“This brother is special, make no mistake about it,” Stephen A. Smith said in July, on ESPN's First Take.
“But the fact that you've got a foreign player that doesn't speak English, that needs an interpreter?believe it or not, I think contributes to harming the game to some degree, when that's your box office appeal. It needs to be somebody like Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, those guys.” He continued, “I understand that baseball is an international sport itself in terms of participation.
But when you talk about an audience gravitating to the tube, or to the ballpark, to actually watch you, I don't think it helps that the number one face is a dude that needs an interpreter so that you can understand what the hell he's saying in this country.”
Smith ultimately apologized for his comments but was hammered for both his contention that the star of an American sports league needs to speak English?and that anyone would necessarily care one way or the other. When I ask Shohei what he made of Smith's comments, he (ironically) understands my question in English and chuckles.
“I mean, if I could speak English, I would speak English,” he says in Japanese. “Of course I would want to. Obviously it wouldn't hurt to be able to speak English. There would only be positive things to come from that. But I came here to play baseball, at the end of the day, and I've felt like my play on the field could be my way of communicating with the people, with the fans. That's all I really took from that in the end.
“It's mandatory in school, for, like, six years in Japan,” he adds. “Middle school, high school, which everyone takes. That was the only exposure to English I had before I came over. My high school English teacher was actually my baseball coach…,” he says, laughing, as something appears to occur to him in real time.
“Now that I think about it, he probably can't speak the language that well. But they teach it to us to, like, pass tests.
They don't really teach it to be…” To be broadcast on SportsCenter. To be making the charismatic case for rejuvenating a nation's latent baseball fandom.
“Not that I want to be dissing the whole English educational system of Japan…”
DeepL 自動翻訳
"日本では6年間、学校で必須なんだ "と彼は付け加えました。
「中学、高校と、みんな受けるんです。日本に来る前は、それしか英語に触れる機会がなかったんです。高校の英語の先生は、実は野球のコーチだった......」と、リアルタイムで思い当たる節があるようで、笑っている。
「今思えば、あの先生も英語ができないんだろうな。でも、テストに合格するために教えているんです。でも、テストに合格するために教えているのであって、本当にそうなるために教えているわけでは......」。スポーツセンターで放送されること。
国民の潜在的な野球ファンを再生させるためのカリスマ的な訴えをすること。「日本の英語教育全体をディスるわけではないが...
GQより
https://www.gq.com/story/shohei-ohtani-february-cover-profile
