Billionaires and Boasts
Timothy Egan, NYT
JAN. 23, 2014
SEATTLE — My city is famous for its retail exports: coffee and Costco, Microsoft and Macklemore, Boeing’s jetliners and Jeff Bezos’s business model. This week, a boast by a man with number 25 on his chest turned all eyes to Seattle. But it should have been the claim by the city’s most famous billionaire that got more attention.
The first gasconade was uttered by Richard Sherman, the Seattle Seahawks all-pro cornerback, who let his adrenaline speak for him after making a play that sent my hometown boys to the Super Bowl. Sherman is not just the best corner in the game — as he let the world know — but a thoughtful, generous, bright guy from Stanford by way of Compton’s Dominguez High, where he ranked second in his class.
His postgame rant, one-part early Muhammad Ali and one-part pro-wrestling swagger, brought out a torrent of overt racism on the Internet — “porch monkey” and “thug” and “gangster” were the printable epithets. Most of this came on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Thug, as Sherman noted Wednesday after apologizing for letting his words outshine his teammates, “seems like the accepted way of calling someone the n-word nowadays.” He shrugged it off with good humor, and asked people to look at the man outside the organized brutality of football.
(More here.)
JAN. 23, 2014
SEATTLE — My city is famous for its retail exports: coffee and Costco, Microsoft and Macklemore, Boeing’s jetliners and Jeff Bezos’s business model. This week, a boast by a man with number 25 on his chest turned all eyes to Seattle. But it should have been the claim by the city’s most famous billionaire that got more attention.
The first gasconade was uttered by Richard Sherman, the Seattle Seahawks all-pro cornerback, who let his adrenaline speak for him after making a play that sent my hometown boys to the Super Bowl. Sherman is not just the best corner in the game — as he let the world know — but a thoughtful, generous, bright guy from Stanford by way of Compton’s Dominguez High, where he ranked second in his class.
His postgame rant, one-part early Muhammad Ali and one-part pro-wrestling swagger, brought out a torrent of overt racism on the Internet — “porch monkey” and “thug” and “gangster” were the printable epithets. Most of this came on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Thug, as Sherman noted Wednesday after apologizing for letting his words outshine his teammates, “seems like the accepted way of calling someone the n-word nowadays.” He shrugged it off with good humor, and asked people to look at the man outside the organized brutality of football.
(More here.)
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