hip hop woodstock

In February of 2007, the NBA held their all star weekend extravaganza in Las Vegas for the first time ever. It was a much-anticipated event that had been garnering hype since early 2006. I had just moved to Hong Kong at the start of 2007 and gave myself a 50 day deadline to land a job--if I failed to land a job by the end of the 50 days, I was going to move back to California--why 50 days and not say, two months? Because I timed the deadline so I'd still have time to make the all star game if I moved back to the US. But...BC magazine hired me and that was that (more on the BC stint later at the end of this giant long entry).

Anyway, the 2007 NBA all star weekend was a memorable one. For all the wrong reasons.

People from sports writer Bill Simmons to journalist Michael Wilbon to my own dad (who was in Vegas for the weekend to work a gig with some obscure Taiwan singer) said there was a general sense of lawlessness throughout the weekend. The streets were filled with shady characters looking like they were carrying drugs and/or guns.

Even my dad said he avoided walking alone on the strips.

Simmons wrote that people were willingly choosing to wait 45 minutes for a cab than walk 10 minutes to the next casino because of the amount of shady looking characters roaming the streets.

It's not just these guys now. Stories from blogs and radios started leaking throughout the week after about the unusually high amount of brawls, shootings and muggings. Stories of cab drivers being robbed were surfacing left and right.

Teresa Frey, general manager of Coco's restaurant, told KLASTV.com that "They didn't want to pay the bills, the weekend was filled with an element of violence."

Things got so bad that she closed the 24-hour restaurant from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m.

Anyway, is it a coincidence that this sudden rush of "shady characters", "gangbangers", and "troublemakers" all gathered during the weekend of a league that is 80% black?

Everyone knew the answer but most were afraid to say it. Over the next week, even though everyone were buzzing about how crazy and dangerous Vegas was over the weekend, most sports writers avoided writing about it because they were afraid of being called the "r" word.

Bill Simmons was one of the few to write about how wild Vegas was (he called it a "free for all" and described the weekend as "a hip hop woodstock"). Fellow sports writer Scoop Jackson (yes he's black) immediately wrote a rebuttal piece implying that Simmons, and the small number of other writers who had wrote about the weekend in a negative way had hidden racial agendas.

This ultra sensitivity has always been an issue in America. You can't write or say anything negative about minorities--even if it's completely true--because they will pull the race card. For example, if you're a newbiedirector making your first film project, you better make sure you don't cast a White man as the hero and a Black/Latino man as the villain or else your career will die before it starts. And you better make sure to throw in some Asians in the film (and make sure they speak perfect American English) or else you'll hear complaints from that direction too.

It's something that's always annoyed me. Facts are facts. I'm not comfortable walking around Compton at night but I am at Pasadena. Am I a racist because Pasadena is a white town and Compton is a black town?

But yeah, this super sensitivity of minority groups in the US results in people over compensating--every fucking made-for-TV family movie has to have a diverse cast with at least one Asian and one Black, no matter how unrealistic it is. Log onto any new company's website and check out their "about us" section, their mission statement must preach about how they embrace diversity and to prove it they'll have a picture of a random Chinese woman or a grinning brotha next to the text.

Anyway, most sports writers were afraid of writing about what really went down in Vegas. The few that did (Simmons was one) were called racists.

This is where Jason Whitlock comes in.

As a brotha himself, he could write the truth and don't have to worry about detractors painting him as "evil white man". He wrote this absolutely hard hitting piece in which he called out troublemaking African Americans to get their act together because they were essentially, giving their own race a bad image and adding fuel to racism. He called those people "the Black KKK".

(here's a link to the Jason Whitlock piece. I can't find the original piece no more so this is a message board reposting his article. And here's the Bill Simmons' piece on the lawlessness of the weekend. And for the record, Scoop Jackson's rebuttal and accusation that people had hidden agenda was idiotic. That fool referred to the weekend himself as a "four day freaknic", but took offense to Bill Simmons calling it a "hip hop wood stock".)

So why am I writing about this 2007 incident now? Well first of all I've always been random with my blogs and don't need no rhyme or reason to write about anything. I ain't blogging for you guys, I blog for me (Ivan Drago reference here). But really, I'm writing about this now because earlier in the day I purchased a used book from The Book Attic--The Best American Sports Writing.

While skimming through the book in the bathroom I came across a story by Whitlock, and then another by Michael Wilbon (another great writer) and both stories were so intriguing I stayed in the bathroom like 6 minutes after I finished. That's what good writing does to you.

Alright, now about the BC Magazine story I mentioned earlier...

I was being introduced to this coworkers at SCMP, she was like "I interned at BC, I heard about you when I started!"

She didn't hear about my writing, cause they weren't nothing noteworthy. She heard about me cussing out the editor/boss of BC Magazine and my storming out of the office!

YEAH!