March 15, 1996 – Denver Nuggets guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf stands with his teammates and prays during … [+]
ASSOCIATED PRESS
“The long-standing values of the NBA are to support freedom of expression and certainly freedom of expression from members of the NBA community.”
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver spoke these words at a press conference in Tokyo, Japan last October, paraphrasing the statement he had just released confirming the league’s intention to “protect [its] freedom of expression for employees “.
The employee in question at the time was Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, whose Twitter message the previous day, “Fight for freedom. Stay with Hong Kong,” immediately sparked controversy and crisis for the NBA in the form of a rapid and serious backlash from China.
This reaction, according to a February observation by Silver, will eventually lead to the league losing “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenue due to canceled transmissions and commercial partnership interruptions. However, the league was resolute in defending the freedom of expression of Morey and all his employees.
Now, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the continuing crisis of police brutality and racial inequality in the United States, the NBA’s commitment to freedom of expression and speech will soon be put to the test.
In a championship where, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, around 82% of its players are African American or otherwise colored, the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against injustice have been at the center stage alongside coronavirus security as one of the two most imperative and important factors in the imminent restart of the NBA season at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
In a mid-June teleconference reported by The Athletic’s Shams Charania, NBA players such as Kyrie Irving and Dwight Howard expressed reservations about the resumption of the season, with Howard expressing concern that restarting the season “would become a distraction from the problems. that the country is facing, “And Irving says more openly:” I don’t claim to go to Orlando. “
To his credit, the league has taken steps both to explicitly support Black Lives Matter, and to work proactively with the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) to determine new ways in which players will be able to express their support for the movement. to fight the race injustice and police brutality.
According to a report by Zach Lowe and Ramona Shelbourne of ESPN, the NBA and the NBPA “are planning to paint” Black Lives Matter “on the field within both margins in all three arenas” in Orlando, and for a Charania tweet, players will also be able to “replace the surname on their shirts with [a] social justice statement. “
There is another form of expression in the world of sport, which has become the archetype par excellence of a request for justice: to protest peacefully during the national anthem.
From track and field athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists during the 1968 Olympics medal ceremony, to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar who refused to support the anthem when he was still known as Lew Alcindor at UCLA at the end of the years ’60, up to the most famous, the recent example of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick who knelt during the anthem in 2016, sports figures who use the symbolism of the anthem and the flag to highlight that they represent a country that has failed to achieve its declared ideals of justice and that equal rights for all has proven to be a powerful, irresistible and lasting form of protest that constantly hits a nerve in the American collective consciousness.
Kaepernick’s protest was powerful enough for the kickback to actually end his playing career. The NFL has now admitted to having made a mistake in handling player protests, with Commissioner Roger Goodell saying in a statement: “we were wrong not to listen to NFL players previously and encourage everyone to speak and protest peacefully” .
What Apparently Goodell did not do, however, was to apologize to Kaepernick. Nor can it provide him with a time machine to restore what may have come from a career that once looked promising.
It seems highly unlikely that Kaepernick would have suffered the same harsh fate in today’s social climate. There has now been a real support base for the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, with a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation that found that “64% of Americans supported recent protests against police violence” and a Quinnipiac University poll showing that “67% of registered voters supported the protests in response to” the death of George Floyd by the police. “
Kaepernick was a true pioneer of modern times in using his platform as a professional athlete to peacefully protest for social justice, taking one knee at a time when, especially among American whites, there was much less support for athletes who protested during the hymn for changes to a structurally discriminatory system, possibly due to the poor understanding of the frequency and severity of racial police brutality and other injustices.
But if Kaepernick was four years early, former Denver Nuggets player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was 24 years ahead.
On March 12, 1996, after refusing to support the national anthem, Abdul-Rauf was suspended by then-NBA commissioner David Stern and fined $ 31,707 for the single game he missed.
A dynamic guard who played the first six years of his NBA career with the Nuggets, making the All-Rookie team in 1990-91, earning the league’s best player award in 1992-93 and becoming Denver’s absolute leader as a percentage of free throws at 91.6%, Abdul-Rauf subsequently compromised with the NBA in the form of standing while praying with his head bowed.
This decision allowed him to continue playing while he protested in a form that he and the NBA had deemed acceptable, but the damage to his career had already been done.
The Nuggets swapped him for the Sacramento Kings at the end of the 1995-96 season, and as his role and minutes progressively decreased over the next two years he was actually forced to leave the NBA, returning only to ride on the bench for the Vancouver Grizzlies. in 2000-2001.
Like Kaepernick with the NFL, neither the NBA nor the Denver Nuggets have ever formally made public apologies to Abdul-Rauf, although they now report support for Black Lives Matter and the rights of their players and other employees to express themselves freely.
This is a scar on the history of the Nuggets league and franchise that have never completely healed and hypocritically spoils their current efforts to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
Also, when asked by Time’s Sean Gregory if players could have knelt during the national anthem, Adam Silver avoided the question:
“Again, I don’t feel comfortable with the word” allow. “We have a rule in our books dating back to the early 1980s – it also precedes David Stern’s mandate as commissioner – which requires players to stand in line on attention during the national anthem. “
While Silver added, “I also understand the role of the protests and I think we will tackle that situation when it arises,” his initial response appears to be a doubling, rather than a willingness to reconsider, the anthem rules.
NBA players from the 22 teams that will participate in the restart of the season are about to make a series of sacrifices, giving up a wide range of freedoms they would normally enjoy while residing for up to three months in the Disney World “bubble”, depriving themselves the ability to live and spend time with families, wives, girlfriends and friends and literally put their lives in danger by playing a sport of heavy contact during a deadly pandemic.
In addition, many players have made it clear that they intend to use the restart of the season platform and the media attention it will attract, rather than distracting from the Black Lives Matter movement while Howard fears, doing whatever is in their power, not just turning on the spotlight. on the struggle for social justice, but to use the resources available to them to create change.
As basic but substantial reassurance for players who will not be punished or penalized for peacefully protesting, for the NBA canceling the requirement to resist during the anthem would be a change that would be fairly easy and painless compared to the immense difficulty that the players face their struggle to bring about significant transformations to the country’s devastating and profound racial injustices.
The league changes the rule of the hymn before players get into the stress and anxiety of life in the Orlando bubble could help them find at least a little more tranquility, and perhaps even gain more confidence that the NBA is truly, and not only aesthetically, on board with support by Black Lives Matter.
If it is true, as Silver said last year, that “the long-standing values of the NBA are to support freedom of expression and certainly freedom of expression by members of the NBA community”, then it meets a requirement from his book of the rules that has the sole function of limiting freedom of expression is literally the least it can do.
And since both a good faith show and simply the right thing to do, both the NBA and the Denver Nuggets should release the long-awaited formal and public apologies to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf for depriving him of not only his best career possible in basketball, but millions of potential dollars and the reputation he should have always had – not as someone who disrespected the flag of his country, but someone who was paying that flag a great honor by exercising his rights to fight for it in which he truly believed, which should live up to the high standards of equality and justice for which he stands.
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