The Study of Racialism

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2942 }

ABOVE:
HINES WARD
FOOTBALL PLAYER,
REAL-ESTATE OWNER
This Pittsburgh Steeler’s maneuvers don’t end at Heinz Field; as it turns out, Hines Ward runs with the ball in the off-season, too. “I head back to Atlanta when we’re not playing and buy properties, fix them up and sell them,” he says. The University of Georgia grad (B.A. in economics with a minor in real estate) finds beauty in Pittsburgh—“the cold, winter days when the branches are covered in snow and the sun shines through the trees”—and in wife Simone and son Jaden. He admits he takes a little heat for maintaining his pedicures and manicures: “That’s just me being clean. It started when my teammate Charles Johnson told me I should get a manicure…. Charles said if I took care of my hands, my hands would take care of me.”
Photo by Archie Carpenter; makeup by Patty Bell

And then Ward. Sorry, folks. He's one of those guys I cross the line for. There's so much about him I admire. Great guy, great call-returner, great love and loyalty for his mother, who worked endlessly to give him a good life growing up outside of Atlanta. And, most all, great player. Selfless blocker, emotional player, great locker-room guy. I didn't like his preseason holdout this year. A contract's a contract to me. That's about the extent of what I can find wrong with the man.

So here's the picture of a Super Bowl MVP in this rabid Football America era, the real picture, not the glossy one where everything is pretty and touched up. An hour or so after the game, Ward was at his locker, still in his game pants, ankles taped and with an ace bandage, the kind you'd buy at Walgreens to wrap your ankle to play pickup basketball, holding an icebag to his left shoulder. He sprained the AC joint in the shoulder during practice on Friday, and had to get it shot up to play. He sat, elbows on knees, head looking at the ground.

"I'm in pain,'' he said. "My shoulder's on fire right now.'' A smile. "At this point, it's good pain.''

Now the space around his locker was being invaded. He looked up. One radio producer, Lonnie Martin from ESPN Radio, had a cell phone in his right hand, holding it out and saying Ward was going to do his show. Another radio producer, Doug Mortman from Sirius NFL Radio, had a cell in his outstretched hand and was saying, No, no, no, we're next. And Ward looked at me, incredulously, and started laughing. "Peter! Can you believe it! They're arguing over me! Me! They want a piece of me!''

A compromise was reached: Ward gave a minute to Sirius, then a minute to ESPN. Then he needed to relax a while. He just didn't have the energy to move on. Then I was alone with him.

"I threw up today,'' Ward said. "I never get sick before a game. Never. I can honestly say I've never gotten sick before a game, but my stomach was so nauseous and I was a little nervous. I went back in the bathroom, so my teammates wouldn't see me. I didn't want them to see me like that. When I went out on the field, I saw all the former MVPs, and I went to talk to Ray Lewis. I said, 'Ray, is it all right to be nervous before this game?' He said, 'Man, we all get nervous before the Super Bowl.' And I'm thinking, Well, if Ray was nervous before a game like this, I guess it's OK that I'm nervous. I think that's why I dropped a couple of balls.''

I asked him what it was like to be an MVP of the biggest game on the planet. Starr, Staubach, Bradshaw, Rice, Montana, Elway, Brady.

Ward.

"You picture what something like that will be like,'' he said, smiling, "but you just can't imagine. Really, you can't imagine. I can't believe it. I can't believe for one day I was one of them.''

He paused.

"Ward, Swann, Stallworth. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?''

For Steeler Nation, it'll have a nice ring. Forever.

***

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2942 }

Updated 4/10/2006 6:43 PM ET

By Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY
SEOUL, South Korea — At school, they taunted him for his looks — half-black, half-Asian. "Jackie Chan!" they'd say. "Bruce Lee-roy!" At home, he didn't understand why his mother struggled with English, couldn't help him with his homework and made him take his shoes off before he walked in the door.
"I was a lost child," Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward says. "I wasn't accepted in the black community because I was Korean, and I wasn't accepted in the Korean community because I was black." He blamed his Korean mother for the teasing he got on the playground in suburban Atlanta. "I was ashamed of the person who instilled everything in me. I let the kids get the better half of me."

How different things are now. Ward, 30, describes his childhood while relaxing in the $6,300-a-night Royal Suite in Seoul's Lotte Hotel. His mother, Kim Young-hee, sits proudly beside him on an overstuffed couch, sunlight streaming through a window that offers a glorious view of the Seoul skyline and the mountains behind it.

Ward made it through adolescence, through the University of Georgia and into the NFL. He's a four-time Pro Bowl wide receiver and MVP of Super Bowl XL. His five catches for 123 yards and a touchdown led the Steelers to a 21-10 championship victory against the Seattle Seahawks in Detroit on Feb. 5.

Last week, he and the divorced mother who worked three jobs to support him returned in triumph to the country where he was born. He credits her for his transformation from confused, angry adolescent to confident NFL star. "She gave up so much," he says. "It's a great success story."

His mom still works at a high school cafeteria in suburban Atlanta; she tried retirement but gave up after two months.

Ward and his mother have been welcomed as heroes in South Korea, where kids like him — children of Korean women and American GIs — have been treated as pariahs, shunned, ridiculed and locked out of the best jobs and schools.

On this trip, Ward has met the president, thrown out the first pitch at a baseball game and endured camera crews hounding his every step as he tries to tour the city of his birth. At a news conference at the Lotte Hotel last Tuesday, 200 reporters and photographers filled a meeting hall with a capacity for 130, yelling at each other and jostling for position.

Ward even canceled some planned stops to escape. "It's been wild," he says. "I knew it was going to be crazy. But it's pandemonium crazy. I didn't know that."

The adulation is a little awkward. Ward knows if he'd grown up as a half-black child in South Korea he likely would have been relegated to a second-class existence. His Korean mother knows it too. She chose a tough, lonely life in the USA to spare him the ordeal.

"I enjoy the Korean community support," Ward says. "My mom is still leery: 'Is it because he's MVP, or do you really accept him?' "

Ward has teamed with Pearl S. Buck International, a Bucks County, Pa., organization, to support mixed-race children in South Korea. He's hoping his story will encourage South Koreans to show more tolerance. "They didn't have a choice to come into this world as a biracial kid," he says. "If you can welcome me — a guy who doesn't speak the language — you can do it for them."

South Korea's 5,000 Amerasian children born since the Korean War have struggled to fit into a society that takes prickly pride in its 99%-plus ethnic homogeneity.

Teased and bullied, 9.4% of Amerasian children drop out of elementary school; another 17.5% quit middle school, according to Pearl S. Buck International. As adults, more than 45% are unemployed or work odd jobs to get by, the Buck organization says.

Seven-year-old Ahn Arum, daughter of a Seoul woman and an absentee American father, refuses to study Korean at school. "She doesn't know why she should read Korean. She doesn't feel Korean," says her mother, Ahn Jin-hee, 29. "The boys tease her. They say she has curly hair; she is black; she is smelly. (Even) my parents didn't want to take their granddaughter outside because it was disgraceful."

Kim Su-bin, 20, says she goes to the salon every three months to straighten her curly hair, evidence that her absentee father is black. Just in case, she wears an Adidas cap: "I want to hide my frizzy hair."

For outcasts such as Ahn Arum and Kim Su-bin, Ward's celebrity is a godsend. Suddenly, their neighbors and classmates are rethinking their attitudes. "This Hines Ward phenomenon is very positive," says Seoul resident Jung Young-ja, 72. "We've been proud of our homogenous society. It's time to change."

South Korea has little choice: Already more than 10% of South Koreans marry foreigners — mostly brides imported from poorer Asian countries. The country has 35,000 "Kosians," offspring of a Korean and a parent from elsewhere in Asia; they are expected to emerge as a voting bloc over the next two decades, says Song Young-sun, a South Korean legislator.

So Ward is helping prepare South Korea for its multicultural future: "That guy has no idea how much good he's doing," says Janet Mintzer, president of Pearl S. Buck International.

Ward was born March 8, 1976. A year later, his American GI father took his Korean bride and his young son back to the USA. But the marriage quickly disintegrated. A court, convinced Kim Young-hee didn't have the language or job skills to support a child, gave custody to Ward's father.

But Kim didn't give up. She stayed in the USA, working three jobs and saving everything she could. When Ward was 7 or 8 years old, he came to live with her. The change was traumatic: He was moving from an all-black neighborhood to a mixed-race community in suburban Atlanta and into a household where he and his mother could barely communicate.

Ward excelled in athletics but still struggled to find an identity between two cultures. When he was a teenager, Kim recalls, Korean neighbors recruited him to join their basketball team for a tournament and excluded him from the celebration afterward. "They used him," she says. "I cussed them out."

Kim knew nothing about football during Ward's high school career — even when some of the top college coaches came calling, trying to woo the star from Forest Park High School. "Tom Osborne, Lou Holtz, Bobby Bowden were in our living room," Ward says. "My mom didn't know who they were."

Kim may not have known the big names or understood the X's and O's, but her values influenced the way her son played football. "You've got to be humble," she says. Sure enough, Ward won't take running plays off the way some star wide receivers do; he's a ferocious blocker. And his mom better not see him dancing after a touchdown. "I tell him don't do it," she says. "I can't stand it."

Over time, she's become a football fan. "She's like a coach now," Ward sighs. " 'You didn't do this. You dropped the ball. You should have gone for two points.' "

Kim didn't attend the Super Bowl, preferring to watch it at home with friends. She didn't want to miss the replays. When Ward called her after his MVP performance, she was fast asleep. She had to get up at 5 a.m. to go to her job in the school cafeteria.

Hines Ward hands South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun a football while visiting the presidential Blue House.

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2942 }

Updated Apr.5,2006 20:45 KST

U.S. Super Bowl star Hines Ward embraces An Arum, like Ward the child of an African American father and a Korean mother, at a meeting with mixed-race children organized by Pearl S. Buck International on Wednesday.
Emotionally charged ceremony brings tears from NFL superstar Hines Ward. "I used to be ashamed of my Korean heritage when I was child," said Ward. But he added he was now very proud of that heritage and apologized for his past resentment while expressing his gratitude for the warm welcome he has received. After making these comments he was overwhelmed and could not continue speaking. In his left hand he clutched his certificate of honorary citizenship in Seoul. Ward opened his tear-filled eyes and looked at his mother who was sitting nearby.
He pointed to mother and said once again how much she had sacrificed for him, adding "Without my mom, I do not think I would be where I am now." His mother Kim Young-hee then took off her glasses to wipe away the tears and a sudden hush came over the mass of reporters who had been falling over themselves to get at the athlete. At that moment Seoul mayor Lee Myung-bak, who had been standing next to him, came close to comfort him and got out a handkerchief to wipe away his tears

Ward (30, Pittsburgh Steelers) became the honorary Seoul citizen on Wednesday. 29 years after he went to the U.S. with his mother after being born in Jegi-dong, Seoul in 1976. The city presented honorary citizenship certificate and a medal, in return Ward gave the Mayor his jersey with his number 86 and phrase, ‘‘To Mayor of Seoul, LEE MYOUNG BAK. Go Steelers!’

Ward said that to let people know about the toils of his mother, who went to a strange land to make dream come true, I had kept the plan to visit Korea in mind since long time ago. And he also said that he is happy that he received honorary citizenship on his first visit to Seoul. The Mayor said, “The mother of Hines Ward reminds me of my mother.” He told Ward to visit Seoul again next year after being MVP again.

Honorary Seoul citizenship is presented to a state guest of Seoul or foreigners residing in Seoul who make a contribution to the improvement of the city. So far honorees include Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck (1968), action movie star Jackie Chan (1999) Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson (2004), and Guus Hiddink, Dutch football coach (2002). Ward became the 538th honorary citizen.

Ward is schedule to visit to the Ewha Womans University Medical Center, where he was born on Thursday.