The Ethics of Spinoza, pizza, race, and Matt Carroll

When I was 12 years old and played first base for the little league (baseball) Giants, I engaged in a pizza eating contest with NBA 5.5 million a year man Matt Carroll (aka the North Hills of Pittsburgh version of a Jason Kapono with some more defense and less backpack-er cred.)

From the best of my memory, I believe I ate 13.5 slices and Carroll ate 12. However, in an early moment of dishonesty, I threw out half a slice in the bathroom. This was discovered by a teammate who exposed me. In my defense, I threw the half-slice in the bathroom trash instead of flushing it down the toilet because I would have felt guilty of the toilet was clogged because of my cheating.

Still, it raises a question: did I lose the contest because of an automatic disqualification? Or did I win because even after subtracting the thrown out slice, I still was up on him? I don't know what we decided, but lacking official rules, history can remember it however people decide to remember it. Ultimately, reading "Ethics" by Spinoza on my bus ride to work didn't shine much light on this question for me.

So let me move into my other thought...every morning on that same bus that I read Spinoza on, we travel by Allegheny Traditional Academy on Pittsburgh's Northside. It's a K-5 school and a "Traditional Academy"-track Magnet, complete with dapper uniforms. According to its website, it's approximately 60% African American, 30% white, 7% multiracial. It has a pretty good reputation as a school. One demographic not on the school's website is obvious though: the basketball court behind the school is always exactly 100% African American.

The white kids are there in front of the school every day...playing yu-gi-oh, probably talking about playing basketball on PS3, skateboarding...maybe in the winter I'll see some snowboarding and a variety of XXXXXTREME mountain dew "sports" like zip-cording across the Golan Heights as televised by ESPN-8/The Ocho. But come on little white dudes, play some hoops! Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki won MVP awards. And Nash deserved at least one of his two: plus he doesn't sound like an Ivan Drago when he talks either. I would have assumed he was American if i didn't follow his career closely.

Stephen Jay Gould did a lot to fight against racism in his life, especially by engaging against racist junk science as a public intellectual and writing books like The Mismeasure of Man. He was also a huge sports fan and wrote some very interesting observations from a scientific standpoint (for instance -- streaky shooters don't actually exist from a statistical standpoint -- that is just in our popular imagination.) Anyway, Gould wrote that he didn't mind admitting he often rooted for a sort of "racial underdog" in sports too. He wasn't pulling a Jimmy-the-Greek or decrying the decline of the white athlete or any such thing: he thinks those of us who often like to side with the underdog in life will find a 1985 Dwight Gooden or 1985 Larry Bird particularly interesting. I have to agree. We like interesting stories. A white kid from West Virginia with a street game like Kings-era Jason Williams is interesting. Tiger Woods has excited people around the world, not just because he is the best at what he does, but because he doesn't look like most golfers either. We shouldn't deny the obvious.

In conclusion, Matt Carroll...you were a really nice guy. You talked to even the least popular player on our team, who was a home schooled kid of the strangest sort. You managed to run a fair pizza eating contest. You blocked my hook shot, which no one had ever done before.

And you're no Larry Bird. And despite the Slam interview with Larry Bird where he said its unfair to ask any white player to be the next Larry Bird (just like he didn't like being held to the standard of being expected to be the next Rick Barry), a great white American player who wasn't drafted purely for his 3 point shooting ability or his height would be a fun thing for the league. If he is a kid who put down the Wii controller to shoot outside of Allegheny Traditional Academy, all the better. If he ends up on a team with the first great Chinese point guard, all the better. It makes for an interesting story.