Scholarly Commons @ UNLV Boyd Law Scholarly Works Faculty Scholarship 2014 Racial Upside: Deconstructing the "Merits" of Jeremy Lin's NBA Contract Stewart Chang University of Nevada, Las Vegas -- William S. Boyd School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub Part of the Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons, and the Law and Race Commons Recommended Citation 14 Va. Sports & Ent. L.J. 1 (2014). This Article is brought to you by the Scholarly Commons @ UNLV Boyd Law, an institutional repository administered by the Wiener-Rogers Law Library at the William S. Boyd School of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Article Racial Upside: Deconstructing the 'Merits' of Jeremy Lin's NBA Contract Stewart Chang This Article disputes the common misperception that sports are a colorblind meritocracy that should serve as a model for the rest of society. The capacity of players to break into and succeed in professional sports is believed to be based purely on merit, with no consideration of race. Controversies that surfaced around the rise of professional basketball player Jeremy Lin, an Asian American not expected to succeed in a sport dominated by blacks and whites, challenged this popularly-held notion. This Article argues, not in a derisive way, that Lin's ability to secure a lucrative $28.8 million contract, originally with the Houston Rockets and recently traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, was not purely based on merit, but was based on race. Expanding upon Nancy Leong's theory of racial capitalism and Justice O'Connor's business diversity rationale in Grutter v. Bollinger, this Article suggests that the primary reason for Lin's continued place in the National Basketball Association represents the monetization of race by corporate interests, which contradicts the idealization of the sports as a colorblind meritocracy. The winter of 2012 witnessed the phenomenon in American sports known as "Linsanity." Jeremy Lin, an undrafted third-string point guard who had drifted from team to team in the National Basketball Association (NBA) seemingly on his way to obscurity, suddenly and unexpectedly sparked a winning streak for his then- team, the New York Knicks, capturing the attention, adoration, and imagination of sports fans across the country. What distinguished Lin from the typical sports underdog success story, however, was his race-as an Asian American, Lin was not expected to possess the talent to succeed in a sport traditionally dominated by black and white athletes. Boxer Floyd Mayweather infamously reacted to Lin's success by tweeting "Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he's Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don't get the same praise, ' implying "Assistant Professor of Law, Whittier Law School and Assistant Professor of English (by courtesy), Whittier College. I am grateful to Sheldon Lyke, Manoj Mate, Karthick Ramakhrisnan, Oliver Wang, and Seval Yildirim for their helpful comments, feedback, and conversation. I Ian Begley, Floyd Mayweather Questions Jeremy Lin, ESPN (Feb. 14, 2012, 12:11 PM), http://espn.go.com/new-york/nba/story/_/id/7572690/floyd-mayweather-says-new-york-knicks- jeremy-lin-spotlight-race-not-play; see also David C. Wilson, Mayweather's Racial Resentment Reflects America's Thinking About Race, Huffington Post (Feb. 15, 2012, 9:53 AM), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-c-wilson/mayweather-jeremy-lin b 1278796.html ("Mayweather thought it was unfair that Lin has received celebratory attention, but not because of Lin's basketball "merits" rather it was because of Lin's race."). VOL. 14:1 VIRGINIA SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT LAW JOURNAL FALL 2014 that Lin was an undeserving recipient of affirmative action. Mayweather's criticism spurred a public debate concerning race and merit in sports, 2 which Carmelo Anthony, Lin's then-teammate on the Knicks, continued later that summer. When Lin obtained a $28.8 million contract offer from the Houston Rockets during free agency, Anthony called the contract "ridiculous," suggesting that Lin was objectively not worth that much talent-wise and that the Knicks should not match that offer.3 Anthony's sentiments, shared by some of his teammates, implied that there is an objective correlation between ability and earning capacity in NBA player contracts, which is perhaps premised on the assumption, as many African American 5 6 athletes have wrongly been led to believe, that sports is a colorblind meritocracy. The circumstances surrounding Jeremy Lin's initial breakthrough and continued presence in the NBA problematize this belief in the race-neutrality of sports, and instead uncover the way race interplays with primarily fiduciary and commercial incentives behind NBA player personnel decisions. In the midst of Linsanity, the term now popularly used to memorialize Jeremy Lin's unlikely surge through the NBA in early 2012, Oliver Wang observed the racial polemics that were surfacing: For some, Lin is the ultimate underdog: overlooked, undervalued yet now, overachieving. For them, his rise is a confirmation of American exceptionalism and the promise of meritocracy... For others, Lin is the 2 See Peter S. Goodman, Jeremy Lin: The Backlash, Huffington Post (Feb. 14, 2012, 2:32 PM), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/jeremy-lin b 1277250.html ("Put aside for a moment that this statement is demonstrably ridiculous. Very few players in the history of the game have done what Lin has been doing since he took over starting point guard duties for the New York Knicks earlier this month. The last newcomer to post numbers comparable to Lin's was a guy named LeBron James."); Ian Begley, Spike to Floyd: 'Recognize' Lin's Talent, ESPN (Feb. 15, 2012, 10:07 AM), http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/knicks/post_/id/I 1777/spike-to-mayweather-recognize-lins- talent (describing Spike Lee's response, "Floyd Mayweather I Hope You Watched Jeremy Hit The Gamewinning [sic] 3 Pointer With .005 Seconds Left.Our [sic] Guy Can BALL PLAIN AND SIMPLERECOGNIZE [sic]."). 3 Chuck Schilken, Carmelo Anthony calls Jeremy Lin contract offer 'ridiculous,' L.A. Times (July 16, 2012), http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/I 6/sports/la-sp-sn-jeremy-lin-carmelo-anthony-20120716. ld.I ("New York shooting guard J.R. Smith told Sports Illustrated on Sunday that it might not go over so well in the locker room if Lin returns to the Knicks making the kind of money he's been offered."). 5 See John Hoberman, Darwin's Athlete's: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved The Myth of Race 29-30 (1997) ("the presence of large numbers of black athletes in the major sports appears to have persuaded almost everyone that the process of integration has been a success."); see also Gilberto Conchas, The Color of Success: Race and High-Achieving Urban Youth 56 (2006) (noting the ways in which black urban youth regard professional basketball as a medium for achieving success in America). 6 See Douglas Hartman, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath 76 (2003) (discussing the "remarkable affinities between the sacrilization of sport and dominant American conceptions of liberal democracy, racial progress, and color-blind, meritocratic social justice."); see also John Bloom and Michael Nevin Willard, Sports Matters: Race, Recreation, and Culture 2 (2002) (describing how media has a vested interest in portraying "sports institutions as benign agents that promote a 'color-blind' social vision."); see also Jacquelyn Bridgeman, The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat: What Sports Tell Us About Achieving Equality in America, 7 Va. Sports & Ent. L.J. 248 (2008). FALL 2014 RACIAL UPSIDE VOL. 14:1 beneficiary of token sympathies, overly lauded for being7 an Asian curiosity in a sport dominated by black and white bodies. The question whether Lin emerged in the NBA spotlight in spite of his race or because of his race, engaged archetypal issues of discrimination and affirmative action in America and brought them into popular discourse. Lin's contract offer from Houston reignited the debate as to whether he truly "merited" the price or whether the contract represented some type of"unmerited" affirmative action for an underrepresented minority. As Wang concludes, rather than support the notion of sport as a realm of colorblindness, "what Linsanity has also revealed, in stark and8 sometimes uncomfortable ways, is how much we still want to talk about race." This Article argues, not in a derisive way, that Lin's contract is indeed racially based. Yet his continued place in the NBA is not a matter of simple affirmative action, but instead addresses the exploitative financial complexities behind many other race-based decisions by institutions in America. Lin's $28.8 million contract, which was recently traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, challenges the idealization of sports as a colorblind meritocracy, and demonstrates the conscious monetization of race in American culture. The Houston Rockets, Los Angeles Lakers, and the NBA have institutionally been enabled to capitalize on Jeremy Lin's race, which demonstrates Nancy Leong's theory of "racial capitalism," a term she coins to describe "the process of deriving social or economic value from the racial identity of another person." 9 Leong examines the ways in which institutions derive market benefits from partial racial inclusion of minority members, and thus commodifies them.' 0 She contextualizes her argument within the affirmative action debate in higher education. According to Leong, by having minority members, schools can utilize diversity as a marketability mechanism to attract other consumers, most of who may come from the white majority, but who in turn are able to claim that diversity as their own social capital once they buy into that system."1 However, whereas Leong's example primarily focuses on the commodification of diversity, this Article suggests that Lin's race itself becomes the marketed commodity for consumption in the NBA, not by the general consumer population, but a specific sector of racial minorities.