More on the S.I. controversy.

TheBigLead.com addressed this issue today, and brought up an interesting point:

SI always goes with the safe choice, an athlete/team/pair of athletes who are pretty vanilla (Tom Brady, Don Shula, Cal Ripken, etc) and not going to ruffle feathers. This is not to say those choices weren?t deserved ? they just have always been safe, and play up to White Collar, Middle America.

Wade isn?t that. Even though he?s a pretty face gracing the pages of People Magazine and Madison Avenue ads, he retains that urban tinge ? a player with crossover appear, and certainly the much-coveted ?street cred.?

So are people angry because simply because it’s Dwyane Wade? Would they be less angry if it were Tom Brady or Peyton Manning? Brady won last year, and I recall people thinking he was undeserving (I certainly felt that way, considering he didn’t even win Superbowl MVP and that was arguably the least impressive of the Patriots’ three Superbowl winning teams). But the vitriol over Wade’s victory makes me wonder if it is simply because he comes from a young, ‘hip-hop’ generation.

In other words, are people mad that Dwyane Wade won because he’s a black NBA player?

Maybe not; I don’t listen to a lot of sports talk radio, so maybe there was this much irritation over Tom Brady’s selection. However, I can’t imagine that there was the almost universal swell against him that there is against Wade. Virtually nobody thinks he deserved the award. That does have a lot to do with the Roger Federer factor, but Federer did win two Grand Slams in 2005 (making the final in three of them) and I don’t remember him getting quite the amount of indignant support he’s getting this year.

I don’t think I’m paranoid, and I don’t think that everyone is against Wade because he’s black. There are legitimate reasons to think he did not deserve the award, as I went over in the post below. However, I also think that the reason a substantial number of people, maybe not the majority but certainly not the fringe, dislike the selection of Wade is precisely that he’s young, black and in the NBA. Two out of three and maybe there’s not as much irritation. If he were young, black and in the NFL or old, black and in the NBA like David Robinson was on ’03, when he was co-Sportsman of the Year, we might not see the universal hate.

There’s also the ‘golden boy’ factor. It’s why people hate Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Duke basketball and USC football. Wade has been anointed one of the three, clean-cut young stars of the NBA. That too could have something to do with the objection to his winning the award. People have been inundated with Wade commercials since the start of the new NBA season, all while his team struggles with a 7-10 record. Many may view Wade as getting the same type of no-matter-what-you-do-I-love-you praise that Brady, Manning, Duke, the Yankees and USC get.

When it comes right down to it, I think that most of these objection is unwarranted. Certainly, objecting because Roger Federer or the New Orleans Saints should have won is understandable. But objecting because Wade is black or a golden boy or got ‘phantom calls’ in the NBA Finals is not.