By unifying in opposition to Trump, sports world is finally speaking its mind
SCOTT STINSON
TORONTO — 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. He remembers being afraid to look police officers in the eye “because you didn’t want to be questioned.” He said he had friends who were at his home one day, and killed by police later that week. “Even now, I drive a nice car and I’m still being questioned: ‘How you get this car?’ ” DeRozan said it reminds him of being a kid, “like we were hiding (from the police) or running from something, even if you didn’t do anything.”
Dwane Casey, the Raptors coach, began his education at a segregated school in small-town Kentucky. It was integrated when he was going into Grade 4 and he remembers getting into fights with the white kids. He said what the President has been saying is hurtful. “It hurts because most players, the majority of players, are minorities and it’s almost like, ‘You have a right to entertain us, but you don’t have a right to be able to speak up about something,’ ” Casey said. “And that hurts me because I’ve come through that, I’ve come through segregation.”
He’s correct that there is a stayin-your-lane element to much of the criticism of the athletes, even if they are just silently kneeling. This argument says that an athlete can say whatever he wants on his own time, but not when they are representing their team. But being a pro athlete isn’t like being a barista, a banker, or a steelworker. They are always representing their team to the public, and if they say or do something dumb in private, it could cost them their job. Is an athlete supposed to sever his thoughts from his professional profile? Hold office hours after practice? There is also this: “We are human beings first,” said Kyle Lowry on Monday. Should he be banned from speaking his mind as an individual because he happens to be an athlete? “I want to use my platform in a positive way,” he said. (He did one-up his backcourt mate in suggesting that Trump sometimes acts like a six-year-old on social media.)
Hockey players were speaking out on Monday, too, with Blake Wheeler saying in Winnipeg that he had had enough of Trump’s rhetoric and his teammate Matt Hendricks saying that while he wouldn’t kneel during the anthem, he would respect those that did. “It’s not just the flag,” he said. “For the others that choose to take a knee, it’s a different reason.”
Not everyone agrees with that position. But the right to disagree is kind of the point. Trump has always spoken his mind, and was elected president because of it. He has now sparked to the sports world to do the same. The filters are off. It will take some getting used to.
LeBron James is not backing down on his comments about President Donald Trump, and countless other players and coaches in the NBA made it clear at media days around the league Monday that they are equally fed up with what could perhaps be described as a pattern of actions from the White House that they would call divisive or worse.
Politics were the storyline of the NBA on the first official business day of the season for most of the league’s clubs. That was no surprise, given the events of a weekend that included Trump rescinding the champion Golden State Warriors’ invitation to the White House, James calling the president a “bum” and stars like union president Chris Paul speaking out in frustration.
But these tensions have been present for far more than one weekend, and they are bubbling now in the NBA like perhaps never before.
“We know this is the greatest country in the world,” said James, the Cleveland Cavaliers’ star. “It’s the land of the free. But we still have problems just like everybody else and when we have those problems, we have to figure out a way how we come together and be as great as we can be as a people.
“Because the people run this country. Not one individual. And damn sure not him.”
James referred to Trump as “that guy,” and defended his decision to call the president a “bum” — in what quickly became one of Twitter’s most-shared posts ever.
The name-calling didn’t end there: Washington Wizards guard Bradley Beal called Trump “a clown” and Toronto Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan said the president is a “so-called leader.”
“I think the president brought a lot of this stuff on himself,” said DeRozan, who is American but plays in Canada. “He brought it on himself, he brought it on us as a country . ... I feel no player is trying to disrespect anybody, no flag or anything like that, but we seem to be the ones who get all the disrespect from our so-called leader.”
Trump’s comments about the NFL and NBA come at a time where the government has obvious concerns about matters involving North Korea, the pledge many Republicans made to repeal and replace health care legislation, with a tax overhaul plan looming and with Florida, Texas and Puerto Rico all dealing with crippling effects of hurricanes in recent weeks.
Amid all that, Trump said at a rally in Alabama on Friday night that NFL owners should fire players who kneel during the national anthem.
After deadly protests involving white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia last month, Memphis Grizzlies coach David Fizdale has been actively trying to get Confederate symbols such as monuments removed from his city. On Monday, Fizdale said it was Trump who should stand accused of disrespecting military members, not athletes who protest in various ways.
“Look at what he’s doing with North Korea putting our troops in danger right now instigating a war,” Fizdale said. “You know how many troops we have in South Korea and Japan that’s in direct line with where this guy can fire missiles? Obviously the Gold Star family that lost their son ... I can keep going on this, guys, you know that.
“So when we talk about disrespecting our military, people need to take a look back at who’s really disrespecting our military and who’s really honouring our military by exercising their rights.”
Media days in the NBA are usually a mixture of basketball-related interviews, photo sessions and some frivolity. At Heat media day, Udonis Haslem traditionally commandeers his own camera crew and does his own interviews — as was the case again this year. Coaches take questions en masse, often talking about what has to get done at training camp. End-of-thebench players often walk around in near total anonymity.
This year, all that happened again. But there were countless questions about politics as well, and given the reaction players are getting from their fans, people want to hear what they say.