Friend or Foe: Sports Edition
Brought to you by the undefeated world champion of judging people I've never met.
Rooting for a sports team or athlete is just like being in any other fandom – you take unearned pride in a stranger’s accomplishments as though they’re your own and find equal (sometimes greater) satisfaction in the missteps of their competitors. Being a fan means surrendering a piece of your heart and emotional well-being to forces that are entirely out of your control. Please let the Bengals win the Super Bowl before I die. All I want is for Nida Manzoor to write and direct something that more than 15 people end up watching.1 If there is a God, she cannot let Lorde’s next album flop like Solar Power did.
All this to say: The fact that I have a plethora of professional athlete-related feelings is a recent but not totally out-of-character development. It was only a matter of time until I explored this final frontier of hyper-fixation and reported my findings. So without further ado, here’s a guide to where my sports allegiances lie.
Friend: Carlos Alcaraz
My Number One Boy
The universe has favorites, and Carlos Alcaraz is living proof. At 21 years old, he recently broke his hero Rafael Nadal’s record to become the youngest man to win a Grand Slam title on every tennis surface (clay, grass, and hard courts). Achieving the “Surface Slam” requires depth of skill, superhuman versatility, and an iron will rarely found in any single player, let alone one as young as he is. The exciting thing is that he’s not even close to the finished article yet – there are still matches when Carlos (or Carlitos, as he’s affectionately called by fans) resembles nothing so much as an overgrown puppy stumbling over his own paws in eagerness to show you how fast he can fetch and how high he can jump. Sometimes his execution falls short of his vision, but more often than not he’ll pull off a shot that makes you reconsider what you previously understood to be the limits of tennis and the human body itself, all with a big ol’ grin on his face. We can only hope that as his game matures, he’ll retain the creativity and spontaneity that have made him so electric to watch thus far. Star quality can’t be taught or trained; he comes by it naturally. No matter where in the world he plays, the crowd understands that he’s their champion – and they root for him accordingly.
Foe: Aaron Rodgers
Mr. Washed Up
Aaron Rodgers is Joe Rogan if Joe Rogan ever had the makings of a varsity athlete. Aaron Rodgers is not very bright but unfortunately very rich, which means his threats to “debate” Fauci (yes, he is still doing this in 2024) are platformed on national television instead of exiled to the internet’s most rancid echo chambers. He’s a sheep with delusions of shepherding grandeur. He’s so annoying that he makes fellow middle-aged anti-vaxxer Novak Djokovic (also a foe) seem reasonable by comparison. Aaron Rodgers is so toxic that Shailene Woodley, whose threshold for healing-crystal-woo-woo bullshit is famously high, broke off their engagement after a year of trying – and failing – to fix him. Even the parasite puppeteering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from inside what’s left of his brain doesn’t take Aaron Rodgers seriously. Despite their common ground (both men are off-putting to the point that their own families want nothing to do with them), Aaron’s dreams of becoming RFK Jr.’s vice-presidential running mate died as swiftly and decisively as his Achilles tore in the first game of the 2023 season. Bedtime for Bozo, indeed.
Friend: Ja’Marr Chase
CEO of Just Saying Shit, Inc.
Greatness comes in many forms, and giving memorable sound bites is one of them. Enter Ja’Marr Chase: a very talented wide receiver whose true greatness lies in the fact that he’s got the gift of gab and has seemingly never been introduced to the concept of “speaking off-the-record.”
Wide receivers are one of the most entertaining cohorts in football – notoriously cryptic, egotistical, and often entangled in a codependent, vaguely homoerotic dynamic with their quarterbacks. Ja’Marr checks all three boxes on a regular basis, providing reporters with an endless supply of quotes about how his quarterback (Joe Burrow, who was also his college quarterback at LSU) is the best in the league. Patrick who?
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My personal favorite Ja’Marr-as-unreliable-narrator moment was the time he was profiled by GQ and decided to claim responsibility for Joe Burrow’s style, which Twitter user @dirtbagqueer memorably described as “Lesbian Drip.”
“Joe literally won’t buy his own clothes,” [J'a’Marr] tells me. “He always asks me to shop for him and drop it off at the house. He’s not really into fashion like that, he cool with his li’l khakis and skinny jeans.”
Then, less than a week later, Ja’Marr admitted that he had made the whole thing up. Maybe he stretched a single instance of actual shirt-gifting into hyperbole, or maybe he was lying about his initial quote being a lie and he really is Joe’s personal shopper. We’ll never know with 100% certainty, and that’s fine with me. Spreading misinformation about who dresses his teammate is the kind of low-stakes drama I heartily endorse, and only further validates my belief that he would thrive on the Real Housewives of Cincinnati.
One last piece of Ja’Marr lore for you: He was born and raised in Louisiana, so he became something of a hometown hero when his LSU team won the 2019 national championship and completed a perfect, undefeated season. The jersey he was wearing during that final victory was framed and hung, never to be removed from its place of honor. Unless, of course, his quarterback was the one asking. You see, Joe wanted to wear Ja’Marr’s championship jersey when they returned to the Bayou together for the first time as Bengals instead of LSU Tigers. Which could mean nothing.
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Foe: Son Heung-min
The Son My Dad Always Wanted
It’s not Son Heung-min’s fault, but I suspect my dad might love him more than me. Sure, I’m my father’s youngest child and a precious light in his life – but do I inspire the type of devotion that drives him to defend Son Heung-min’s honor as a world-class striker in the YouTube comments of random EPL streamers? I have my doubts. This past weekend my dad went off on a five-minute tangent, unprompted, about the type of person he thinks Son Heung-min should marry.2 I’ve long since resigned myself to the fact that Son Heung-min occupies a significant amount of real estate in my dad’s mind, but am I meant to quietly suffer the indignity of witnessing this brazen display during a Father’s Day dinner thrown in his honor? We were supposed to be celebrating the colorful tapestry of family memories that we weaved together over the course of several decades – a tapestry, mind you, that Son Heung-min had no hand in creating. Enough is enough! If that makes me a traitor to the Korean cause, so be it.
Frenemy: Jeremy Lin
Hooping in Jesus’ Name
I spent a truly excessive amount of time in high school reading things on my phone during class, but I only ever deviated from Marauders fanfiction during the three month stretch of Linsanity back in 2012. Jeremy Lin’s magical Cinderella story, going from unheralded benchwarmer to conductor of the New York Knicks offense, was the stuff of dreams. Asian American teens loved seeing someone who looked like us play with swagger and win big in the NBA, while our parents loved that he graduated from Harvard and incorporated the Bible into his pregame handshake with fellow Ivy League alum Landry Fields. The buzz around him grew with each new impossible feat – beating the Lakers and outscoring Kobe Bryant or hitting a three-point buzzer beater over the Toronto Raptors – and I didn’t want to blink for fear of missing a single second of history in the making. I read every article and watched every video covering his meteoric rise that I could get my hands on, greedy for more of the lightning-in-a-bottle underdog narrative he was living out in real-time. Basketball came alive for me in a way I hadn’t experienced with any sport since I played soccer myself.
It couldn’t last, of course. The Linsanity bubble popped by the end of that 2012 season due to a knee injury and the Knicks’ skepticism that Jeremy would turn out to be more than a flash in the pan, and he spent the next seven years bouncing around six different franchises across North America before eventually opting to play in Taiwan. Fizzling out of the NBA is not a crime – what he did to his hair before that, however, definitely counts as one.
Men will always find a way to embarrass you, but only a Bay Area Asian man could conjure these heights of humiliation. One of the main facets of Jeremy’s personality is loving God out loud, which is ironic because only Lucifer himself could have convinced him that the hairstyles pictured above were a good idea. When former NBA player Kenyon Martin called him out for cultural appropriation, Jeremy’s response was essentially a platitude word salad that failed to address the issue at hand:
“As minorities if we’re able to appreciate [each other], if Asians would be passionate about issues that aren’t just related to Asians, if African-Americans are able to be passionate about issues that aren’t just related to African-Americans, I think we’ll start to see something big happen and we’ll be able to influence mainstream society. I think that’s the ultimate goal. But all this pitting me against him, or anything that creates that division, I don’t really stand for.”
I think the point is that your way of “appreciating” Black hairstyles was at best ridiculous and at worst offensive and disrespectful, Jeremy, but sure – you looking like an extra in a Jay Park music video totally brought us one step closer to the elusive goal of POC solidarity.
Part of my brain will always think of him fondly because Linsanity was such a formative pop culture moment in my life, and at least it seems like he got the Rachel Dolezal urges out of his system before returning to the motherland, but I’ll never forget the havoc he wreaked on Planet Blasia via his scalp. I don’t care how piously he presents himself – nothing about those dreads is God-fearing.
Season two of We Are Lady Parts is out now on Peacock, get to streaming!
My dad is adamant that Son Heung-min should marry a normal civilian, not a celebrity. He also thinks settling down in England long-term instead of Korea would be the smarter choice, due to Son Heung-min’s overwhelming fame in his home country. I cannot stress enough that nobody asked my dad how he felt about Son Heung-min’s marital prospects – he just started monologuing out of nowhere.