Ex-tennis star still shaken by encounter with cop in ’15
Nearly ve years later, former United States tennis star James Blake says he never suspected the large man running towards him was a plainclothes New York City policeman. Blake was in town that day for the US Open and standing outside a Manhattan hotel. “I thought someone was running at me that was a fan, someone that was going to say, ‘Hey I saw you play so and so, I was at this match, my kid plays tennis,’” Blake recalled. “I’m smiling with my hands down.” But Blake, who is black, had been mistakenly identied as a suspect in a credit card fraud scheme. Video showed the undercover ocer grabbing him by the arm, throwing him to the sidewalk face down, and handcung him. All of which intensied Blake’s reaction to the video of George Floyd’s death shortly after being detained by Minneapolis police recently. “I went to bed very sad and very deated, seeing this over and over again,” Blake said on June 2 from his home in San Diego. “I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t stop my mind from racing, thinking about the events that took place there, the events that took place with me in 2015. It saddens me to see that kind of policing is still going on, that kind of brutality, particularly how often it is aimed at the black and brown community.” Blake, a Harvard alum who reached a careerhigh ranking of world No. 4 and is now tournament director of the Miami Open, said the 2015 episode transformed him into an “accidental activist.” He supports peaceful protest, and said it’s possible no arrest in the Floyd case would have been made without the recent demonstrations in Minneapolis and elsewhere.