Coach Scott Cross of the University of Texas-Arlington’s men’s basketball team tweeted last night that he is not interested in recruiting players to his program who take selfies.
Attention high school, JUCO, & AAU coaches: if u have a player that takes Selfies, please don’t ask me 2 recruit him bc #SoftGuysGetYaBeat!
— Scott Cross (@CoachScottCross) March 27, 2014
Cross, whose UT-A Mavericks have gone 15-17 this season (with an in-conference record of 9-9), has spent the last 24 hours retweeting people complimenting him on his coaching insight, including a tweet linking to a study about how selfies are indicative of narcissism, addiction, and mental illness.
“Bingo!” Cross tweeted.
On one level, this is just a ridiculous old guy complaining about Kids These Days with their Selfies and their Social Medias and their Clickety Clack Music, and we can roll our eyes and laugh at him and go about our days.
But there is something far more insidious going on here as well: Selfies are soft—vain, preening, unmasculine (i.e. feminine)—and unmasculine basketball players are bad basketball players, Coach Cross seems to be saying. Just look at selfie-takers Lebron James and Dwyane Wade. And Kevin Durant. And James Harden. And Floyd Mayweather.
Then again, it’s not every day we are able to see the entire misogynistic, homophobic, and contradictory logic of mainstream American masculinity in less than 140 characters, so I guess we should consider ourselves lucky.
Image via Acid Pix/flickr (CC BY 2.0)
