I feel bad for all of the “stick to sports” guys.
All they wanted to do was watch baseball players hit dingers, basketball stars throw fundamentally sound bounce passes and football players make literally mind-blowing tackles without having to think about “politics.”
I get it. Sports are their escape from the “real world” — the day-to-day drudgery of working at the mill, mowing the lawn and posting videos on Facebook.
But then, about a year ago, this guy Colin Kaepernick comes along and quietly sits for the U.S. national anthem at several football games before someone finally notices and a reporter asks him about it. Kaepernick, disturbed by several cases of unarmed black men being killed with no repercussions, says he is protesting the oppression of people of colour in America and ongoing police brutality. He immediately becomes a villain to some and a hero to others, and the rest, as they say, is minor history.
Or it probably would have been minor history save for the intervention last week of President Drunk Uncle. Despite the fact that, you know, Kaepernick has been effectively blackballed by the NFL — he remains unsigned despite showing enough talent to at least be a backup in one of the toughest positions in all of sports — Trumpy decided to use Kaepernick as a punching bag at a recent rally in Alabama. The very, very presidential president said that NFL owners should respond to protesting players by saying, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired. He’s fired!”
Somehow, shockingly, the players didn’t obey the very, very powerful president, with hundreds joining in protests in one form or another over the weekend. None were fired.
Trump stuck to sports later that weekend, disinviting NBA superstar Steph Curry from a trip to the White House to commemorate the championship win for the Golden State Warriors. Many athletes responded to the president’s behaviour with varying critiques ranging from the thoughtful to the exasperated to the angry, although superstar Lebron James threw down the hardest dunk simply by calling Trump “U bum.”
Anyway, it seems like no one for the foreseeable future is in any way going to simply “stick to sports.” Donald Trump certainly won’t shut up about sports, politics and protests — he’s been tweeting about it all week. When the president spends more time criticizing black athletes quietly kneeling than he did white supremacists running over people with cars, those athletes are going to respond, and many other people are going to want to talk about it too.
So all of the guys who constantly try to shut down adult conversations about anything deeper than Tom Brady’s blue eyes with that phrase “stick to sports” are out of luck — no one is listening. With sports and politics now firmly intertwined, maybe the “stick to sports” crew needs to find other, less powerful people they can try to shout down.
Wherever the “stick to sports” guys end up now that they’ve been forced to leave their favourite teams behind, I hope they find peace. I do feel bad for them, completely unable to take just a few minutes to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, to contemplate what life is like for a person of colour, even a famous one, who has led a very different existence than them. To consider that it would take a lot of courage to stand up — or kneel down — for something you believe in, a greater good for yourself and those less fortunate, even knowing that you may lose endorsement money, your job, even face threats from the president of the United States. Stick to sports? That game is over.
Andy Prest is the sports editor of the North Shore News.
aprest@nsnews.com • @Sports_Andy
