Blake is grateful NBA players treated him as if his life mattered and that he wasn’t some wild beast that needed to be put down. He urged athletes to continue using their voices. “It’s gonna be heard, you have a platform. You have followers, you have fans. So people are going to hear you. They’re going to listen and they care what you guys think,” he told me. “That’s power, they made the entire world look at me through their eyes. At the end of the day, these athletes were speaking up because I am a human being.”