Saints’ Kamara just became fan of Wallace, racing
Alvin Kamara knew a little bit — a very little bit — about NASCAR before Wednesday. He grew up in Georgia and has spent pretty much his entire life living in the South, so he would maybe watch a race for a few minutes while he flipped through channels in the summer and nothing else was going on. He never really cared enough to learn how the sport works.
On Wednesday, NASCAR made the shocking — yet long overdue — decision to ban the Confederate flag from its venues, at the urging of Bubba Wallace, the lone fulltime African American driver in
the NASCAR Cup Series. “When the next race?” Kamara asked on Twitter once he saw the news. About an hour later, the New Orleans Saints running back plopped down in front of his television to live tweet the Blue-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 500. By banning the Confederate flag, NASCAR gained one prominent fan.
“I’ve watched it before, like I’ve turned it on and just skimmed through it, but I never really understood it,” Kamara said as he watched a NASCAR Xfinity Series race Sunday in Homestead. “I never even really took the time to understand what was going on.”
He was probably the most famous fan in attendance Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway. On Sunday, NASCAR opened its doors to 1,000 fans for the Dixie Vodka 400 — the first time a major sports league has hosted fans since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March. Most of the spectators were military personnel, but NASCAR also extended an invitation to Kamara, who spends his offseasons training in South Florida. Right around noon, Kamara pulled up to the track decked out in a Wallace T-shirt and hat to support one of the unlikely new faces of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Kamara had played a football game at a NASCAR track before — he played at Bristol Motor Speedway as a junior for the Tennessee Volunteers — but Sunday was the first time he was at a track for an actual race and it was all thanks to Wallace.
Kamara and Wallace first crossed paths about four or five years ago. Kamara was a budding star at Tennessee, and Wallace, whose mother competed in track and field for the Volunteers, would make frequent trips to Knoxville as he toiled in NASCAR’s minor league series.
In 2017, Wallace became the first African American driver to compete in the Cup Series in more than a decade. In the past two weeks, he has become one of the most famous drivers in the sports, speaking out about police brutality in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and donning a Black Lives Matter paint job on his No. 43 car. When he pushed NASCAR to ban the Confederate flag from crowds and campsites Monday, Wallace created a new entryway for African American fans, like Kamara, who previously felt alienated by the sport’s history with the racist symbol.
“I don’t think it’s about when to say it. It’s about it actually being said,” Kamara said. “It’s taken this long to do it and it is what it is. Me personally, I’m not going to be mad at that because the climate dictated it. The fact that they sat down and got rid of it, and are making these strides to flip the script, that’s all you can ask for.”