“Floyd Mayweather questions Jeremy Lin”

Oh, Floyd Mayweather. Please stop talking about Asians. This is not your best subject:

“Boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. believes that New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin is getting national attention because of his race, rather than his exceptional play. ‘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,’ Mayweather wrote on his Twitter account on Monday afternoon.”

Along with the insensitivity, I see at least 4 problems with Mayweather’s logic:

1. Black NBA players get truckloads of praise every night. What on earth is Mayweather talking about here?

2. So what if someone is being hyped for being an unusual story? Here Mayweather is sounding just like the people who claimed Barack Obama was being “hyped” for analogous reasons. Along with Obama’s qualifications, it was simply very interesting to have a serious black Presidential candidate for the first time, and also very interesting to have an Asian-American basketball star appear on the scene unexpectedly for the first time. So what?

I also don’t think Mayweather is correct that all or even most of the hype about Lin is based on the fact that he’s Taiwanese-American. Instead, there are two storylines here that are much more compelling, at least for me:

3. Most of us had never heard of this guy until a week or so ago. My sports junkie days are behind me now, so I tend to learn about things at the same time as the slightly-above-casual fan. And it was exciting to see this no-name from the developmental league suddenly emerge.

4. He played college basketball for Harvard. Harvard. Not exactly a sports power. He was also undrafted.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. is an amazing boxer. But he really just needs to keep his mouth shut about Asians from now on. He gets himself in trouble every time he addresses the topic, and I hate to see him get himself in trouble. Undefeated boxers are rare.