Three Things: What Was Bryson DeChambeau Doing With That Sign?

1. What Was Bryson DeChambeau Doing With That Sign?

At the moment this is written, Bryson DeChambeau is tied for the lead in the Masters late in the second round. More importantly, Bryson DeChambeau picked up a huge signpost earlier today and carried it over his shoulder like a cross, right in front of a sign that said “Cross Way.” Here’s a picture.

What was DeChambeau doing? I guess the sign was in his way or something. The officials made him put it back, though. Gotta love golf refs. They’re like little supernatural beings who exist in some subterranean hole, monitoring the tournament on a bunch of screens. Then, they teleport to the course to alert players they’ve broken a rule. Pop up in front of the golfer. Probably scare the shit out of ’em.

I’d watch a movie about DeChambeau trying to infiltrate the golf ref ranks.

2. The NIT Was Loaded With Talent

From EvanMiya’s latest transfer rankings…the five-star transfers whose teams played in this year’s NIT:

• Tony Perkins (Iowa)
• Sean Pedulla (Virginia Tech)
• Robbie Avila (Indiana State)
• Chris Manon (Cornell)
• Viktor Lakhin (Cincinnati)
• Lynn Kidd (Virginia Tech)
• Ryan Conwell (Indiana State)
• Roddy Gayle (Ohio State)
• Dre Davis (Seton Hall)
• Rollie Worster (Utah)
• Zed Key (Ohio State)
• Rubin Jones (North Texas)

What a list. The NIT had only 8.8% of college basketball teams, but it has 24.5% of five-star transfers. Loaded tournament. Top to bottom. So many players in such high demand.

3. Were We All Being Racist?

I promise this is innocuous. Hear me out.

Say Shohei Ohtani was not a Japanese baseball player and was instead from Panama, but in some alternate reality where Panama wasn’t a Spanish-speaking country and instead spoke some language called Panamanian that was little-spoken in the United States. If this Panamanian Ohtani had sixteen million dollars stolen from him by his translator/manager, how would we react?

Joe made the point yesterday that the Ohtani thing’s a little similar to the Manti Te’o incident featuring Lennay Kekua. The main parallel there is that we, the collective public, didn’t expect Ohtani to be dumb enough to get conned. Why didn’t we expect that? Well.

Again, as Joe said, we don’t really know Ohtani. We assign a lot of personality traits to him in this absence of knowledge. As Joe did not say, a lot of the traits we assign are stereotypes we associate with people from East Asia: Dutiful. Fastidious. Smart. When we see a big strong white baseball player who throws hard and hits a lot of home runs, we don’t assume they take responsible care of their finances. We did, collectively, assume that about Ohtani.

I think we did this partly because he’s Asian.