Before Taiwanese basketball player Jeremy Lin entered the NBA or Manny Pacquiao made his name as a boxer, the words “Asians” and “sports” hardly ever came together in a sentence synonymously. Asians in society have often been categorized as being smaller, weaker and less able to excel in sports. Ask football fans to name an Asian football player, and they would struggle. If you asked why that is, they would probably say that it’s because Asians don’t or can’t play sports.
American society can’t be fully blamed, however, for holding this assumption that Asians don’t play sports. In fact, a major part of this stereotype is based on the fact that Asian culture places an overwhelming emphasis on education over athletics. Most Asian households view sports as a distraction or a hobby, but nothing more than that. However, just because culture partly causes this discrepancy of Asians in the athletic world, it does not mean that Asians are less qualified as athletes in the professional sports world.
Luckily, as more Asian Americans make it to the NBA, NFL and other American leagues, the stereotype of Asians being bad at sports is slowly beginning to diminish in the U.S. When hearing this, you may applaud Asian Americans for finally making it into the sports spotlight. But if you actually took a look at sports globally, Asian dominance in sports is everywhere and has been around for quite a while.
Just look at the medal count these past few Olympics: China led the gold medal count at the 2008 Olympics, and South Korea and Japan were in the top 10. In 2012, China finished second overall, and South Korea was in the top five as well. In 2016, China finished third overall, losing to Great Britain by only one medal.
Not only have Asians competed at a high caliber in sports globally, but Asian-American athletes have also been making history in American professional sports. For instance, Korean-American Snowboarder Chloe Kim is the youngest woman to win an Olympic snowboarding medal (which was gold, by the way). Junior Seau (Samoan-American) reigned as one of the best NFL linebackers for 19 years and was elected posthumously to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2015.
Jeremy Lin (Taiwanese-American), an NBA guard for the Brooklyn Nets, generated the craze of “Linsanity” in 2012 after his performance on the New York Knicks, proving to many young Asian basketball players that Asians, too, can make it to the big leagues. But while Jeremy Lin has become a success story, his story also reveals the barriers that may still be present for Asian-Americans with sports. In high school, even though Jeremy Lin proved to have great basketball skills, being named as the Division II “Player of the Year” and being included in the first-team All State in California, he didn’t get a single scholarship offer from one of the 351 Division I colleges, which would have been an assumed result for someone with his talent.
In the past, sports have always been seen as a rare industry where talent usually takes the upper hand, but as we’ve seen with Lin’s case, while Asians may be best known for their work ethic and academic efforts in the professional world, they still may be discredited in their athletic abilities.