{"id":93,"date":"2013-06-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-16T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2013\/06\/16\/post-86-national-quotas-in-us-golf-korean-baseball\/"},"modified":"2013-06-16T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-06-16T00:00:00","slug":"post-86-national-quotas-in-us-golf-korean-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2013\/06\/16\/post-86-national-quotas-in-us-golf-korean-baseball\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-86: National Quotas in Sports \/ USA vs. Korea"},"content":{"rendered":"
Last week, a minor U.S. radio host was fired after picking up and waving that faded old banner bearing those two well-worn words, Yellow Peril<\/em>. He was talking about golf, specifically women’s golf in the USA, the LPGA. He implied that East-Asians (esp. Koreans) were taking over the LPGA and called for a national-quota system for U.S. golf.
<\/span>
Who’d have thought it, but South Korea (and to a lesser extent all of East-Asia) is <\/em>producing lots of winning golfers.
<\/span>
<\/span>The fired radio host said the following<\/a>:\n<\/div>\n

I count 38 players from the Republic of Korea on the LPGA tour manifest.\u00a0 Add in the eight female Japanese golfers, two from China and four from Chinese Taipei, and that\u2019s a lot of Asians!\u00a0 Fifty of \u2018em, if you add it up.\u00a0 Again, unless I counted wrong, there are 396 LPGA players on the entire list, but that includes retired players and those who don\u2019t tour anymore.\u00a0 Still, that is 13 percent of every player, both active and inactive, on the LPGA tour.\u00a0 Break it down further and you will find five of the top eleven on the money list, nearly 50%, are Asian golfers, and finally, 26 of the top 100 money winners on the current tour are Asians — a whopping 26 percent!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The radio host, Craig Schaller, included some insensitive <\/em>remarks (sounding like jokes we made in 5th grade) as he was explaining why such a huge increase in East-Asian players in the USA’s LPGA bothers him:<\/div>\n

I used to look forward to the LPGA tour event coming to town.\u00a0 I used to mark it on my calendar months in advance, ask off of work, and make sure I was at one day\u2019s play at least.\u00a0 Not any more.\u00a0 Now, I couldn\u2019t care less. <\/p>\n

<\/span>…[The East-Asian golfers] [don’t] have easily distinguishable names. It\u2019s hard to remember specific golfers when half of them seem to have names that sound like the sound you get when you bang pots and pans together.
<\/span>
<\/span>…I\u2019m sure I sound culturally racist, but I would be willing to bet that I am not alone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/span>Schaller proposes a cap on players per country, a national quota system:<\/div>\n

If I were the LPGA, I would put limits on how many golfers can qualify for the tour from a country each year.\u00a0 A cap if you will.\u00a0 If you cap the number of Korean golfers on tour at, say, twenty, then if you are Korean, and you want to play on the tour, you have to wait until one of those twenty retires.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nThe popular blogger ROK-Drop<\/span> (who is, or was, connected with the USFK [U.S. Forces Korea] and who blogs on USFK matters, and who I think is married to a Korean) was really angry<\/a> about this. He posted an excoriation of Schaller. It’s outrageous to propose a national-quota system for a sports league!<\/em><\/strong> was ROK-Drop’s idea.<\/p>\n

<\/span>The thing is<\/em>….South Korea itself <\/em>has an ethnic-national quota system for its sports teams. I’d always heard that the Korean baseball league limited teams to one foreign player. For some reason it’s always a pitcher. Now that I look it up, Wikipedia claims it is two <\/em>foreign players per team. The cap may have changed since 2009, I don’t know. Let me point out that two foreign players (defacto limited to pitchers) on a baseball team’s roster is miniscule<\/em>. I think similar rules apply in the other Korean sports leagues: basketball, soccer.<\/p>\n

In other words, Schaller’s “outrageous” suggestion of trying to ensure local-players’ dominance of the league actually is…not so outrageous in Korea<\/em>. It is the accepted practice in Korea. Of course, when Koreans do it, it becomes not <\/em>so “outrageous”. Our instinct, even my own, is to look to justify it or excuse it away.<\/span> Koreans are right to limit the number of foreign players; this is a Korean<\/u> league. Koreans would not support teams that are mostly full of foreign “mercenary” players who can’t speak Korean and have no connection to this country. Korean fans need to feel a connection with these players, whom they are supposed to like and support — if the league is to succeed!<\/em><\/p>\n

I think the above is a fair summary of the rationale for why the KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) and the other leagues put such a low-cap on the number of foreign players here. The tricky thing for the critics of Schaller is, if you replace “Korean” with “American” in the above, well — Is that not the entirety of Mr. Schaller’s rationale?<\/span><\/p>\n

I pointed this out in a comment on ROK-Drop<\/a>, but got no meaningful reply.<\/span>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, a minor U.S. radio host was fired after picking up and waving that faded old banner bearing those two well-worn words, Yellow Peril. He was talking about golf, specifically women’s golf in the USA, the LPGA. He implied that East-Asians (esp. Koreans) were taking over the LPGA and called for a national-quota system […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}