SOLOMON ON ATHLETES’ INFLUENCE.
Their social media posts — tweets, photos, memes — were different this past week.
Athletes had things to say. Imagine that.
For a few days, at least, realworld tragedy pushed aside the mindless stream of random thoughts, stale motivational quotes, and tantalizing pictures of vacations most of us will never take and weights few of us will ever lift.
For a number of athletes, senseless, violent deaths — two black men at the hands of police and five police officers in a despicable attack in Dallas — could not be ignored.
Some anger, some outrage, some expressions of hurt. I applaud them all. We often use, even need, sports to take us away. That shouldn’t mean athletes must go away when there are no games.
Commenting on issues via social media in 2016 doesn’t put an athlete in the John Carlos and Tommie Smith category, not even close, but hopefully we are moving to an age where athletes will consider how much they can influence change, progress.
‘No more sitting back’
New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony shared his thoughts on the week’s events on Instagram alongside a picture of an iconic 1967 news conference photo after a meeting of the minds featuring a group of socially conscious black athletes including Jim Brown, Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor).
Anthony says athletes should be out front leading the charge to pressure elected officials to “get justice right.”
“There’s no more sitting back and being afraid of tackling and addressing social issues any- more,” he wrote. “Those days are long gone.
“We can demand change. We just have to be willing to.” Fear can be stifling. Granted, the modern athlete’s reluctance to speak on social or political issues is more about loss of income than loss of life as was the case when Muhammad Ali told the world his stance on the Vietnam War, which precipitated the aforementioned black athletes’ meeting.
“Hands up don’t shoot” was more than a hashtag when Russell was stopped for driving while black and exaggeratedly kept his hands held high so police wouldn’t shoot.
Black lives mattered even less than they do today when Wilt Chamberlain said he told a police officer, who had pulled a revolver on him after stopping him for being black and rich, “You cocked that thing, you might as well pull the trigger.” More than ‘mindless animal’
The first time I talked to Brown — on a red-eye flight from Las Vegas to Cleveland some 20 years ago — he told me that modern-day athletes were wasting their power by being silent on so many issues. Not standing for anything except their next shoe deal or soda endorsement.
That was when Michael Jordan was certain such silence sold shoes and before Tiger Woods figured being quiet was good for the golf business.
Check the comments under the Chron.com aggregations of various athletes’ thoughts and you’ll see many “shut up and play” orders, as if they were video game options.
You claim you don’t care what athletes have to say about anything other than sports, but that doesn’t stop you from reading and commenting.
Unlike your feigned Johnny Manziel fatigue (miraculously those clicks keep coming), your interest in athletes’ views could lead you to a deeper appreciation (or dislike) of your favorite running back or right fielder.
Do we really expect them not to have thoughts and opinions? Do we expect them to remain silent on issues that touch them emotionally, personally? They live here too. If you are bothered when athletes talk about social issues, you should feel that way when they talk about cancer because it has touched their family. You should tell them to just say nothing about education or drugs (performance-enhancing or otherwise).
Sports have often been ahead of society on social issues. There is no reason for that to not remain the case.
We know how an athlete would be treated these days were he as outspoken as Ali or Brown or Russell.
Arian Foster basically channels Chamberlain when he talks about media. Some locals in the industry do a laughably poor job at hiding how much it bothers them.
As Chamberlain wrote in his autobiography, media “help perpetuate the image of athleteas-mindless-animal.” Power in numbers
The distance between athletes and fans has never been shorter, and it is shrinking.
Athletes are choosing to bypass media and go straight to the people.
There was a time when aside from books or the occasional in-depth newspaper or magazine article, an athlete’s personal views were shared only with the inner circle: family, friends, fellow barbershop or hair salon patrons.
Now, whatever they say can be seen around the world in seconds.
J.J. Watt has 2.2 million Twitter followers, 2.1 million Instagram followers and 1.8 million likes on Facebook.
If you don’t think he could wield political power, consider, a total of 208,600 people voted in the last Houston mayoral election.
Watt has chosen not to say anything about this past week’s events. Maybe he thinks he has too much to lose, or perhaps he just doesn’t care to share his thoughts on the issue with the world.
That’s his prerogative. It’s a free country.
It could be that Watt simply has nothing to say on the matter — Texans backup quarterback Tom Savage posted one word: “#Unite” — and that’s fine too if it works for Watt.
It is also fine, good even, that so many other athletes are participating in the conversation.
To borrow from Ralph Wiley, I’d like to see more WWJD, and think “What would Jackie (or Jim or Jabbar) do?” and try to do that.