NFL assistant coach Eugene Chung said that his Asian ethnicity was the reason he was not considered for a new coaching position this off-season.
“It was said to me, ‘Well, you’re really not a minority,” Chung, who is Korean, told the Boston Globe without specifically naming the organization that told him that.
“I was, like, ‘Wait a minute. The last time I checked, when I looked in the mirror and brushed my teeth, I was a minority,” he said. “So I was, like, ‘What do you mean I’m not a minority?’”
“You are not the right minority we’re looking for,” Chung said the interviewer told him.
The veteran coach said he was shocked by the interview’s remarks.
“That’s when I realized what the narrative was,” he said. “I was blown away, emotionally paralyzed for a split second. I asked myself, ‘Did I hear that correctly?’”
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He then claimed the interviewer began to backtrack the statement.
“As soon as the backtracking started, I was like, ‘Oh no, no, no, no, no, you said it. Now that it’s out there, let’s talk about it,’” Chung said.
“It was absolutely mind-blowing to me that in 2021 something like that is actually a narrative,” he continued.
Chung, the NFL’s first-ever Asian American drafted in the first round, played 55 games as an offensive tackle for the New England Patriots, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Indianapolis Colts and went on to join Super Bowl winners Andy Reid and Doug Pederson as an assistant coach with the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs for 10 seasons.
The NFL previously adopted “the Rooney rule,” requiring league teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching positions, and it recently expanded it to include front-office and coordinator positions, the New York Post reports.
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While the NFL does not set quotas for how many ethnic-minority candidates should be interviewed, or ultimately hired, it does reward teams with draft picks for providing such hiring preferences.
The rule includes considerations for women and black, Hispanic, and Asian people.
“For me, in this profession, I don’t think I’m looked at as a minority,” Chung said. “Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know.”
“I’m not sitting here bashing the league at all, because there are great mentors and there are great coaches that embrace the difference,” he added. “It’s just when the Asians don’t fit the narrative, that’s where my stomach churns a little bit.”
