SPEAKS VOLUMES
Media silence shows how out of touch Kyrie is
THE shock-and-awe news came thundering out of Brooklyn like a rocket hitched to a meteor. It broke the sound barrier on the Gowanus and stopped traffic on the Belt. Those hearing the news on radio gnashed their teeth in anguish, rubbed their hands raw in concern.
This week, Kyrie Irving, a firstclass pain in the NBA’s keister the past few seasons, had declared that this season, when he is due to be paid $33 million, he will not — repeat, not — speak with or to the media until he sees fit.
One small problem for Irving: Who gives a damn?
In a further insult to the good senses, the NBA fined Irving $25,000 for his unavailability. But if he doesn’t want to speak with us, why should we care?
Most don’t give rat’s retina if he speaks to the media or to the nearest wall. Last year, with player misconduct, selfishness and antisocial behavior again in full flower — but this in the throes of a pandemic that cost tens of thousands their lives or jobs — produced the least fan interest in the NBA since the Lakers were named for environs of Minneapolis.
Has Irving no sense of the world beyond himself?
If there’s one thing we learned this year, it’s how to live without. No Kyrie quotes? It’ll be a burden, sure, but we’ll struggle through it. It’s not like we’ve again run out of toilet paper.
So many of these guys just don’t get it. Perhaps Adam Silver can explain it to them.
Silver and team owners found out the hard way that pandering and selling out to a sweet-sounding socio-political Marxist, democracy-destructive con such as Black Lives Matter was a case of blind, wishful, reckless trust. And if you don’t know by now that BLM is and was a massive, media-reliant con it’s because you don’t want to know.
The Black Lives Matter movement, as demonstrated by its steady refusal, among other mindlessly destructive acts, to repudiate the slaughter of young black urban males by young black urban men — by the thousands — served conspicuous daily notice that black lives, like looted and burned black businesses, don’t matter.
And Silver and the NBA’s team owners now recognize that it threw in with a con, as top to bottom, beginning to end, the NBA told all non-black viewers that they’re racists — and had better mend their evil ways.
Now Silver wants to get back to basketball and with complaining players changing places in exchange for added tens of millions of dollars at a time when so many have, one way or another, tapped out, it may be too late. The NBA laid its cards on the table and now it wants a new deal?
One could see where the NBA was headed 13 months ago, after former Rockets GM and current 76ers president Daryl Morey openly expressed his support for pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, then, as now, under the totalitarian rule of Communist China.
The NBA, with hundreds of millions at stake in China — much of it dependent on the toil of slavewagers — freaked out, made it known that Morey spoke only for himself.
So if you’re scoring at home, the NBA had made it conspicuously clear that it threw its full support behind a rabidly anti-American American Marxist movement but assiduously avoided any support for a pro-democracy NBA GM.
And so it came as a great calamity that Irving, from life on his oneway street including millions in Nike made-in-China endorsements, has determined not to speak to the media until further notice. Apparently he believes all fans are unconditional NBA fans despite recent ample proof to the contrary.
Great! I can hardly wait to hear what he doesn’t have to say.