There was once an episode of King of the Hill where there was an all-Asian country club in Arlen that just kind of out of the blue began trying to woo and get Hank to become a member. It was later revealed that the club needed to have at least one non-Asian member to get some sort of sponsorship with the PGA, which would culminate with a visit from, “the greatest Asian player in the history of the game – Tiger Woods.”
Ultimately, Hank realizes the ruse and not wanting to be a token whitey, declines the membership. Khan, desperate to gain clout with the Asian elite of Arlen ultimately decides to hang with his redneck neighbors instead, and we have a fairly happy ending for the main characters.
But the point of this backstory is mainly revolving around the joke about how Tiger Woods is the greatest Asian golfer in history, despite the fact that most of America doesn’t identify him at all by his Asian heritage, despite the fact that his genetic background contains a fairly substantial amount of genes originating from China and Thailand.
Because that’s basically precisely what the NFL is doing when they start declaring Jayden Daniels the first ever Japanese quarterback in the history of the league. Apparently, despite the fact that he appears to identify as a black man, he has a great-grandmother who was Japanese, and has thusly decided to honor an ancestor three generations removed, by putting a Japanese flag on the back of his helmet, which basically served as the impetus to this whole story.
Depending on the genetic backgrounds of his predecessors, Daniels is probably no more than like 12.5% Japanese; I don’t know what percentage of indigenous someone needs to claim in order to get to run a casino, but I imagine it’s somewhere slightly more than 12.5% in order to do so, but that’s not stopping the NFL from seeing potential dollar signs and cultural outreach with Daniels’ pithy amount of Japanese in his genetics.
By saying the first-ever Japanese QB, you’d think they were talking about someone who looked like Ken Watanabe or Hiroyuki Sanada. Don’t get me wrong, Daniels is a good looking kid, but to say Japanese guy and flash this guy’s face? As the kids say, the fuck outta here
NFL be grasping at some real low-hanging fruit in tryna spin this shit into some global outreach, and that the NFL is a global game on par with futbol. If they really wanted to really glorify football americano in Japan, they’d talk about shit like how when Japan crushed the USA in some foreign exhibition, if they really wanted to garner interest in the sport overseas.
Jayden Daniels is an outsanding player and has managed to bring a feeling of hope back to Washington Football, but he’s about as Japanese as the Toyota RAV-4 driven by the MAGA idiot down the street who flaunts his racism and hate for all that aren’t white, and the NFL looks like a bunch of clowns trying to portray him as anything other than such.