Columnist Dean Juipe: Asian influx tests U.S. sports fans

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, June 26, 2002 | 9:42 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

It was with a sense of relief that I watched the latest installment of "The Human Face," a documentary series of sorts hosted by actor John Cleese that's currently running on the cable network The Learning Channel.

In one segment, expert testimony was used to illustrate the difficulty people of any one race have in identifying people of another race. For instance, as a white guy it's said that I may have inherent trouble, comparatively speaking, in remembering the names of the black people that I encounter.

Such difficulties are said to be perfectly normal and are nothing more than a physiological quirk that mysteriously derives from the brain. For reasons science has yet to unravel, people of all races tend to lump people of other races into a group and can struggle to distinguish one person from another.

At its most horrific, mistakes of identification can be made in criminal cases, as the show pointed out by using an example of a white woman who had erroneously fingered the wrong black male in a rape case. She was enveloped in grief when it became apparent years later that her testimony had placed an innocent man in jail for several years.

But my trouble isn't in recalling the names of the black people I meet, as I seem to have been doing that all my life and rarely give it a second thought. No, my trouble is in matching the names and faces of the many Asian athletes that have made their way into America's professional sports in the last couple of years.

Sometimes the name is familiar and sometimes it's the face, but rarely, as yet, am I apt to successfully identify both. And the only thing I can think of that would fully correct the problem is to go back to collecting baseball cards.

Even if you follow the sport closely, it would be a real test to unscramble a list of current players' names and link them to their photos. To get the idea of what I mean, try visualizing these players: Dodgers pitcher Kaz Ishii; Expos pitcher Tomokazu Ohka; Giants outfielder Tsuyoshi Shinjo; Royals pitcher Makoto Suzuki; Mariners pitcher Shigetoshi Hasegawa; Diamondbacks pitcher Byung-Hyun Kim; Rangers pitcher Chan Ho Park; Expos pitcher Masato Yoshii; Dodgers pitcher Hideo Nomo; Rangers pitcher Hideki Irabu; Mariners pitcher Kazuhiro Sasaki; and Mariners outfielder Ichiro Suzuki.

While it might be easy to pick AL batting champion and MVP Ichiro out of that group and maybe veterans such as Park, Nomo and Irabu as well, the rest sort of blend together in an Asian spritzer of sorts. And you've really got to know your ballplayers to even come up with the first names of guys such as Izturis, Komiyama and Simontacchi, who currently play for the Dodgers, Mets and Cardinals, respectively.

Asians are also prominent in boxing and increasingly so in both men's and women's golf. The LPGA Tour has no fewer than 16 Asian members this year and without listing them all the typical white male will find it challenging to differentiate Sun Hee Lee from Yu Ping Lin from Mayumi Hirase from Shiho Katano from Oh-Yeon Kwon from Jeong Jang from Minny Yeo from Se Ri Pak from Mi-Hyun Kim and so on.

But I'm working on it, and that's the important thing.