Oklahoma City Basketballspieler Chris Paul
Photo: dpa / Kim Klement
Chris Paul remained polite. Oklahoma basketball star didn’t cut off television reporter Stephanie Ready directly after beating Houston. But he really didn’t want to answer your question about how his team managed to equalize the NBA round of 16 series to 2-2. “I don’t know, it’s all going to work,” he said, only to talk about what really moved him that Monday evening. “I sympathize with Jacob Blake and his family. We came here a few months ago to play, but also to denounce social injustice. For us blacks, what happens in the country is just not right. The game is well and good. But voting is more important. “
Player boycott game
Since the NBA ended its season in a tournament bubble in Florida at the end of July, there have been many anti-racism campaigns there. Almost all players kneel by the anthem. They wear “Black Lives Matter” shirts and instead of their names have words such as “Equal Rights” in their respective mother tongue above their number. Now that with the start of the playoff the focus should be on sport again, athletes and coaches are talking more about racist police violence in the USA. The trigger this time was a video with police officers who shot the African American Jacob Blake seven times in the back in Wisconsin while his children had to watch everything. Utah’s Donovan Mitchell also began his press conference by talking about something “bigger than a game. We just don’t feel safe. It’s inexcusable, ”he said.
Fred VanVleet, builder of the Toronto Raptors then even brought a boycott into play: “I was looking forward to the quarter-finals against Boston. But it feels like nothing’s going to change again. ”They knew that police violence doesn’t just stop, whether you gamble or not. “But asking whether we play at all puts pressure on us,” says VanVleet. At some point it is necessary to actually risk something. He thinks just continuing to play basketball is a sedative pill.
When VanVleet and his colleagues from Toronto were still debating whether they would play their first quarter-final game against the Boston Celtics on Thursday, another team made nails: “The Milwaukee Bucks have decided to boycott their game,” he always tweeted a lot well-informed ESPN expert Adrian Wojnarowski shortly before the fifth round of 16 game of the Bucks against Orlando. Milwaukee is less than an hour’s drive from Kenosha, where Jacob Blake was shot. It is the first boycott of a team in one of the major US professional leagues. A few hours later, the other two games of the evening between Oklahoma City and Houston, as well as the Los Angeles Lakers and Portland, were canceled because the players did not want to play. It was not initially clear when the games would be rescheduled.
Not only in the NBA, some athletes hardly talk about the sport anymore. Berlin basketball player Satou Sabally, who made her WNBA debut a few weeks ago, refused to answer questions about her game on Tuesday evening, even though she had just set a new personal record with 28 points. “We can’t enjoy this right now. There are a lot of things happening in this country that we have to focus on, «said the black German national player from the Dallas Wings. She is also currently playing in a “corona bubble”, but would rather go demonstrating, as she tweeted on Wednesday morning.
The NFL’s Detroit Lions football pros canceled their training Tuesday and instead gathered around a board that read, “We will not be silent” and “The world cannot just go on.” Defense specialist Duron Harmon said that the team decided together “that football is no longer important today. We have a platform where we can not only raise awareness but also bring about change. “St. Louis baseball player Jack Flaherty played on Monday, but said afterwards,” Just because the sport is back can the debate go on Racism does not end. “
Frustration with Republican politicians
But most haunting were the words of Doc Rivers. The coach of the Los Angeles Clippers from the NBA referred on Tuesday to the current Republican party conference of US President Donald Trump: “They only spread fear,” said Rivers. In fact, no party conference speaker has spoken of Jacob Blake. Instead, the flower warns that blacks will move to the white suburbs and bring violence with them. “They talk about fear. We are not allowed to live in good areas. And it’s us who are going to be shot, ”Rivers said before tears choked his voice. “My father was a cop. I believe in good cops. But they must finally protect us all, ”Rivers continued. “What white father has to tell his son to be careful when the police stop him?”
This article has been updated. In the original version, no boycott of games in the NBA had yet been decided.
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