SPEAK UP AND DRIBBLE

               In this extraordinary time of illness and anger, a couple of statements stand out. One was by the conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, who in an interview a couple of years ago told the basketball star LeBron James to “shut up and dribble” after he’d voiced criticism of President Trump. The other, just last week, was from Roger Goodell, commissioner of the National Football League, our most-buttoned-down sports entity. Videotaped from his basement and looking penitent, he said the league now encourages its players to speak out on public issues that concern them.

               Those pronouncements represent the two ends of the spectrum of athlete activism in America, or the lack thereof. The subject has been with us for many years, but never as vividly as these past few weeks during the protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. As the turnouts at the nationwide rallies have shown, the vented outrage isn’t strictly a black-white matter, but they looked for leadership from African-American communities. Well-known athletes are among the most-visible members of these. 

               It’s long been apparent that the role of social activist doesn’t fit well with many sports standouts. Excellence in sports can be an all-consuming proposition, beginning very young and thriving in a hot-house environment that all but excludes other interests. In team sports unity is all, so subjects that may interfere with it are all but banned in locker-room talk, by tacit understanding rather than executive fiat.

 Over the years a few top athletes have ventured into social-political scrums, but mostly after their playing-field careers have ended. The basketball player Kareem-Abdul Jabbar and the football great Jim Brown come to mind in that respect, as do the tennis players Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova. A handful of athletes have had careers in electoral politics after they’d hung ‘em up, with ex-footballer Jack Kemp, the 1996 Republican vice-presidential candidate, and old-Knick Bill Bradley, a three-term U.S. senator, the most-prominent recent examples.

The dominant model, however, has been one of public neutrality, especially when commercial interests also are involved. Basketballer Michael Jordan, the best athlete and sports-gear model of his or, maybe, any era, steered clear of political frays with the memorable line “Republican buy sneakers, too,” and Tiger Woods, golf’s undisputed king as the centuries turned, followed a similar path. The boxing champion Muhammad Ali, a uniquely global sports figure, was not only apolitical but also antipolitical. He was an adherent of a religious sect that frowned on civic engagement and considered white people to be devils, although in later life he modified his views and came to be regarded as a benign figure.

The pressure to change has come from the racial nature of many current national issues and the left-right political divide that has been exacerbated by the Trump presidency. African Americans make up about two-thirds of the players in the National Football League and about three-fourths of those in the National Basketball Association, making those entities politically relevant whether they want to be or not. When the cameras roll, or when a microphone is thrust faceward, comment has become increasingly imperative. Noted Danny Trevathan, a Chicago Bears’ linebacker, after the football team’s meeting on the recent demonstrations, “you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable these days.”

That the main focus of the protests is police brutality gives it a special sports turn. The issue has a long history in the U.S. but of late it’s been linked in the public mind with the football player Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling posture during the playing of the National Anthem before games in the NFL 2016 season.  Kaepernick’s action was aimed at calling attention to the police shooting deaths on consecutive days that July of the unarmed black men Alton Sterling (in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) and Philandro Castile (in the St. Anthony suburb of Minneapolis), but the backlash led by President Trump, abetted by the NFL, turned it into a debate over respect for the anthem. Kaepernick, a San Francisco Forty Niner quarterback, lost his job in the aftermath, and has yet to be hired by any NFL team.  Whether or not he plays again will be a test of the league’s professed new attitude toward outspokenness.

The recent protests have dwarfed those that went before for a couple of reasons. One is the drumbeat of black lives lost in police hands, lately etched into painful memory by video recordings. The other was the school shutdowns caused by the coronavirus outbreak, which left millions of high-school or college-aged students free to march and march again.  The sheer weight of the protests seems to have created the sort of impetus for action that heretofore has been lacking.

As a young newspaper reporter I wrote that something or other “remains to be seen.” The phrase was exorcised by an editor who told me that just about everything does. That seems especially pertinent to the prospects for success of efforts to effect long-term changes in police conduct. New Federal or state legislation might tilt the seesaw in favor of change, but American law enforcement is mostly a local matter, with some 800,000 officers employed by about 1,800 different police or sheriff’s departments. Each has its own history, culture and leadership that will have to be addressed, one at a time. 

County sheriffs are elected, making them pretty much laws unto themselves. In Maricopa County Arizona, which includes Phoenix, Joe Arpaio was elected to six four-year terms in the office despite thumbing his nose at directives to stop things like racial profiling for arrests and immigration “sweeps” that netted citizens as well as the undocumented. He was voted out (in 2016) only after a Federal contempt-of-court conviction and the county’s bills for lost lawsuits over jailhouse deaths and injuries topped $100 million. Overcoming the likes of him in many places will require the kind of stamina the best of athletes possess on a physical level. Free to do so, maybe our sports heroes can help out there.