Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Tannehill: ‘My eyes have been opened’
Former Dolphins QB credits 2016 team on helping him better understand social ills
Every successful movement has a moment when it goes from social cause to a society’s demands. Maybe if the sports world represents the larger world, the death of George Floyd has come to that moment when an everyman like Ryan Tannehill is in.
“My eyes have been opened to the privilege I’ve lived with my whole life just because of the color of my skin,” Tannehill said in a conference call with Tennessee Titans reporters.
He’s speaking up, he said, “to be true to who I am and support what I know is right,” he said. “I am going to fight for what I believe is right.”
You see change across sports from a few years ago. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said the league was “wrong for not listening,” to players protesting against racial injustice. Drew Brees explained to President Trump why he apologized for saying players shouldn’t kneel during the national anthem.
NASCAR sent a direct message to its fan base, saying Confederate flags were no longer welcome at races and Bubba
Wallace ran a “Black Lives Matter” car.
Four years ago, Tannehill was noticeably silent as four Miami Dolphins teammates knelt on the sideline during the national anthem.
That was his right to stay quiet. It’s everyone’s right. That needs to be said. You can understand why a young public figure who hadn’t thought through some heated issues wouldn’t want to speak publicly about them.
But listen to Tannehill, at 31, now with the Titans.
“Do I wish I would have known more and been more supportive back in 2016? Yes, 100 percent,” he said. “If I would have known then what I know now, I probably would have been more vocal and supportive.”
Tannehill said he had done “a lot of growing” in the four years since
Kenny Stills, Michael Thomas, Adrian Foster and Jelani Jenkins took a knee against social issues that season.
Those Dolphins were conflicted. Owner Steve Ross backed the kneeling, telling Thomas so before the first game in Seattle. Coach Adam Gase just wanted to win games, as his career depended on that.
Tannehill said he talked about race and society with Stills, who was traded to the Houston Texans before last season. He read books Stills suggested like “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” This is what you miss when you don’t get to see a player last with one team for his career. You miss seeing who he becomes.
“The situations my friends, my teammates, guys I love, that they’ve been put in throughout their life purely because of the color of their skin,” he said. “Things they have to deal with, which no man, people should have to deal with.”
He added, “I think the unfortunate thing about it is if you’re a white person, you don’t have to deal with it on a daily basis, and you’re not put in those situations, it’s easy to just go about your life and not recognize it and not realize how big of a deal it is and how many people it affects on a daily basis. I think with this push, more and more people are having an awakening to the reality of the situation and how deep it really is, how many layers of injustice there are to it with the court system and policing and on a day-to-day basis … It’s been happening far too long, and enough is enough.”
If sports reflects society, the increasing number of outspoken athletes like Tannehill speak of a larger change digging into communities. In Cincinnati,
National League MVP Joey Votto wrote a column entitled, “My Awakening,” on his need to listen and educate himself about racial issues.
In Washington, Stanley Cup-winning goalie Braden Holtby started a campaign of, “Get Off The Bench For Racial Equality.”
In a previous sports generation, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods resolutely refused to take stands on social issues. Jordan’s line of, “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” defined what mattered to him when his voice was loudest.
Tannehill showed how he’s changed as he grows. Maybe he shows how we’ve changed as a society. He’s not sure whether Titans players will kneel during the national anthem. But his voice shows how seeds of dissent on the Dolphins four years ago brought change. On such change a moment becomes a movement.