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Jennifer Wu is a naturalized citizen of the United States of America. She picked herself up from her bootstraps at the age of 18, moving from Beijing to New Jersey and gained American citizenship along the way. She loves America, and would like nothing more than to bring the sport of table tennis to the forefront of American popular culture. She has her eyes set on a gold medal in Rio for herself and the USA, which is a lot more than I can say for former world number one Rory McIlroy.
“It’s my dream to play in the Olympics,” Wu said. “If I can win gold or get a medal, I think it will really help the sport in the U.S. I want to help the sport grow.”
Contrast that with this quote from our boy Ror’s. Jennifer Wu is out here trying to bring the United States a goddamn championship and what is McIlroy doing? He’s sitting in his sick penthouse in Northern Ireland counting stacks of money like Scrooge McDuck.
“I didn’t get into golf to try to grow the game. I got into golf to win championships and win majors. All of a sudden you get to this point and there is a responsibility on you to grow the game and I get that. But at the same time that’s not the reason I got into golf. I got into golf to win.”
Huh. Real class act, Rory. Glad we’ve people on our Olympic table tennis team who want to make this country great again..
[via CBS New York]
Image via Team USA
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jduda@grandex.co
Growing a sport is great if that’s what you’re passionate about, but I completely agree with Rory. And Forrest Gump did more for ping pong than Jennifer Xu ever will.
Good work on knowing what the term “naturalized” means.
Extra point for the edit after my original comment.
I think you have to look at the pay here though. Rory is doing just fine with the cash he gets from golf, so there really is no incentive to “grow the game,” whereas table tennis professionals aren’t exactly cashing 6-figure checks so they have a bigger incentive to increase the popularity of it.