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This is from a Chuck Klosterman article on ESPN.com. Read to the end. It will all become clear:
Malcolm Gladwell writes for The New Yorker and is the author of "The Tipping Point" and "Blink" (he also really, really respects Kris Kristofferson). One of his most interesting (and previously unpublished) concepts is his "White Gunner Theory," which might partially illustrate why I feel nervous comparing Morrison to Bird.
Does Morrison play like Bird? Or are we simply fooled by the fact that both are white?
"The black/white stereotyping in basketball," Gladwell said, "crudely breaks down somewhere along these lines: fast/slow; me-first/team-first; leaper/smarts and footwork; shooter/passer; ability/effort. The key psychological term here is attribution -- that is, 'What reasons do we use to account for someone's achievement?' So if we take a white player and a black player with exactly the same statistics, we might nonetheless explain their success very differently."
What Gladwell is basically saying is that there are certain "athletic" qualities traditionally applied to black players and certain "old school" qualities traditionally applied to white players. However, if you didn't pick up that notion on your own, you might want to quit reading right now because it's about to become considerably more complex.
"More significantly," Gladwell said, "this means we ignore aspects of someone's achievement that contradict the stereotype. Hence the 'White Gunner' -- a type of player we struggle with because he is white yet simultaneously embodies all the stereotypes we've reserved for blacks. Tom Chambers is the White Gunner poster child. Rex Chapman was another example. I would argue that Pete Maravich was not, if only because he embodies some completely sui generis Cajun thing that defies the normal black/white breakdown.
"This fits into another psychological theory, which is called cross-race recognition theory," Gladwell says. "It suggests that when we mentally process the appearance of faces different from our own -- in other words, faces that we're not familiar with -- we categorize by race and color and ethnicity. But when we process faces from our own race that we're far more familiar with, we categorize by feature -- by eyes and mouth and hair and eyebrows. That's why the old adage about how all black people look the same to whites (and vice versa) is true: When we look at someone of another race, we're not remembering them by using the kinds of features that make it easy to distinguish an individual. We're just coding them as 'black' or as 'white.' My point? In basketball, the 'face' we're familiar with is black. We code black players by feature, so we can make endlessly subtle distinctions between players: There is a David Thompson 'type,' which is quite unlike a Grant Hill 'type,' which, in turn, is quite unlike a Gary Payton 'type.' But I think we code white players by category. They are simply 'white,' and we don't make the same kind of sophisticated distinctions among them. So we miss the 'White Gunner.' Does that make any sense?"
It absolutely does; it's the same reason every rock critic in 1988 wanted to compare Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid to Jimi Hendrix. The reason we feel strange drawing reasonable comparisons between two white small forwards or two black quarterbacks is because both idioms are relatively rare, and -- perhaps unconsciously -- we're aware that we might be might be missing all the details we've been conditioned to ignore. This has become less of a problem in pro football because there are now lots of black, dissimilar quarterbacks. But it has become even more confusing in pro basketball, despite the fact that the league suddenly looks "whiter." European players like Nowitzki and Andrei Kirilenko (and South American players like Manu Ginobili) mix and match the aforementioned Gladwellian dichotomies; these athletes exist outside the stereotype of American white players and American black players. We don't know where to place them. Europe appears to be an entire continent of White Gunners.
I'm not sure what any of this means (or proves), beyond the fact that I will no longer deny that Adam Morrison is a lot like Larry Bird, which -- all things considered -- is not exactly a life-altering watershed. However, perhaps these ideas will convince Mel Kiper Jr. to go on "The Charlie Rose Show" in April and say something like, "Reggie Bush is not the next Gale Sayers -- he's actually more similar to Red Grange!" Because that would be stellar.
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