well. But it drove home the fact that throwing a baseball is a learned skill, one that often pre-dates our memory to recall the actual process. I suspect that my father had the greatest influence on how I ended up learning to throw a ball.

Another soccer casualty.

I read your latest post and agree completely that throwing and most other things can be taught and it often takes a long time to develop the skill that we tend to take for granted because as boys we started very early. When I was in the service in the 60s and still able to associate with guys that has been in WWII and Korea, I was told that the German Potato Masher grenade was designed that way because European sports didn't involve a lot of throwing, and that made sense to me.

The T. Rex angle, from a reader in Florida.

I don't know if this is a localized euphemism, but among various baseball teams on which my 9-year-old boy has played, the term for low-elbow, no-body-rotation throwing has become "throw like T-rex." I've taken to using it myself now that I'm coaching. And I spend a lot of time trying to teach kids to throw. I think you'll agree that's a much better phrase -- more accurately descriptive, harmlessly funny for the kids, and even educational in its way.

I love this woman's point [from this post] about feeling the joy of a body in motion. That's why the hell we do this for our kids/ and to our kids. I have a stutter, and one of the ways I developed confidence as a kid (actually the main way) was I got to be quite good at catching, throwing, and shooting. And I love to this day shooting, catching, throwing -- with anyone. By myself. Went out and took a bunch of jump shots today all alone. I've met more friends through pickup hoops than almost anything else. Athletic confidence, which my parents didn't really have, almost certainly altered my life for the better. If they had not pushed into sports at a young age, who knows how my life would have suffered?

And one the great byproducts of coaching I've found is how much just a little bit of attention can help an awkward kid. A lot. And what incredible fun that is to see happen. You see an awkward kid that you've worked with make a shot or catch a rebound when they could hardly hold the ball when they first started, and it's fantastic. And then getting those kids to compete (and I am pretty competitive) with the bigger, stronger, more coordinated kids and believe in themselves a little is just as gratifying. Forget the score; it's the competing on honest terms that matters. Self-respect.

So you're right and she's right. Anybody can be taught to do these things well enough to enjoy them, well enough to feel themselves getting better. If more coaches cared about competing with the kids they have and helping them get better rather than team-stacking so they can be elite at 9, we'd all be happier.

Coaching has showed me why people still teach despite all the crap that comes with it.

From a mother of a daughter.

I didn't think twice about marrying a guy who throws like a girl because I threw very well and would be the go-to athletic coach parent.

I didn't count on coming down w/ inherited autoimmune arthritis.  I gotta pop some tylenol and teach my girl how to throw.

Thanks for giving me the motivation. She throws even worse than my husband, and I didn't think it was possible for anyone to be worse.  ;-)

From a father of a daughter.

I've been paying attention to the throwing issue. Girls with no brothers tend to throw better than girls who have brothers. Dads with boys spend most of their coaching time with the boys. Dads with only girls spend their coaching time with girls. Very few moms teach kids of either gender how to throw. The big exception: willful girls in mixed-gender families that are madly obsessed with participant sports.

My observations aren't scientific, but I'm near certain anyone who carefully measured would come to the same conclusion.

From another father of a daughter.

I read today's blog entry with great pleasure, as almost nothing raises my hackles as quickly as that loaded phrase. My daughter, you see, plays baseball. Not, as she frequently has to assert, softball. Both spring and fall, she has been the only girl in a 150-player Little League division. She started playing at six because she wanted to follow her brother. At her first practice, she simply refused to throw overhand. It wasn't comfortable, it wasn't natural, and she knew perfectly well she could throw the ball the 15 feet to the coach by tossing it underhand. She also wouldn't even try to catch a gentle return toss, just letting it drop and then retrieving it. Two years later, she throws like a gunslinger and delights in egging me on to throw it ever harder when I send it back at her. So what happened?

The same thing that happens to every other Little League kid. Many of the boys I've coached over the past three years didn't have a lot of baseball exposure at home. Their models, if they have any, are big league players they've seen on TV. When they start, most of them throw "like a girl" (the ones not trying to throw sidearm like a 3B barehanding a groundball).

We don't call it that, of course; we tend to call it "the shotput motion," with the elbow tucked under the throwing hand, the step with the throwing-side foot, and a predictable high arc to the throw. Getting proper mechanics to stick takes roughly two seasons, on average, with wide variability sourced in both athletic and listening ability. The same, I'd imagine, applies to throwing a football, another sport from which girls are typically excluded. Small wonder that many women have horrible throwing mechanics.

The gender essentialism assumption -- that girls just can't throw properly -- does raise its head in Little League at times, sometimes with gratifying results. In one game this past spring, an opposing player hit a clean single to my daughter in right field. As the runner approached first, she had already scooped up the ball, but the first base coach sent the runner to second. Rebekah had plenty of time for a mystified double-take before throwing a rope to second base that easily beat the poor runner, who didn't even bother to slide. Sometimes it's a good thing to be underestimated.

However long she keeps playing baseball, she'll spend the rest of her life occasionally smirking at some poor sap whose assumptions got the better of him. Hopefully enough young men will read your piece that there'll be fewer saps around to be caught out.

That's a limited sampling of what's come in; more after a while. Thanks to all.

I was traveling so didn't get on the much- commented-upon Washington Post feature about "throwing like a girl" when it first appeared. I am reminded by Andrew Sullivan that the topic is still bouncing around, so here goes:

1) I am weirdly heartened to have other people treat this as a "real" subject. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the article I've most enjoyed doing in my Atlantic career was one called "Throwing Like a Girl," from some 15 years ago.

2) As you'll see if you compare my piece and the Post's, we come to somewhat different conclusions. We both agree that there is a such a thing as the throwing-like-a-girl motion. We disagree on its fundamental cause.

3) The Post piece talks about a variety of differences between the genders. Eg, "[a professor of psychology and women's studies] found what she defined as a 'very large' difference in only two skills: throwing velocity and throwing distance." I ended up being convinced that, apart from obvious gaps in size and strength, the only difference that mattered between men and women is that more males than females have spent time learning how to throw.

4) Learning how is the crucial concept, because throwing a ball "correctly" is like riding a bike, in this way. Virtually anyone can learn to do it, but virtually no one starts out knowing how. Once people learn, gender differences in strength take over. The average male bike rider will be stronger than the average female; the strongest male ball-thrower, like Randy Johnson, above, will throw faster than the strongest female. But they all can ride bikes the same way, or throw balls the same way, once they learn how.

5) Check my article for details (and this follow up), but here's the simplest try-it-right-now proof that throwing motion is a learned rather than an innate skill. Pick up a ball with your "off" hand -- for me, the south paw, since I am right-handed. Throw the ball with that hand. You will throw it "like a girl." And it will take you hundreds, probably thousands, of throws before you feel as if you can do it naturally. As part of my article research, I threw left-handed with my sons and my wife. It was revealing and character-building.  UPDATE! Here is a fabulous Vimeo clip of men throwing with their "off" hands. Every one of them throws like -- well, see for yourself. [Thanks to reader ER.]

6) Now we get to the other realm of gender differences. For whatever reason, most little boys spend more of their early years learning how to throw than most little girls do. They get better at it -- as they would be at bike riding, if only boys rather than girls were taken through the inevitable shakiness and falls of those first few rides. But that's where the boy/girl difference emerges -- from the thousands of instances of a boy picking up a rock to skip it across a pond and learning how the "kinetic chain" of a throw feels, while a girl, for whatever reason, is doing something else.

Below, as discussed in another item, is a great super slo-mo video with the Giants' Tim Lincecum, showing the "kinetic chain" of an effective throw. And after that, continued after the jump, is a note that came in just now on the very topic of learned rather than innate skills.



Now, below and after the jump, a touching letter that has just arrived, on this very topic. It is long but to me very interesting:

I loved your article, "Throwing Like a Girl." it.  I loved that you even dared to point out this stinging little "euphemism"  and all that it implies.   I am personally guilty of using the expression (along with "you scream like a girl") and I AM a girl.
 
I think the part of this article that interested me most, however, was not that  you pointed this out, but that  you pointed out that throwing properly is something that can be learned by adults - and more importantly to me, by children. 

I'm sure the reason my husband brought this article to my attention was to sooth my worried and inherently UN-athletic soul.  I have managed to pass this inherent lack of athleticism down to my oldest son, despite ALL of the opposite genetic material encoded in my husband and his side of the family.  It runs deep and strong on his side, but apparently not deep and strong enough. 

When I realized that my tall and naturally strong boy, a boy who even looks graceful in repose, was not actually gifted with any grace when it came to running, throwing or hitting, I got very sad about it.

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Following previous items here and here, a reader in New York writes:

I remember a caller on WFAN (sports radio station in New York City) not long after the 9/11 attacks.  The awful closer for the New York Mets had blown his second save eliminating the Mets from any possibility of the post-season.  The caller said to Mike and the Mad Dog:  "First let me express my sincere condolences to those who have lost loved ones at the World Trade Center, but that Armando Benitez, he has got to go."

Anyone who remembers the ... suspense ... of watching Armando try to hold a lead and finish a game, as my sons and I do all too clearly from his time as an Oriole, knows just what the caller was talking about.

Another reader provides this apposite quote from Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power, ten years ago. Emphasis added:

You sometimes find in non-literate cultures [the] development of the most extraordinary linguistic systems: often there's tremendous sophistication about language, and people play all sorts of games with language.

What all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow, and if you don't have a lot of technology and so on, you do other things.

Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way -- so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports.

You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folks. So what's left? Well, one thing that's left is sports -- so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter.

A prize to the first sports-talk host who devotes a segment to Noam Chomsky. LaVar Arrington, I'm looking at you!

1) Things I wish I didn't know from the weekend papers.
     - Andy Murray, answering readers' questions online, as relayed by the NY Times:

Yes, the Nationals bandwagon is truly exciting, especially after the decades of misery with ill-managed laughingstock local pro sports franchises. Thanks, Dan Snyder! Thanks, Peter Angelos! And I understand that the Olympics are still underway, plus all this politics stuff.

But for many people in the DC area, the real drama begins this evening, in Buffalo, in Game I of the Age of RGIII. I have no idea who "Rev Redskin," the guy in the robes in the video below, really is, but he is great, and he expresses one important part of the regional id.



Naturally we'll be watching to see whether local favorite Chris Cooley is back in shape to be on the other end of RGIII deliveries. Thanks to TAJF for the tip.

For a momentary diversion from politics, beer, global disaster, and China, let's round out a discussion thread from last week.

As a reminder: a Harvard alum said that things were hideous at Penn State but wouldn't bear close scrutiny at a lot of other places too. Then a Michigan alum replied that the college-sports spirit actually did more good than harm.

Final round. A scientist at a famous football school (OK, it's OU) writes:

As a college professor,and a football fan, I am hugely ambivalent about college sports. Student athletes include some of the best time managers and most mature students for their age. But there are also those that see classwork only as a necessary evil while they pursue their dream of excelling in sport. Most, especially those in money-making sports, see the hypocrisy of the word "student athlete", where graduation rates of basketball players and football players, even with a huge infrastructure meant to help them along, is shamefully low.

It seems the best solution, in lieu of flat out payment, is to guarantee athletes working for the university, or the family members, an additional 2-4 years of free education (an increasingly pricey prize) when they choose to devote their time to study.

From another Wolverine:

Although this might make me a heretic as a Michigan alum, the whole build up about "Michigan Men" and athletics is a giant facade. Like every other school, the middle-aged men at top of the athletic department have no problems collecting their six- and seven-figure salaries while the "student" athletes got paid nothing (stuck subsidizing a bunch of other sports played by rich kids) and got no real education.

The Ann Arbor News conducted an in-depth investigation a few years ago dismantling the idea that the school's image matches reality. The outrage from the fans directed at the newspaper was embarrassing--like most fans, they care about their own enjoyment, not the well-being of the kids.

If you want further proof about the rot of big-time athletics, talk to James Duderstadt--a former UM President!--that has written an entire book about the invidious commercialization of college sports.

I have no problem opening up opportunities to those that otherwise wouldn't have them--although why they should go to athletes rather than poor math geniuses or artists I don't know--but we should make sure our schools actually fulfill their duty to those kids. I'm not sure Michigan does that any better than any other school, regardless of what the reputation of the "leaders and best" says.

The indecipherability of college sports:

I'm a sports fan, but ... I have zero interest in collegiate sports - I don't know who any of the players are, there are too many leagues and conferences and they rank them in a bizarre subjective fashion I find completely corrupt. So I enjoy professional sports, and literally pay no attention to the college games.

So to me, with no investment in the sports side, it's simple to just think "this isn't about sports, this was a crime, a horrific crime that damaged a bunch of kids, taking advantage of their most vulnerable traits for a kind of sick predatory satisfaction.  It is not about college, not about sports, it is about violent crime".

So while I can see how being deeply invested in the concept of college sports would allow a human to have a kind of a "yeah, but..." moment, but just as how a commitment to an ideology can bring people to believe blatant lies, I have to think that this smacks of willfully blurred vision.  No matter what, or how much, good school sports have done, they were also the vehicle for locating and exploiting vulnerable kids, and too many people decided to remain silent in order to protect the "integrity of the institution".

Nope.  Ask anybody who doesn't care one way or another about college sports, and they're going to be unanimous that the entire structure has the appearance of being corrupt and unhealthy...

And finally, the Darwin/Huxley angle:

No big surprise that even prestige colleges are obsessed with sports; thus was it ever. Remember the 1932 Marx Brothers' film Horse Feathers? Groucho Marx, (playing Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, president of Huxley College) was pondering how to buy shamateur football players in order to defeat arch-rival Darwin College.
 
Groucho: Where would we be without football? Have we got a stadium?
Trustees: Yes!
Groucho: Have we got a college?
Trustees: Yes!
Groucho: Well, we can't support both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
Trustees: But, Professor, where will the students sleep?
Groucho: Where they always sleep, in the classroom!
 
Obsession with sports has been an American fixture at least since the days of Grantland Rice and the Four Horsemen. I haven't been to Europe for years, but I doubt there are many Frenchmen with a decal on the back window of their Peugeot that proclaims "Sorbonne" or "Ecole Polytechnique." Likewise you could go a long time, I'll bet, before you encountered a German wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with "Max-Planck-Institut" or "Göttingen." So who is the outlier, us or the rest of the world?

American exceptionalism: undiminished even now. Thanks to all.

Taylor Branch delivered the roundhouse punch to the NCAA and its hypocrisy/standards last year in our pages. Louis Freeh et al delivered a damning judgment on Joe Paterno's Penn State earlier this week. Yesterday I quoted a Harvard graduate on the Ivy League's problems in the same regard.

A reader writes in to make the contrary case, on the character-building traits of college sports etc. I can imagine the followup arguments pro and con and won't keep this going indefinitely, but in fairness here is the other side.

After reading the note from your Harvard alum, I felt it's important to ask what the value of higher education is? I'm an alum of Michigan-a very good school with a very good football program. In 1997, we won a national championship in football, and had the Heisman Trophy winner. Obviously many of the members of that team went on to have long, successful NFL careers. But what of the majority of the players who ended up not going on to the NFL?

It's only one year from one school (and after Penn State, I hesitate to point our it's known for doing things "the right way,") but the vast majority of those players have gone on to successful careers. Many of them owned their own businesses. All had jobs. I'll try to find the link on MGoBlog tomorrow*, but a Michigan blogger caught up with those players around 2007 and found out that they were all doing all right - more than all right, actually.

Now again, this is a small sample size - but usually folks who deride the term "student athlete" use anecdotal evidence, as does your Harvard alum. A sample size of one is stronger than that. And again, Michigan is known for doing things "right," and is also a good academic school with a strong football program. But then, so are Texas, USC, Georgia Tech, Stanford and Notre Dame.

In this country, as in most of the world, universities are used to turn boys and girls into future leaders. They evaluate their recruits mostly by grade point averages and standardized tests, the latter of which many educators feel is a poor way to measure their students. A minority are let in with lower GPAs because they demonstrate excellence in another realm - arts, music, and yes, sports.

And what's wrong with that? What's wrong with opening up opportunities to kids who wouldn't otherwise have them because they demonstrate excellence differently than the traditional way? Maybe it's because Harvard, and Michigan, do actually give a damn at giving these kids a chance, both on the field and in the classroom? After all, Michael Oher [from Michael Lewis's The Blind Side] ended up as a valedictorian in his class, after barely qualifying for school in the first place.

In another country, these same kids would get stuck in some "minor leagues" for a few years before finding out that they weren't going to ever cut it in the big leagues. And then they have to decide what's next. Here? They go to college, get an education while playing ball, learn more about teamwork, leadership, and dealing with success and failure. And then they get a degree and decide what to do next. I imagine the reason they recruit those non-revenue sports in schools like Harvard is to give excellence an opportunity to develop in the collegiate environment. And they teach them to become future leaders, in and off the field.

Isn't that the point of an education?

Hail! To the Victors, Valiant!

* He sent a followup note with more data:

Here's the link to the Michigan blog that found followups on the 1997 team:

http://mgoblog.com/content/destroy-harbaugh

It was made after Jim Harbaugh called out his alma mater. We may call ourselves classy college football fans - but we're still college football fans.

From the website of Penn State's president just now. Good to know that the most newsworthy item for university leaders is the excellent shoulder surgeon at Penn State Hershey.


To the extent this all bears on the question of equal opportunity and (metaphorically) level playing fields, you can (loosely) classify this as another installment in the annals of casino capitalism.

Winter is coming, as they would say in Game of Thrones land. By which I mean not the actual season but grim-toned political discussion ahead. So again let's pause to look on the bright side with:

1) Chinese hoops. Here is a very nice brief video, courtesy of reader AK and SB Nation, of Stephon Marbury joyously celebrating with his Beijing Ducks teammates after their victory over the Guangdong Southern Tigers to win the Chinese Basketball Association championship. Really, this is heartwarming in about twelve different ways -- and a partial balm for this season's untimely end to Linsanity.


 

2) Aussie beer. The promised full retrospective report is still to come. But as a guide to anyone who wonders whether Australia's brewers, long famed for blah watery lagers, could produce something more ambitious, here are another two signs of progress.

One is the Stow Away IPA entry in the James Squire line of craft brews, shown below in its natural setting in a James Squire brewpub in Hobart. (The company itself is based in Sydney -- and is owned by Kirin, which in turn is part of the Mitsubishi combine.) Stow Away is the purple one on the left and is about the closest thing I've found in the Antipodes to the current American-style IPAs.

Last from me on this topic, until Jeremy Lin is MVP of the NBA Championships, followed by leading the U.S. to an Olympic win this summer. For maximum drama, the gold medal game should be against the team from China. Until then:

1) From a cultural, social, business, and individual perspective, every aspect of Jeremy Lin's identity adds to the fascination. That he's Asian; that he's Christian; that he's from Harvard; that overnight he became a star. It's legitimate and natural to dwell on each of these elements, including his race.

   1A) On the cultural front, David Brooks's observed about Lin this morning that "we shouldn't neglect the biggest anomaly. He's a religious person in professional sports." This observation is ... surprising. Brooks might want to spend a little more time watching athlete interviews ("I want to thank Jesus for helping me on that field goal") on ESPN.

   1B) Non-surprisingly, the Daily Show trumps all in cultural-social-racial coverage.

2) When it comes to his athletic performance (as opposed to cultural significance), I strongly believe that none of those "identity" elements means anything. I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that what matters about Lin's basketball achievements is that he is exceptional as an athlete. Many commenters on TNC's post explain the shock of having known people who had made it as pro athletes: these people are different. They're different not in being black or Asian or Christian or anything else, but in being faster, stronger, better coordinated, better conditioned than the rest of us.
 
My story: in high school, I was a bad member of a tennis team whose #1 player won the national under-18 championship that year (the Kalamazoo tournament). He was just playing a different game from ordinary people -- and was faster, stronger, better coordinated, better conditioned. (Even so, he wasn't a big success in the pros, because there was a level above his of speed, coordination, durability, etc.)

Jeremy Lin is showing us his athletic skill now. Not his Harvard book-learning, his oriental heritage, his Silicon Valley optimism, or anything of that sort. Here he is doing his two-hand dribbling drill. Can you do this? No matter what your race?




3) Because a number of serious writers have based their theories of "Asian" behavior on the same social-science experiment, it is worth going into exactly what that experiment showed. Mark Liberman lays it out at Language Log, but here is the crucial chart. It tracks where different groups of people directed their attention when shown a set of pictures:

To simplify, the difference between "Asian" and non-Asian perspective  is the gap between the red and blue lines. Among other things, the chart shows that on initial, "at a glance" perspective, for the first half-second or so, there's virtually no difference. Everyone is looking at the same things. For a point guard, or a fighter pilot, that first half-second would be what matters. This chart is the basis of the "Asian different perception" arguments you're hearing. Again see Language Log for more.

4) Alan Paul, former resident of Beijing and author of Big in China, tells about his experience with the Chinese hoops world.

5) Another reader who knows the Asian basketball scene writes:

As a long-time hooper and resident of Taiwan maybe I can add something to this.  Unlike in the US, where many more kids get coaching in rec leagues or basketball camps, in Taiwan the athletics path is limited to a small number of kids.  This is not so much due to 'the system' but rather because most parents view sports as a waste of time / distraction from studies (which as you know, compared to US schooling, is gruelling).  The result is that most people playing in the average pick-up game have never been drilled in the fundamentals, so mostly what they do is imitate what they see on TV / Sportscenter highlights.
 
As for why China hasn't produced an NBA point guard, well China has only had a handful of NBA players and they've pretty much all been big men.  One possible explanation is that big men who can play are rarer than little men who can play - if you're 6'2, you are competing against many more people (locally and worldwide) for the limited number of spots than if you are 7' - so the best Chinese big men are naturally more in demand than the best guards.

After the jump, one more bit of eyewitness testimony.

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A 20-something American now working as a translator in China sends this report:

Having lived in Beijing for five years now, I've played in more than my share of Chinese pickup games. Something that becomes obvious very quickly is that people here--especially young people--model their games more on the Kobes of the world than the Nashes. While you will sometimes see someone who's a willing distributor, or someone who has an outside shot, many times pickup games here quickly degenerate into a series of dueling "drive-to-the-hoop/rebound/kick-out" possessions. Setting picks is rare, the pick-and-roll is even rarer, and the concept of spacing on offense is practically non-existent (actually, now that I think about it, I'm probably doing Kobe a disservice. At least he knows how to come off a pick!).

Why? One of the Chinese micro-blog users you quoted cites the system as the main reason why China has yet to produce a great point guard. I completely agree. Despite the prevailing stereotype of "collectivist" Asians, in basketball, at least, people here aren't taught how to function as a team. And it shows on the pickup court. Or at least it does in Beijing (You harp constantly on China's diversity, and you're completely right on that count. Maybe they ball it up differently in Guangzhou!).

Just part of expanding the data-set on how "Asians" bring their special, spatial perspective to ball sports.

The other notable aspect of this message, of course, is that the reader has evidently been away from a native-English environment long enough that he says "harp constantly on" when he means "devote admirably consistent attention to." Otherwise, excellent note!

Following this item earlier tonight about the ethnic element in Jeremy Lin's athletic skills, and emphasizing that what follows is explicitly not related to Robert Wright's original post on the topic, several intriguing leads:

1) Adam Minter, a good friend from Shanghai, has a great item on Bloomberg about the way people in China are debating the racial / national / cultural aspects of Lin's recent success. Sample:

[One Chinese person's] observation raises an awkward question that's been ricocheting, in various forms, within Chinese microblogs since Lin first broke out on Feb. 4: Why is the first ethnic Chinese point guard to star in the NBA not a Chinese national?

It's a sensitive question with political implications for China's state-run sports establishment, which is responsible for training China's elite athletes. On Feb. 12, Mao Maozi, a cameraman with the state-run Shanghai Education Television network, tweeted an answer to that question on Sina Weibo:

>>If Jeremy Lin lived on the mainland, he would either be a semi-literate CBA [Chinese Basketball Association, China's state-run professional league] player or an ordinary undergraduate who likes basketball in his spare time. We admire him not because he is an ethnic Chinese, but because he has proved for a fact that the main reason that Chinese don't play basketball well is because of the system, and not their physique!<<

And, Yes, for the record, that's all one tweet! The writing system of the Chinese language has its drawbacks, but one of the pluses is that with 140 characters you can say a whole lot more in Chinese.

2) About the "bigotry of pattern matching" -- assuming that Asians (or Asian-Americans) won't be good at sports, and other groups will be bad at other things -- an essay from a venture capitalist.

3) About a now-forgotten cultural explanation of basketball success, several readers pointed out an essay on Jewlicious.com. It describes the days when basketball was considered a Jewish sport:

Along with stickball, basketball was the game of choice for the little Jewish ragamuffins living in the tenements of the Lower East Side of New York and elsewhere in the US. The poor little yidden, first generation immigrant kids, freed from their shtetl yoke of religion, needed something to do with their spare time and for many, sports was their new religion.

New York Daily News sports editor Paul Gallico wrote in the mid 1930s that basketball "appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background [because] the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness." We see how qualities such as cunning and wiliness were posited as the keys to Jewish basketball success and how these kinds of statements were indicative of early 20th century America.

4) David Ryan, former guest blogger in this space, points out a book about Jewish "dominance" of American basketball before World War II, and the ethnic/religious reasons for their success. As the abstract of the book's argument says,

During the interwar period, public recognition of Jewish basketball led both Jews and non-Jews to describe basketball as a uniquely 'Jewish game.' The 'Jewish game' existed not simply because of the prevalence of Jewish players, but also because Jews were considered inherently good at basketball.

More here. That's it for now.

Once again I am on the road and off the Internet, so let me be the last person on Earth to weigh in about Jeremy Lin. I'll do so by disagreeing totally with my longtime friend and recent colleague Robert Wright.

In his item about Jeremy Lin yesterday, Bob Wright made the argument that Lin's "Asian heritage," including its philosophical aspects, helps explain his current success on the court. Some social scientists have contended that "Asians" -- a grouping that covers maybe two billion people -- perceive reality in a more "group"-like than individually centered fashion. No wonder Lin has such great court sense and can dish off those assists! Wright asks:

Is it crazy to think that the perceptual tendencies that [these social scientists] documented in East Asians could equip them for this sort of thing?

To answer that question: Yes, it's crazy. More precisely, it's horseshit. I say so in the friendliest possible way, but again: horseshit.

Everything about the Lin story explains why he is such a phenomenon. That he's Asian is part of it. Plus that he went to Harvard, that he's playing in New York, that he's a devout Christian, that he was undrafted, that he has come from absolute nowhere to outmaneuver Kobe Bryant -- and that he has done all this with a suddenness whose main American pop-culture precedent is the story of Joe Hardy (look it up). Some of these elements might have been enough, on their own, to get him extra attention. Think how the "Harvard quarterback" angle added to coverage of Ryan Fitzpatrick on the Bills, or how religion has added to the Tebow saga. To have all these elements together for Lin is truly riveting. I'm even willing to concede that his Asian identity, such a rarity in the NBA, is the single most attention-getting theme, though the Harvard angle is a close second.

But being Asian has nothing to do with how he plays ball. (Nor does going to Harvard.)

My evidence? Earlier this week, the Atlantic's sport columnist Jake Simpson analyzed Lin's game in terms of its real components -- shooting accuracy, willingness to take on double-team coverage, etc. I could leave it at that, with the reminder that considering his passing skills "Asian" is about as legit as saying that he has "a high basketball IQ" because he went to Harvard. Or a confident on-court manner because he's from Silicon Valley. [Update: Mark Liberman of Language Log absolutely demolishes the "science" that is the basis of this whole "Asian view" conceit.]

But let's go to the videos! It happens that there is a test case available: the millions of actual Asian people who play basketball  -- it's very popular throughout the region --  and the thousands who have played in professional or semi-pro leagues in China itself. These are real living-in-Asia Asians, without the diluting effect the immigrant experience might have brought to their "philosophical heritage." Overall do they play ball in a way the sociologists might predict?

Unt-uh. Here's one video, of the Dongguan Leopards playing at Shanxi Zhongyu, in a Chinese league. This features Stephon Marbury playing for Shanxi, one of a steady trickle of NBA stars who extend their careers with a contract in China. The first minute or so is the local equivalent of dancing Laker-girls. Some of the rest features crowd agitation, yelling at refs, general tumult, and some basketball. Virtually none of it fits with treatises on Asian "philosophical heritage" -- even though nearly every person you see on screen (apart from Marbury and a few other foreign players) is theoretically part of this tradition.
 


Or consider last summer's "basketbrawl," in which the Chinese military team Bayi Rockets slugged it out with the visiting Georgetown Hoyas. The gratuitous aggression all came from the Chinese side, as many Chinese commentators noted.



Obviously there are big differences between American culture as a whole and the varied cultures of mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, etc. But (in my view) that has zero to do with Jeremy Lin's amazing recent run.

By happy chance, yesterday was the publication date for a wonderful book about the way those differences show up in sports, and the larger implications for U.S. and Chinese interactions. This is Brave Dragons, by Jim Yardley of the New York Times, which uses the travails of an American coach and player on a flailing Chinese hoops team as a way of explaining larger U.S.-Chinese interactions. The two countries' differing approaches to discipline, individuality, athletic training, and other matters show up on the basketball court as they do elsewhere, Yardley shows. But not in what we've seen from Lin and the Knicks.

Now you know. And for the record, I am going on at such length because I agree with Bob Wright on the vast majority of other topics.

For work reasons, I've been away from the realm of connectivity longer than I anticipated. As a quick re-entry note, before a longer item forthcoming shortly on "the Mormon question" and then some other topics (including WTF with these weird Chinese structures that have shown up via satellite and that everyone is writing about), here is a note with which I agree 100%. A reader writes:

Was curious if you saw Bob Costas' interview with Sandusky. [See Atlantic Wire item for background.] Putting aside the content of the awful Penn State mess, it's worth watching Costas's fabulous technique. Such a professional. Totally prepared. Didn't fill silences. Crafted questions in a way that illuminated while getting himself out of the way. I complain alot about the quality of reporting out there. But this was outstanding. Any young reporter would do well to emulate.

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Agreed. Serious without being sanctimonious. Skillful and natural-seeming use of the pressure of silence. Going into horrifying and titillating material in absolutely straightforward non-smirky fashion. Relentless without seeming bullying. [More from Ta-Nehisi Coates on the interview too.]

A lot of the time, when you see a "star" interviewer on TV, you get a lesson in posturing or narcissism that you hope young journalists will ignore. This is the reverse. I'm sure if we went through all of Bob Costas's oeuvre (or mine, or anyone's), we'd find some less impressive examples. But this could hardly have been handled better on his side. Sandusky could hardly have handled himself worse, but that is not Costas's fault. Well done by Bob Costas and NBC.
---
UPDATE A reader writes:

Agreed that Bob Costas is a competent interviewer.  And that's precisely why we will never see him interview Speaker Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, etc. 

Ever since the ugly spectacle of the Bayi Sharks professional/military basketball team pounding away on the visiting Georgetown Hoyas at the "goodwill" match in Beijing, there has been much heavy-weather commentary about what this bodes for US-Chinese relations. "Heavy-weather" in the sense of people loading a lot of surplus "tensions of a rising superpower"/ "pent-up US-Chinese hatred"-style narrative on one really nasty event, which was preceded and followed by some perfectly normal basketball games for Georgetown and Duke on their China tour.



To my mind, the most interesting and plausible context-setting for the brawl comes today from the Washington Post's sports columnist Mike Wise. (Photo also via the Post.) He is no China hand but knows a lot about the culture of big-time sports and its international ramifications, and his description of the mix of ingredients sounds saner and more perceptive to me than other things I've read.

Naturally I like his headline -- "Georgetown's basketball brawl in China erupted from complex mix of history, hubris and culture" -- since I think versions of that headline can apply to many things going on in today's China. Wise says that some of the reasons had to do with China, and with this particular team. Part had to do with the Georgetown team, at this particular stage in its own history. And a lot of it had to do with images and practices from American sports culture being projected worldwide. Eg:

>>Here's a theory: Beyond nationalistic pride, a bevy of home-cooked calls that made for over-the-top bad officiating and two teams going at each other physically, the fight was very possibly the result of the perfect storm -- a caldron of history, hubris and the overseas marketing of win-or-die American sports culture.
And it's been percolating for years....<<

This leads to his intertwined histories of Chinese basketball, seen as needing to get "tougher" to compete internationally, and the Hoyas themselves, under similar pressure to show that they are not "softer" under the current Coach Thompson than under his dad. Leading to:

>>Lastly, if people were worried about our game being co-opted by other countries after Team USA's embarrassing Olympic losses in 2004, they need to worry about something more sinister now.

Our talent isn't being exported as much as our attitude.

We woof. We taunt. We don't just want to win; we need to dominate. And, yes, there is a racial component to this mentality. Even an old-head NBA player could tell you that.<<

There's more. Worth checking out. By the way, the cool of the current Coach Thompson and his team as they left the Olympic sports center under very hostile circumstances deserves respect and praise. In those few minutes they served their country and their university well.
___
UPDATE. An ethnically Chinese reader in the US writes:

>>My spouse told me an anecdote from his days as a Peking University student that illustrates the will-rather-die-than-lose-face attitude of the athletes from the PLA.

As a university student, he was required to participate in military training on an army base (sort of a compulsory ROTC). The first day he arrived, the friendly soldiers asked them to sign up for a volleyball game. But before the game, they asked the students to practice first. During "practice", they send 2 spies to watch the students, and discovered to their dismay that the students were really good at volleyball.

So next day, when the game was supposed to begin, they cancelled the volleyball game and insist on basketball instead, where the students were soundly beaten. (No surprise there: If you have the chance to drive by the PLA's Navy base near the Central district of Hong Kong, which used to be HMS Tamar, you will find that the sailors/soldiers are always playing basketball!)

See, no nationalism or racism is needed to start a basket-brawl in China! :)<<

Having struck a sour tone these past few days, it will be all upbeat, all the time, with posts today. That is to say, no politics, public finance, FAA or TSA screwups, Chinese unrest or high-speed train updates, or anything else of that depressing sort.

Instead, let's start with: running!

About a year ago, I was moaning that many decades of distance running had left me with knees and joints that all felt fine but with an increasingly sore, swollen, and unsightly right Achilles tendon. The more I read about "tendinosis," the more it seemed like balancing the federal budget a depressing future reality of life. And if that turned out to be the reality, I would be consigned to a grim (from my POV) future of swimming, "the erg," the elliptical, and similar drudgery.

Therefore when I heard rumors of salvation, in the form of "barefoot" running and the oddball Vibram finger-shoes, I naturally rushed to embrace this hope. That's what I depicted last year, in a trick photo of me with one of my sons just after we'd bought a matching set of Vibram FiveFinger footwear:



A year's worth of use later, here's how one of the Vibram shoes now looks. The shot below corresponds to the foot-and-shoe second from left in the shot above. (And thanks for asking: the red mark on the big toe isn't blood. I once caught my toe on a track with a red rubbery surface. I haven't washed the red off because it adds that tough-guy look.)

And a sign that not all of the news out of Washington DC makes you want to jump off a bridge:

At least for purposes of admiring the panache and "a dish best served cold" gleeful nastiness of today's proclamation by Gov. John Kasich, Republican of Ohio, that the Dallas Mavericks and their friends, family, and fans are all Honorary Ohioans.



The second and third Whereas clauses are where the knife is twisted, with joy. I thought this was a hoax when I first heard about it (via Politico's James Hohmann), but it's right there, on the splash page of Kasich's official site. PDF of the proclamation, suitable for printing at home, is here. It's nice to see a whole state that can bear a grudge. Maybe next year's license plates can say, "Ohio: The Buckeye Schadenfreude State."

I mentioned yesterday that, as part of China Daily's touching 30th-birthday festivities, it ran some pictures of Premier Wen Jiabao playing basketball with school kids.

Little did I know that a 90-second video of the whole event existed. This truly is incredible, from Wen's outfit to his showoff tricky dribble at time 0:25 to his working the offensive boards to ... well, please see for yourself. Thanks to Damien Ma for pointing this out.
 


The official English narration conveys the tone (but doesn't say anything about the conducive-to-layups rim height.)

>>Instructed by school teacher Zhang Tao, Wen learnt how to dribble and control the ball.

A successful shot won him a big round of applause from the pupils, the report said.
[I bet!]

Wen said he was "very happy" to join the students, and added that building a strong and healthy body would help them in their studies.

"Only when children are healthy, can the country have a good future. We must keep a healthy body in order to better serve the people," he said.<<

Well put! Nice play by all. And good sportsmanship by Wen Jiabao -- even though he gives every indication of taking this 100% seriously and not as a moment of high campiness potential. (For another time: has there ever been a moment of senior Chinese Communist officials reflecting awareness of the campy or jokey quotient in such events. Probably so, but I can't think of one now.)