Now is not the time to "stick to basketball."
mollyhmorrison.substack.com
I was proud to be an NBA fan in 2020, when the Milwaukee Bucks walked out of a playoff game against the Orlando Magic days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin.
United, they prepared a statement and read it aloud, demanding accountability from Milwaukee officials and addressing the larger need for reform. Isolated from the world in a bubble in Orlando, they chose to take a stand.
The NBA postponed the rest of the games that day. Other leagues followed.
Their protest came during a period of profound unrest. George Floyd had been murdered earlier that year. Jacob Blake was the latest Black man subjected to police brutality.
Blake was shot seven times in the back by a police officer, in front of his three children. It was all on video. That wasn’t enough.
Today, our social media feeds are filled with footage of masked federal agents murdering Alex Pretti in the street, a week after Renee Good was murdered in her car. Both incidents occurred in Minnesota, the same state where George Floyd was murdered six years earlier. The government lies to us, insisting the man who helplessly crumpled to the ground posed a threat that needed to be extinguished.
Their paranoia reeks of hypocrisy. An armed citizen is a threat, they say. In 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to Wisconsin with an assault rifle and shot three people, killing two, at protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake. He became a hero to far-right politicians, eventually posing for smiling photos in an arranged meeting with Donald Trump.
Alex Pretti was holding a cell phone. He stepped in to defend a woman. He was beaten and killed by ICE agents, then labeled a domestic terrorist.
Tyrese Haliburton was the first current NBA player to address it. His superstar status makes his voice louder.
“Alex Pretti was murdered.”
Four words. An acknowledgement. Infinitely better than silence.
Faceless trolls rush in to urge him and anyone who agrees to “stick to basketball,” doing the government’s bidding for them.
They rely on us to stick to basketball, to get consumed by distractions, wrapping ourselves in them like a cozy blanket. They want players to serve as voiceless props — entertainers who keep us occupied — because they understand the threat their voices pose. They belittle them because they’re afraid of them.
Politics are ingrained in this league, baked into the soil that allowed it to grow. You can try to cut the roots, but you can never dig up the ground.
Earl Lloyd became the first Black man to play in the NBA in 1950. His footprints pressed into the court as the world wrestled with the idea that someone who looked different from those in power could be seen as equal. Even as Black players were allowed on the court, they were treated as lesser than, told to suppress their flair so the white players could shine. In many cities, they had to stay in different hotels due to segregation laws.
Sports are political.
When Laura Ingraham told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble” after he criticized Donald Trump, he reclaimed the phrase as the title of a docuseries that traced the long, uncomfortable history of politics in sports. It was powerful and important.
We are living in an era of distraction. Billionaires control our algorithms, desperately trying to manage what we see and what we don’t. People in power depend on our ability to look away so they don’t have to be held accountable.
I loathe how conspiratorial that sounds. But I’m watching it happen in real time.
Twitter used to be a place where news could be digested quickly and efficiently. Now it’s flooded with propaganda and bots, a hellish hodgepodge of noise designed to exhaust us into apathy.
I refuse to delete it — admittedly in large part because I’m attached to it — but also because I know that’s what the people in power want. They want us to retreat into smaller echo chambers so they can spread their lies more easily. I don’t tweet about politics on BlueSky. I do it on Twitter, a place where opposition is guaranteed, and where my platform is larger.
Of course, nobody in this space has a larger platform than the players themselves.
That’s why American NBA players speaking right now matters. It is okay to ask those who can disrupt systems — who can cause chaos simply by speaking — to use their voices. It has worked before.
I am proud to be a fan of a league that is political. I also recognize the contradictions: men’s sports diluted by violence excused through the absence of convictions, legal proceedings discussed in the same breath as injury timelines and comeback narratives. It’s easy to overlook what happened in the shadows when the truth is buried.
Now the violence is on our phones, staring back at us. We cannot hide from it.
Sports are an escape. At their most vital, they are also a mirror.