After a watershed day in sports — in American history — what comes next?
Wednesday was a watershed day in the history of sports in America. The show did not go on.
It’s hard to find parallels for what happened in the NBA and WNBA, and to a lesser extent in MLS and MLB. It’s harder to imagine what might come next, whether among professional athletes or college football players. Already, there are small reverberations: Boston College decided not to practice Thursday.
Even John Carlos and Tommie Smith, as potent and powerful as their protest was, ran their race. Same with Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid and the NFL players who took a knee. Elgin Baylor boycotted a game in 1959 to protest the Minnesota Lakers’ Jim Crow accommodations in West Virginia; Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics did the same in 1961 in Kentucky. Muhammad Ali didn’t fight for three years after he refused to fight in Vietnam.
Those were all one person or a few people. This was an entire league of players, entire leagues of players, choosing not to play — in the playoffs! — because the weight of injustice had become too much to bear.
It was as unprecedented as it was powerful, the willingness to give up something those athletes love for something those athletes believe.
This is the utmost they can do to get your attention, which only underlines how much it matters to them.
It also happened in an atmosphere of understanding their predecessors would not recognize. Carlos and Smith, who had to be smuggled out of Mexico City by Duke track coach Al Buehler, were vilified at the time and paid the price for many years, until history finally recognized them as icons. Same with Ali, who by the time he lit the Olympic torch in Atlanta was almost universally beloved, but at the time of his draft protest was still referred to as “Cassius Clay” by many hateful observers many years after he changed his name.
Certainly there were detractors and critics Wednesday, but it’s a far different climate now, one where Kenny Smith feels comfortable walking off the TNT set in solidarity, one where Josh Hader — who once had to apologize for racist, sexist and homophobic tweets in his past — doesn’t hesitate to join his Milwaukee Brewers teammates in their protest.
While the NBA in particular wrestles with the implications and where to go next, attention inevitably will turn to other sports, and eventually the college football players who took such a principled stand earlier in this pandemic. The overnight coming together of the Pac-12 players with Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence and Darien Rencher crystallized several disparate threads of protest into one.
Many of their football- and COVID-related stipulations have since been met, from eligibility waivers to opt-out protections. But there has yet to be movement toward a unifying association of college players — tough to do, admittedly, in the midst of August preseason practices — and the Pac-12 players demanded a much broader list of reforms than what eventually came out of the joint statement with the let-us-play faction.
That list included cutting coach and administrator salaries as well as facility spending, tapping into endowments to save sports at places like Stanford, finding ways to address racial injustice in society, post-college medical insurance, the sharing of conference revenues with athletes and other expansions of athletes’ rights currently restricted by NCAA rules.
Did that activism play a role in the Pac-12’s decision to postpone its season, along with the Big Ten, while the ACC and SEC and Big 12 play on? Correlation does not imply causation, but it’s an interesting question to ponder.
But the Pac-12 players were, unquestionably, more aligned with the statements pro athletes are making now, after Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back at point-blank range by a police officer in Wisconsin, the breaking point after a summer that started with a fatal knee on George Floyd’s neck and all of the protests that followed.
As long as the games are still going to be played, football players in the ACC and SEC and Big 12 will have the same power as their NBA and WNBA peers, should they choose to use it.
They lack a union or other players’ organization, but the wildcat strike in the NBA was entirely organic, starting within the Milwaukee Bucks’ locker room and spreading to other teams. The same could happen at the college level. It already has, in a way, this summer. Syracuse players refused to practice over what they believed were inadequate COVID-19 testing protocols. Deciding not to play after insisting #WeWantToPlay would have an explosive impact.
It has never happened before, but what happened Wednesday never happened before, either. The NBA has to figure out where it goes from here. It will not be alone in that.
This story was originally published August 27, 2020 at 1:24 PM.
