Trump has declared war: diplomat
BY TELLING ATHLETES NOT TO SPEAK OUT, TRUMP HAS VIRTUALLY GUARANTEED THAT THEY FINALLY DO
Masai Ujiri was speaking for the Toronto Raptors on Monday, but he might as well have been speaking for the entire sports world. “I can guarantee you one thing, nobody’s getting fired here,” Ujiri, the Raptors’ president, said on back-to-school day for the basketball team, the opening of training camp, which happened to coincide with one of the strangest sports weekends in memory. “(The players) have a platform,” Ujiri said. “There’s nobody getting fired. You can quote me. You can write that one.”
It was a not-particularly-subtle rebuke of Donald Trump, who has spent a lot of time in recent days encouraging NFL teams to fire kneeling players. But as the day continued, it was evident that athletes, having been told to shut up and play, are doing the precise opposite. With camps opening across the NBA, players and coaches were very much not sticking to sports.
“Our country is an embarrassment to the world,” said San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, never one for holding his tongue. Washington Wizards guard Bradley Beal suggested that Trump was acting like “a clown.” LeBron James said that one person did not run the United States, “and damn sure not him.”
This is a sea-change kind of thing. Sports franchises, almost without exception, preach about the importance of limiting distractions, which is code for not saying anything controversial. In practice, this tends to mean players and coaches avoid taking a position on issues of the day, even when it falls in their lap. And so, when Trump brought down the first of his travel bans in late January, touching off nationwide protests during Super Bowl week, it was damned hard to find anyone on either team willing to weigh in on it. New England quarterback Tom Brady, a noted Trump supporter, smiled and said he was willing to talk football. His coach, Bill Belichick, did not smile and said the same. This was neither unusual nor surprising. Players punt on this stuff all the time.
Except, it would seem, now. DeMar DeRozan of the Raptors said Trump brought much of this on himself. “You’ve got your president on Twitter more than a 12-year-old saying the most outrageous things,” he said.
DeRozan, who grew up in a rough part of Los Angeles, said the issues that started this whole controversy — Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality — are important to address.