Lil' Nate Robinson doesn't look like a basketball player
The average American male is 5 feet, 9 inches tall and weighs 180 pounds. Nate Robinson(notes) is 5 feet, 9 inches tall and weighs 180 pounds. He's a perfectly average-sized guy.
The average NBA player, as of 2007, is 6 feet, almost 7 inches tall and weighs 221 pounds. Nate Robinson is not an average-sized NBA player. And when you're running around with giants like Kevin Garnett(notes) and Kendrick Perkins(notes), that can present a problem if you don't have any thing proving you're a basketball player. Nate found that out the hard way.
Nate Robinson had a little trouble getting into the room for the team breakfast yesterday. A security man at the hotel had a difficult time believing the diminutive guard was an NBA player, and Robinson didn't have ID or his hotel room key.
Said Robinson: "I turned to Paul (Pierce) and said, ‘C'mon, tell him I'm with the Celtics.' And Paul said, ‘I don't know you.' The other guys were like, ‘Y'all got to do your job. Get him out of here.'
"He was coming toward me and they all said, ‘No, no, no. He's with us.' "
There's a good chance the veterans wouldn't step in to save a rookie, so Nate should thank his lucky stars that the old guys had his back. Otherwise, who knows what kind of trouble he could have gotten himself in to.
And what was that security guard thinking? The only people with arms that look like Nate Robinson's who aren't professional athletes are me and 50 Cent, and only one of us actually has big arms. The other is a rapper.
You'd think that three dunk contest championships would get you some recognition, especially in a basketball hotbed like Chicago. But 33 years after Randy Newman sang "short people got no reason to live," height discrimination is still alive and well. Just because someone is smaller doesn't mean they are less of a person, even though there is technically less of them. We need to unite through height.
(h/t Celtics Town)
