9 thoughts on “Business Right Fast”

  1. Ya still gotta feel it’s early in the whole process for him. He can change agents. However, I doubt anyone cares about his score on the test, other than the 41-38 score.

  2. It’s pretty obvious, but race/intelligence are the invisible elephants here. Why are white athletes never publicly scrutinized about their representation or their intelligence? It’s not as if only high-profile black athletes make questionable choices with respect to representation. Nepotism and poor career decisions know no color. And not only are black athletes uniquely targetted, the discourse is racialized: I often read about Lebron dumping his agent for his “boy” or “a member of his ‘posse.'” The history of the pernicious ideas about black athletes and intelligence is well-documented; however, this whole situation also bothers me because, as Bomani says, formal intelligence has no bearing on athletic success. Granted, I don’t know them personally, but based on interviews, many great, successful athletes are not that bright in the traditional sense–and I don’t mean just inarticulate either.

  3. Well they sure are mentioning Dan Marino’s low Wonderlic score a lot, and he’s white. I mean, a “6” by no matter who is gonna get covered a lot, whether he really got it or not as it was reported.

  4. Look at my poor grammatical decision making above… It should be:
    A “6” by no matter WHOM…
    And I posted it on a “writer’s” blog to boot.
    8^D

  5. While I like Bomani’s take on this, I’m not sure that a 6 on the Wonderlic is necessarily explained away by saying “my agent ate my homework.” Take one of the many samples available online and it becomes fairly easy to see that, for university graduates, the scores registered by Young AND Marino AND Favre AND Aikman are absolutely pathetic. This is not a test marked on the curve. In absolute terms, I don’t see much of a difference between Young scoring a 6 and Dan Marino scoring a 16.
    That having been said, does race play a factor in all of this? Probably a little, but not in the way that jojo and other astute media commentators think. Starting with Bomani’s take that this low test score (and resulting media frenzy) simply serve to draw attention to VY’s poor judgement as evidenced by his poor choice in agent – a valid point to be sure. However, I think we could stop just as easily at “media frenzy”.
    Just as when the media swarmed around Martha Stewart’s insider trading scandals, I think schadenfruede plays a role here. Young is a highly touted, soon-to-be highly paid young man in a field that many of us (myself included) is filled with complete and utter idiots. And that’s not just the athletes. The jock sniffers who populate the press boxes are about as likely to call out an athlete for ANY transgression moral, academic or otherwise as Condi Rice is to come out of the closet (oops, did I just write that?).
    So, when a story comes down the pipe with concrete proof of one of the soon-to-be very rich young men being stupid – the non-sporting press simply cannot help themselves. Why? Because while they were cramming for finals and dreaming of getting into Columbia J School, Vince Young was banging cheerleaders and picking out plasmas for his booster-supplied H2. Is it because he’s black? Ask yourself this – would the editor of The New Republic have enjoyed it any less if it was Brian Bosworth getting a 6?

  6. How about David Beckham? He admitted that he couldn’t help his SIX year old with his school math homework. From CNN’s website:
    “I think it was maths, actually. It’s done totally differently to what I was teached when I was at school, and you know, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do this.'” (Excuse me, what he was “teached in school”? We think his academic issues extend beyond math or “maths” as they say in England.)
    Being “unedumacated” knows no division lines.

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