If not for the Ray Rice saga playing out in public, the Atlanta Hawks would be America’s No. 1 sports story. Owner Bruce Levenson is selling his shares due to the release of bizarre, ignorant comments he made about his team’s fanbase, and general manager Danny Ferry may be following him out the door soon enough.
Ferry is alleged to have said the following in a team conference call about current Miami Heat forward Luol Deng, who the Hawks targeted and scouted in free agency this summer:
"[Deng] has a little African in him. Not in a bad way, but he’s like a guy who would have a nice store out front but sell you counterfeit stuff out of the back."
In response to the allegations, Ferry has steadfastly claimed that the comments were repetitions of reports he received from other sources and scouts. That feels like kind of a moot point. Regardless of who the words are attributed to, Ferry’s role as general manager is to be responsible for the whole operation. Part of that responsibility — I assume — is going through these reports and using the best bits to communicate with the rest of his staff, as well as clarifying discrepancies as obvious as racist remarks. In a best-case scenario, he was simply unprepared or unwilling to do part of his job, which might partly explain why he failed so miserably to find LeBron James a running mate during his Cleveland days.
Between the best-case (laziness) and worst case (outright racism on Ferry’s behalf) is a middle ground with problems of its own.
Scouting is deeply ingrained in sports, these days down to levels far below professional. The recruitment tactics employed by Divison I colleges and professional sports teams has spilled into AAU, with amateur coaches and organizations leveraging the talents of their players for sneaker deals and corporate cash. As a result of this, teams have incentive to identify top talent and get it on the roster.
Demand for talent kicked into overdrive with the explosion of television rights and other money funnels in the sports marketplace. The amount of cash on the line necessitates top-down ruthlessness on behalf of sports franchises — most can’t afford to screw up. Somewhere in the search to find the best of the best, humanity was eliminated from the process.
Consider this video detailing the selection of Toronto Raptors forward Bruno Caboclo, a virtual unknown heading into the 2014 Draft:
The only definitive terms used to describe him — other than a ridiculous “Brazilian Kevin Durant” nickname — are his height (6’9″) and several catch-all terms used across the sporting world (“raw”, “freak athlete”). While this was necessary in part because of Caboclo’s unknown status, the use of generic features as illustration of makeup is not unique to him. We are expected to learn everything there is to know about a free agent or draftee based on sets of arbitrary platitudes.
In NBA terms, we can quickly conclude that if two prospects are identical in height, one having longer arms than the other is advantageous. This moves down the line from shooting percentage to PER without anyone missing a beat or suggesting something is amiss. It would be nice to think that this greater than/less than thinking is used only in terms of quantifiable data.
Unfortunately, this line of thinking extends to how people process personality. Ferry’s characterization of Deng continued, albeit in a less controversial manner according to documents obtained by Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports:
"Good guy in Chicago. They will tell you he was good for their culture, but not a culture setter. He played hard and all those things, but he was very worried about his bobble-head being the last one given away that year, or there was not enough stuff of him in the [team] store … kind of a complex guy."
Deng’s suggested complexity, “according to Ferry’s sources”, was derived from wanting to be treated as an important member of the franchise after a decade of service. Because he happened to care about his standing with the organization, he was treated as some sort of strange being. To Ferry and the NBA at large, it is easier to treat Deng and every other player as a cog in need of machinery. Perceived differences are marked in the ledger as “weirdness”, rather than contrasting human makeup.
That’s fine when it comes to matters of bobble-heads and the length of one’s wingspan, even if grading somebody on the latter has the creepy feel of a human meat market. But by constantly resigning to do the bare minimum in distinguishing one man or woman from the next, ending up in the racial cesspool that Ferry reached isn’t that shocking. It’s a byproduct of evaluating people as cuts of porterhouse rather than amorphous beings.
Down the slope we tumble; instead of worrying about the paying customers he had and attempting to merge new demographics with them, Bruce Levenson wanted to turn a blind eye to his patrons in favor of a mythical audience he may never reach. Instead of getting to know Luol Deng as a person — and trust when I say he’s worthy of getting to know — Ferry (or his henchmen) let ugly stereotypes based on origin and skin color define him. Based on reports, he did it as nonchalantly as one would describe someone’s height.
Ferry is in the wrong by a country mile, and his status as GM is what makes this most troubling. He and Levenson determine one’s worth and fitness to work as NBA players, yet they can barely be bothered to scratch the surface of the human being on the other end of the deal. It’s the equivalent of a Fortune 500 company hiring job candidates without so much as a phone interview, using a resume and the toolbar that asks your nationality as the only guiding principles. (Maybe that’s more accurate than I’d like to believe.) Rather than caring to find out what people bring to the table on a case-by-case basis, it was quicker and more efficient to see what arbitrary boxes Deng ticked on a personal and physical level.
The leap from, “his game reminds me a lot of [former NBA player]” to “he’s a typical [ethnicity] with the way he [ugly stereotype]” is much smaller than we care to think about. Traversing the gap between nasty profiling and humane evaluation may be as simple as cutting our haste. If we drop the paint-by-numbers evaluation and minimize bigotry in one fell swoop, that’s a job well done.