Kurtenbach
No, this was a moment of true activism by a basketball team, calling for meaningful changes to the real world.
The NBA strike led to the WNBA sitting out games on Wednesday as well. The Giants called off their game, as did the Milwaukee Brewers and Seattle Mariners. The San Jose Earthquakes pulled the plug — they were to have played the Portland Timbers in the first live sports event in Santa Clara County since the shutdown in mid-March — less than two hours before kickoff.
The Bucks put their season on the line. The players’ dreams of winning a championship were willingly sacrificed. And when the five other NBA teams scheduled to play Wednesday joined in not playing, they collectively threw the future of the league, and, ergo, their own personal financial futures up in the air.
They deserve the benefit of the doubt that they knew exactly what they were doing. All the evidence coming out of the NBA bubble in Florida points that way. The Bucks players issued a statement Wednesday evening, asking for the police officers who shot Blake to be “held accountable” and for the Wisconsin State Legislature to reconvene and “take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality, and criminal justice reform.”
And whether you agree with their protest and message or not, these players’ levels of sacrifice must be respected.
The Bucks and the rest of the NBA players who went on strike put it all on the line, without an exit strategy.
That’s bold. That’s admirable. That’s real action.
“We reached the point where we said, ‘Enough,’ ” said Andre Iguodala, the former Warrior who now plays for the Miami Heat, per the Miami Herald. “We realize the leverage we created for ourselves, not just to monetize it, but bring change to what’s been happening in our communities.”
And when you shut down the world of sports the way the NBA players did, you grab people’s attention. There will be some bad that comes with that attention. Such is the world today.
But, hopefully, there will be good, too.
No matter how hard some might wish otherwise, athletes carry massive influence in this country. And as Iguodala noted, for a while now, they’ve realized they could profit off that influence. But it wasn’t until recently that, collectively, these influencers have lent their
power to bigger, systemic issues.
Don’t expect Wednesday’s protest to be the last one, either. We’re across the Rubicon now.
A resolution for this protest might be found in the near future. Games might resume as soon as today. Or not. Maybe the NBA season is over. There’s no timetable or rubric for what happens next. There’s no bubble for police brutality and systemic racism.
But either way, these players — led by the Bucks — went all in for a cause.
In doing so, they firmly and permanently rejected the harebrained notion that sports should only exist as an escape — that somehow these real people are separate from the “real” world.
Are the ball games inherently unnecessary? Of course. We’ve learned that in ways we never expected over the past few months.
But sports have never been meaningless. And all it took was calling off three scheduled games to prove that point and, in turn, shine a light on something far more meaningful.