From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Fri Nov 06 2009 - 15:13:37 EST
http://www.newsday.com/columnists/john-jeansonne/critics-of-keflezighi-uninformed-ignornant-1.1570105
Critics
of Keflezighi uninformed, ignornant
*November 6, 2009* By JOHN JEANSONNE
john.jeansonne@newsday.com<john.jeansonne@newsday.com?subject=Newsday.com
Article>
Pundits targeting Keflezighi's heritage are way off base
Apparently some people were absent from school when the teacher covered the
material about this being a nation of immigrants - America as the world's
melting pot - a new, welcoming society envisioned by the founding fathers.
Why else would those folks, from facts-challenged CNBC sports business
commentator Darren Rovell to the anonymous chuckleheads ranting on the
Internet, argue against Meb Keflezighi's New York City Marathon victory on
Sunday being described as the event's first by an American since 1982?
Rovell characterized Keflezighi as "a ringer who you hire to work a couple
of hours at your office so that you can win the executive softball league,"
and others harangued that the Eritrea-born Keflezighi, for 22 years a U.S.
resident and for 11 years a naturalized citizen, was "just another African
marathon winner."
Rovell subsequently apologized - sort of - by saying that he was not aware
than Keflezighi had come to America as a child and therefore had "moved to
the United States in time to develop [his running talent] at every level in
America."
All Rovell had to do was Google Keflezighi to learn that the 2004 Olympic
silver medalist, for years a prominent presence in U.S. distance running,
had grown up in San Diego and graduated from UCLA. But where Rovell and the
Web pontificators really proved themselves to be idiots was in declaring
that a person had to be born in America to qualify as an American.
Just for starters, 2008 presidential candidate John McCain was born in the
Panama Canal zone (where his father was serving in the Navy at the time),
and such famous Americans as Alexander Hamilton and Albert Einstein also
were immigrants. But let's stick just to sports figures.
When the 34-year-old Keflezighi - it's pronounced Kuh-FLEZ-ghee, for the
non-xenophobic out there who can appreciate the power of American diversity
- won on Sunday (proudly wearing a "USA" singlet), he ended 26 years of New
York Marathon dominance by athletes hailing from such distance-running
hotbeds as Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia and Italy.
The last American, man or woman, to win New York was Alberto Salazar, who
had been a track star at the University of Oregon. But was born in Cuba.
(His parents defected when he was 2). Keflezighi's second-place finish at
the 2004 Athens Games, in fact, made him the first American man to win an
Olympic marathoning medal since a 1976 silver by Frank Shorter, who was
raised in upstate New York, graduated from Yale and established a U.S.
distance-running mecca in Colorado. Shorter was born in Munich, Germany.
(His father was an doctor serving in the Army.)
Two of the most dominant female tennis players in recent history, both whom
played the latter stages of their careers representing the United States as
naturalized citizens, also were born abroad: Monica Seles and Martina
Navratilova.
connections
TheStreet.com, Inc. Jim Cramer Jerry Brown Simon Cowell Burlington
Northern Santa Fe Seles was born in the former Yugoslavia (though she grew
up in a Florida tennis academy) and Navratilova was born in the former
Czechoslovakia, defected and became thoroughly American - she's a big Dallas
Cowboys fan - in her tastes, expressions and, certainly, use of freedom of
speech. "I had to take a test," she once told a group of reporters who
wanted to know if she considered herself an American. "And all you guys had
to do was get born here."
"What constitutes an American?" Franklin Delano Roosevelt's secretary of the
interior, Harold Ickes, asked in a famous 1941 speech. "Not color nor race
nor religion. Nor the pedigree of his family nor the place of his
birth....An American is one in whose heart is engraved the immortal second
sentence of the Declaration of Independence" - the line about holding truths
to be self-evident that all men created equal and entitled to the
unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In 1998 Edward Hudgins, director of studies at the Cato Institute, a
Washington think tank, wrote a July 4 essay in which he declared an American
to be, among other things, "anyone who understands that achieving the best
in life requires risks. Immigrants have no assurance of success in a new
land with different habits, instutitions and language....But they, like all
Americans, understand that the timid achieve nothing and forgo even that
which sustains us through the worst of times: hope."
Keflezighi was a refugee, with his family, of Eritrea's bloody 30-year civil
war to win independence from Ethiopia and knows something about risks and
being sustained by hope. "What does it mean to be an American?" Keflezighi
said recently in response to a question. "In America, people come from
different backgrounds. I was born in Eritrea; I am proud of my heritage. I
was raised here; I am proud I'm American. I was here in sixth grade. I
started running in America."
Even if he started running on the Moon, Keflezighi is a U.S. citizen whose
marathon victory Sunday did more for the USA's good name than those
sulfurous Internet bigots and a CNBC "reporter" who couldn't get his facts,
his grammar - it should have been "a ringer whom you hire..." - or his
American values right.
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