NASCAR’S ban of Confederate flags a principled, and surprising, move
BULLS OF THE WEEK
Michael Jordan had one of the best weeks of his post-playing career.
Still basking in the glow of The Last Dance, the 10-part docuseries that reconnected us to the legendary competitive intensity that made No. 23 the greatest basketball player of all time, Jordan was among the first from the sports community to respond to the May 25 murder of George Floyd.
The former Chicago Bulls star did so by putting his money where his mouth was — to the tune of a $100-million donation made last Friday to programs and initiatives to improve racial equality.
It was a leadership play for Jordan, someone whose personal net worth is estimated to be US$2.1 billion, despite not having had the same kind of success in ownership and basketball management with the Charlotte Hornets as he did as a member of six championship Bulls teams in the 1990s.
Having said that, few have ever caught a 442-pound marlin, something Jordan also did this week during a sport fishing tournament off the coast of North Carolina.
It was also a bullish week for Roger Goodell and the “Shield” that is the National Football League.
After falling flat with an initial written statement on Floyd’s death, Goodell made arguably the most important address of his tenure as NFL commissioner last Friday. Reaching out in a Facebook video, he used terms such as “police brutality” and “oppression” and admitted the league should have listened more closely to Black players on the issue of social justice.
Goodell also freely referred to Black Lives Matter. All of that was extremely significant for a league that awkwardly fumbled and blacklisted quarterback Colin Kaepernick for leading the controversial and polarizing kneeling campaign.
Yet no matter how much of a compelling turn this was for the NFL — a 32-team league that has only three Black head coaches and two Black general managers — even it paled in comparison to the principled (and surprising) stance taken this week by NASCAR.
A privately owned company that’s been run by the France family for 72 years, NASCAR boldly banned Confederate flags from its events effective immediately. The move took considerable courage given NASCAR’S strong roots in the southeastern United States of the old Confederacy.
Predictably, Twitter erupted with many U.S. auto racing fans vowing to never watch the stock car circuit again. Yet, the same Twitter was also effusive in its praise of NASCAR, seeing it this week as a progressive agent of change — a description that would have seemed impossible even one week ago.
BEARS OF THE WEEK
For the fifth consecutive week, no one in the business of sport has been mired in as bearish a market as the one Major League Baseball finds itself in.
While the NHL, NBA and MLS move forward with plans around return to play after what is now a three-month shutdown, and the NFL counts down to its regular-season kickoff in September, MLB is without any such player agreement.
Who knows what happens if commissioner Rob Manfred unilaterally imposes a 48-game season on the players?
The MLBPA may not immediately call for a strike, but there will be no love associated with the diamonds of baseball this summer. And likely even less love during the next round of collective bargaining after the 2021 season. The Sport Market on TSN Radio rates and debates the bulls and bears of sport business. Join Tom Mayenknecht on Saturdays from 7-11 a.m. for a behind-the-scenes look at the sport business stories that matter most to fans.
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