[On December 15th,
1891, James
Naismith invented the game of basketball. So for the sport’s 125th
birthday, I’ll BasketballStudy five histories, figures, and stories connected
to one of our most enduring pasttimes. Add your responses and thoughts for a
slam-dunk crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]
On what’s
crucial, and what’s complicated, about the superstar’s public activisms.
I’ve written
before in this space about athlete activists: a couple
posts on the University
of Missouri football players who protested the university’s president; and this
recent post on San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national
anthem protest (in the context of the 1968 Mexico City protest). Without
intending the slightest bit of disrespect to those athletes, I would argue that
they were relatively unknown on the national level prior to their famous
protests: certainly no individual Missouri football player from that group had
achieved any national prominence (nor have any even in the aftermath of their
controversy); and while Kaepernick was already well-known to serious NFL fans,
I think it’s fair to say that he had never reached a level of wide cultural
recognition or fame (and was by the time his protests started a back-up
quarterback). That doesn’t lessen either the bravery or the potential effects
of their protests, but it nonetheless means that those protests were responded
to and have functioned differently than would have been the case if they had
been undertaken by more already-prominent athletes.
I’m sure you
could make the case for other figures, particularly given the worldwide
prominence of soccer and thus of athletes like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo,
but I believe any short list of the most famous athletes in the world, circa
December 2016, would have to include LeBron
James. James has been famous since his high school days, and that fame has
only grown over his long and groundbreaking NBA career. And for at least the
last few years of that career, James has undertaken a series of very public,
and controversial, activist efforts: from his leading
the Miami Heat in taking a 2012 photo to honor Trayvon Martin and protest
his murder; to his recent campaign
stops and speeches in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Whatever your feelings on LeBron (up here in Massachusetts he has been persona
non grata for a long time, but full disclosure, I’m a fan), these public
stances have represented a striking and inspiring risk for an athlete who was,
by the time he undertook them, one of the most recognizable and marketable brands
in sports (for a contrasting and I would argue more typical case, note Cam
Newton’s complete lack of willingness to engage with #BlackLivesMatter). While
I could imagine cynical readings of LeBron’s activist efforts, to my mind they
reflect a superstar athlete willing to take risks in support of what he
believes.
So I’m a serious
fan of LeBron’s activism efforts—but as I said, I’m also a fan of LeBron
himself. And therein lies a potential complication—like many prominent athletes
(indeed, like nearly all of them in this age of hot takes and internet trolling
and hyper-polarization), LeBron
is a polarizing figure, one who has inspired as much derision and hate as
admiration and accolades in his career to date. Our 2016 politics are already
plenty polarized in any case, of course, but I don’t know that adding athletes
or celebrities who bring their own polarizing effects into the mix necessarily
helps. Again, I’m not suggesting that he shouldn’t pursue these activisms, but
am rather just wondering if there might be an unexpected and ironic effect of
pushing people away from just as much as it might draw people into certain
efforts and causes. That doesn’t mean that only universally beloved folks
should enter political conversations, of course—not only because that’s a very
short list these days (Tom Hanks comes to mind, and even he
has faced backlash for his vocal opposition to Donald Trump), but also
because politics isn’t and shouldn’t be a safe or muted space. But it’s just
one more layer of complexity to this compelling and controversial side to a
superstar like LeBron.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other basketball stories or histories you’d share for
the weekend post?
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