This is why athletes can’t just ‘stick to sports’

We saw the power sports has on Wednesday.

It wasn’t lost on anyone that August 26, 2020 marked the four-year anniversary of Colin Kaepernick sitting during the national anthem, for the first time, before a San Francisco 49ers preseason game.

Asked to explain his decision, he would tell a reporter, “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Four years later to the day, the Milwaukee Bucks decided to boycott their playoff game after the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Wisconsin, and other athletes and teams all over the sports world joined them. That first message about why Kaepernick protested still stands — just replace “football” with “sports.” The part about bodies in the street, horrifyingly, is still true.

There are those out there who still don’t understand what any of this has to do with sports. It’s gotten to the point where it’s exhausting to repeat it over and over, but for those still confused, this is it: sports is an escape, a way to take a few hours off from the doldrums of everyday life and sometimes the horrors that we face.

From Kaepernick to what happened Wednesday night, these protests are meant to disrupt that escape. You want to sit back and enjoy a game without thinking about the real world for a little while? Nope. And it’s because those that athletes and citizens everywhere are fighting for can’t escape from the systemic racism that continues to plague us and the shootings that continue.

Stop talking and listen to the words of current and former Black athletes — Chris Webber, Dominic Smith, Robert Horry, even Kenny Smith spoke volumes by walking off the Inside the NBA set — to hear what their experience has been like as human beings who live with this every day.

That’s why the Bucks and other NBA players boycotted. The messages on the backs of their jerseys, the kneeling and the statements to reporters after games about justice for Breonna Taylor weren’t getting the attention they should have.

This was necessary in the light of the Blake shooting. The focus is — for now — off of Luka Doncic’s ascent and LeBron James making another run. Because we love our sports so much, athletes have the power and platform to get our attention.

Bucks vet George Hill said earlier in the week that “We shouldn’t have even come to this damn place.” You could go back to Kyrie Irving and other players concerned that a restart would take away from the conversations about social justice.

But look at what just happened. Coming to the bubble and playing all the way into the postseason set up for an unprecedented moment in our country’s history. The boycotts’ effectiveness in at least getting us to have this conversation is monumental. The fact that there were important games to interrupt in the first place strangely helped.

There are also lots of people citing Sean Doolittle in this context, and rightly so. The Washington Nationals pitcher expressed his concerns in July about the return of baseball and other sports in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and added this:

“Sports are like the reward of a functional society, and we’re trying to just bring it back, even though we’ve taken none of the steps to flatten the curve, whatever you want to say.”

Think about the “functional society” when we speak about racial equality. Why should we have sports when society isn’t functioning?

It remains to be seen if this will lead to the cancellation of the rest of the 2020 NBA season or that in other leagues. But Wednesday reminded us that athletes can’t just “shut up and dribble.” The stakes are too great not to use the platform to force us to pay attention and make change.

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