Long silent, the world of sports finds its voice
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.
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.”
There is a stay-in-your-lane element to much of the criticism of athletes, even if they are just silently kneeling. This argument says athletes can say whatever they want on their 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, 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,” Kyle Lowry said 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 Trump sometimes acts like a sixyear-old on social media.)
Hockey players were speaking out on Monday, too, with Blake Wheeler saying in Winnipeg that he had enough of Trump’s rhetoric and teammate Matt Hendricks saying while he wouldn’t kneel during the anthem, he would respect those who did. “It’s not just the flag,” he said. “For the others that choose to take a knee, it’s a different reason.”
There was a lot of that, too, including Toronto’s Auston Matthews, who said he felt kneeling was disrespectful to the military but he understood free speech was protected by “one of those amendments.”
Not everyone agrees with that position. But the right to disagree is kind of the point. Donald Trump has always spoken his mind, and was elected president because of it. He has now sparked the sports world to do the same. The filters are off. It will take some getting used to.