The time for sticking to sports is over
There was a time when the safe path, if you were an athlete playing a kids’ game for good money, was to stay out of it — all of it. Name a hot-button topic that might risk annoying your team’s owners or inciting the paying customers — politics, gun violence, racial injustice, police brutality — and it was best not addressed by those residing in society’s toy department.
For a long time sportspeople, a good majority of them, didn’t tread beyond the borders of their sandboxes. A few activist athletes stood out as people of rare conviction. From Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, they often paid severely for holding firmly to their beliefs. Most everyone else, when the microphones and cameras were turned on, stuck to sports.
If we’re seeing a real change in that calculus of late — and given the flood of thoughtful reaction to the murder of George Floyd emanating from the sports world, it seems as though we might be — maybe it’s partly because there are so few sports to stick to. With no daily slate of games to divert attention from the real world’s harsh truths, the harsh truths are being examined a little more closely.
As Jonathan Toews, the Chicago Blackhawks captain, pointed out in an eloquent Instagram rumination on the reaction to Floyd’s death, it’s possible the coronavirus has been good for at least one thing.
“We can no longer distract ourselves from the truth of what is going on,” Toews wrote.
Toews, of course, is a hockey player — a member of a fraternity that has built a generations-old reputation for keeping its discourse almost solely confined to the narrow parameters of the pucks-in-deep cliché. And here he was on Monday urging “white people” to “open our eyes and our hearts” to the circumstances that have led to the protesting and rioting and looting that have engulfed U.S. cities in the days since Floyd died in police custody.
Here he was acknowledging he’d been moved to tears watching video of a Minneapolis police officer applying a fatal knee to Floyd’s neck, and the violent reaction that has followed. And here he was pointing out that, while his first reaction to footage of rioting and looting was to condemn those responsible, he’s since changed his thinking.
“Who am I to tell someone that their pain is not real?
Especially when it is at a boiling point and impossible to hold in anymore,” he wrote. “It’s obviously coming from a place of truth.”
The thing that stood out about Toews’ post wasn’t that he was offering a thoughtful, articulate reaction to a complex issue; he’s long set himself apart as a deep thinker with wide-ranging interests. It’s that Toews was joining a chorus of many athletes who’ve opted to take a stab at doing the same — not to simply stick to sports, but to contribute to the discourse. Given the discourse, in this case, is about racism, the conversation is far from easy. But as Raptors president Masai Ujiri wrote in a Globe and Mail opinion piece on the weekend, it can no longer be avoided simply because it’s hard.
“Silence and inactivity are not acceptable any more. Now is the time to speak,” is how Doc Rivers the L.A. Clippers coach, put it in a social-media post.
Some of the sports world’s outpouring is, like anything, clearly about optics and obligation. The NFL’s statement on the situation, for one, rang as hollow as anything could.
The league that blackballed Kaepernick for taking a peaceful knee to protest the abuse of police power couldn’t exactly claim the moral high ground while denouncing the abuse of police power that led to Floyd’s death.
And there are those who will read umpteen well-meaning social-media posts from dozens of athletes and shrug. They’re just words, after all. And what does it matter that Auston Matthews of the Maple Leafs went on Twitter to insist “the world must unite not divide”? What does it matter if Blake Wheeler, the Minnesotaraised captain of the Winnipeg Jets, is telling his 88,000 Twitter followers “that we need to stand with the Black community and fundamentally change how leadership in this country has dealt with racism”? What does it matter that Matthews’s Toronto teammate Morgan
Rielly offered his take on the situation?
“We all have a responsibility to act; to listen, to learn, to speak up but most importantly to never accept anything less than equality, justice, antiracism and love,” is how Rielly put it.
Those words from Matthews and Rielly and many others matter because those athletes command rapt audiences. Encouraging those audiences to listen and learn, at a moment when racism is being signalled as acceptable from the highest offices of the world’s most powerful nation, is a valuable bit of outreach.
In this age of senselessness, suddenly sports commentators are offering rare havens of common sense. A few days ago Jay Bilas, the white ESPN college basketball analyst, offered a reasoned argument to folks who insist on countering chants of “Black Lives Matter!” with “All Lives Matter!”
“If we all reasonably agree that all lives matter, we must also agree that black lives matter, a subset of all lives,” Bilas posted on Instagram. “Nobody says or posts #blacklivesmatter to diminish the value of any other life. It is said or posted to establish that every black life has the same value as any other life. Tragically in our society, based upon all objective evidence, it is impossible to reasonably suggest that black lives are valued the same way as any other lives. Unless and until black lives truly matter in our society, all lives don’t truly matter in our society.”
As Richard Sherman, the unfailingly outspoken NFLer, pointed out recently to Sports Illustrated, the voices of white athletes “carry a different weight than the Black voices for some people.”
“Which means the people who refuse to listen to a Black athlete’s perspective will hear the same thing said from a white athlete, but receive the message much differently.”
Certainly every message matters if the alternative is silence. In this social-media age, after all, silence can easily be perceived as indifference or even complicity to the injustice. Certainly that was the perception of Lewis Hamilton, the auto-racing great, who lambasted his colleagues in the Formula One paddock for their notable absence in this particular discussion.
“I see those of you who are staying silent, some of you the biggest of stars yet you stay silent in the midst of injustice,” Hamilton wrote on Instagram on Sunday.
“Not a sign from anybody in my industry, which of course is a white-dominated sport … I’m one of the only people of colour (in Formula One) yet I stand alone.”
It wasn’t long after that a raft of Hamilton’s white competitors picked up their phones to offer their contributions. At least one of those drivers explained his previous silence by expressing a common sentiment: He wasn’t sure if anything he had to say would be of value in the face of a crisis so grave. There are those in the sports world, thankfully, who don’t appear to have such moments of self doubt. Which is why Monday saw Gregg Popovich, the San Antonio Spurs coach, call U.S. president Donald Trump a “deranged idiot” and a “destroyer” and a “grade-schooler.”
“It’s unbelievable,” Popovich told The Nation. “If Trump had a brain, even if it was 99per-cent cynical, he would come out and say something to unify people … It’s so clear what needs to be done. We need a president to come out and say simply that ‘Black lives matter.’ ”
In lieu of the leader of the free world, we’ve got the leaders of various professional franchises. If the overwhelming instinct of most sportspeople is to stick to sports, maybe it’s the vacuum of a unifying message that has the executives and coaches and athletes veering outside the lines.