Nice article on Slate about the idiocy in comparing every white basketball player to Larry Bird. Here’s a taste:
Want proof that getting compared to Bird is a one-way ticket to the Caucasian basketball graveyard? A list of players who’ve been identified as Bird-like reads like the roster of a CBA team sponsored by the KKK. There are the Dukies: Danny Ferry, Mike Dunleavy Jr., and Christian Laettner (according to Charles Barkley, “the only thing Christian Laettner has in common with Larry Bird is they both pee standing up”). There are the guys whose main qualification was playing college ball in the Midwest: Troy Murphy and Wally Szczerbiak (“a Larry Bird game, a Tom Cruise smile,” one scribe said). There’s the inexplicable: Australian Andrew Gaze. And the monstrously, hilariously inexplicable: center Eric Montross, whom Celtics exec M.L. Carr said was cut from the same cloth as the Birdman.