John Branch’s ostensible sports column on the front of Thursday’s New York Times Sports section welcomed the return of pro basketball, “Unlike Most Leagues, the N.B.A. Gets Real”:
Maybe you can’t wait to see Kawhi Leonard as a Clipper, Anthony Davis as a Laker or Russell Westbrook as a Rocket. Maybe you can’t wait to see Zion Williamson in New Orleans, Kyrie Irving in Brooklyn or the Warriors back in The City.
That’s all good. But the best thing about the start of the N.B.A. season -- or just the preseason, which began this week -- is that it thrusts the league back into the conversation.
Not just about sports, but about the connection sports have to everything else, from politics to fashion, civil rights to gun rights.
(Note: A longer, less loose version went into print Thursday. The following are excerpts from the online version.)
No league dives into the real issues of today so naturally and so readily. This does not feel like a time to just stick to sports. Thankfully, the N.B.A. is where meaningful conversations reside.
Branch was being slippery here -- “meaningful conversations” is code for “liberal political activism” (click “expand”):
All that can wait. At the start of the season, when plenty of people are excited to see LeBron James and Stephen Curry play, I’m excited to hear what they’ll say.
(....)
The N.B.A. is comfortable being connected. Opinions count. Expression is (mostly) encouraged. Politics is not filtered through political correctness, not parsed by focus groups or marketing departments.
Kerr, whose father was assassinated by gunmen while serving as president of American University in Beirut, does not keep his gun-control beliefs to himself. Popovich fearlessly chimes in on politics. James and others expressed support for the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence. Silver’s first big act as commissioner was to remove an owner, Donald Sterling, for racist behavior.
(....)
In so many sports, players fill the role of performing automaton. (The N.F.L. has 1,700 players on active rosters -- roughly four times that of the N.B.A. but a fraction of the personalities.) Coaches are one-dimensional clones unable, or unallowed, to convey thoughts on anything unrelated to the physical act of playing the last game, or the next one.
Speaking of coaches, there is no mention of Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll’s enthusiasm for 9-11-truther conspiracy theories. Perhaps being a “one-dimensional clone” has its advantages:
Shoutout to all the exceptions, across all the sports, like chatty baseball managers and the United States women’s national soccer team, which proved that joy can be a key ingredient to winning, and that equal rights is a fight worth taking public. And to the W.N.B.A. players who actively supported the Black Lives Matter movement in 2016, months before their male counterparts in the N.B.A.
Branch got in a sneaky crack at the New England Patriots, considered by some to be the conservatives' team, with quarterback Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick seen as supporting Trump. Again, Branch covers himself by not making the politics explicit (click “expand”):
So many places in sports want to be taken seriously while avoiding adult conversations. It’s the Patriot Way, dismissing anything uncomfortable with a Brady smile or a Belichick scowl. Let the office send out a statement vetted by the public-relations staff. We have a game to play.
That is part of the appeal, for some, to make sports an obtuse distraction from reality, but any suggestion that sports used to be uncoupled from culture and politics is myth. “Stick to sports” is the cry of the lout, accented by incuriosity and indifference.
The N.F.L.? There have been more meaningful discussions about Colin Kaepernick among N.B.A. executives, coaches and players than anything we’ve heard within the N.F.L. in the three years that Kaepernick has been out of football.
(....)
The N.B.A. isn’t perfect. Owners like Sterling, issues like a racist dress code, even the clumsy unease of players and teams fully engaging in anthem protests that they purported to support are still visible in the rearview mirror. Questions of equal pay and support for W.N.B.A. players sit on the horizon, among other things, a reflection of the women’s soccer team. Those issues might fill another newsletter.
The unspoken theme is that only liberal expression is acceptable. At least that has been the paper’s standard when it comes to outspoken conservative athletes.
Athletes who would rather stick to sports are anathema to Branch. In September 2018, he criticized golfer Tiger Woods for not coming out against President Trump.
