It’s not too late for the 26 players taking the court in Atlanta Sunday night for the 2021 NBA All-Star festivities. Really, it’s not.
They still have time to go with the first instinct many of them had a month ago, when this half-baked All-Star idea first surfaced.
They can go with the instinct they had last fall, the one they followed through on. The one that started with a handful of players in two leagues, then spread to the teams, the entire league and ultimately the entire sports world. The one that shook the world beyond sports to its very foundations – a tremor that’s still resonating in the very city and state that became the unfortunate home to Sunday’s misguided game.
The instinct was to not play.
To stay home. Pull a no-show. To walk out. To go on strike, for what was right, on behalf of themselves and the people still struggling through a year-long pandemic with no clear end in sight. For a public that needs a lot more than a night of televised entertainment and distraction and a lot less of crowds gathering indoors in winter for a meaningless exhibition in the middle of a season that the virus has unilaterally rearranged at will.
Yes, they had the right instinct – as right as it was back in August, in the bubble, when the players in the NBA and the WNBA said that enough was enough.
It was the right instinct in early February when, even as the league and the players’ union were ironing out details, the faces of the sport said, basically, nope and why.
LeBron James was not the only player to openly object to the idea. Kawhi Leonard, Giannis Antetokoumpo and Kevin Durant made their views clear as well. Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, objected too, which ordinarily would be all the gravitas needed to call the whole thing off.
Because LeBron is LeBron, his voice reverberated the loudest.
He will turn the volume up again Sunday as he narrates a PSA by “More Than a Vote,” the athlete-and-celebrity-driven voting rights organization he spearheaded beginning last year during the contentious national elections.
The spot will air during the TV broadcast – which happens to be the 56th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Ala., and the first since then-protester John Lewis passed away. The ad will feature LeBron’s voice, but also the image of, among others, the most prominent voter-advocacy leader in the country, Georgia’s Stacey Abrams.
Just as with the bubble last season, the platform that gave rise to so much skepticism about the NBA’s financial motives in the middle of a nationwide crisis will be put to practical, effective use by the players.
LeBron and his fellow players are still going to play, though.
The decision doesn’t exactly invalidate the instinct they felt, it just fails to capitalize on it the way it could. It doesn’t flex the muscle players are often late in discovering and it doesn’t fully leverage the power of their position.
Know what does all that?
Walking out.
Player Power
They know it, we know it and you know it, simply because they did it nearly six months ago. The irony of this utterly avoidable gathering in this Covid-wracked city and state is that the story of the athlete rebellion of 2020 comes full circle on the weekend the athletes put on a show in Atlanta.
Over the last six months the NBA and WNBA players made voter registration a plank of both their platform and their negotiation to return to finish the playoffs. League cities, including Atlanta, opened their arenas to registration drives and voting. Players on the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream took it a step further and staged an open revolt against Black Lives Matter opponent, team co-owner and Georgia Senator, Kelly Loeffler.
They threw their support behind Rev. Raphael Warnock and helped him take Loeffler’s Senate seat in January. Loeffler and her partners soon after sold the team to a group led by one of the aforementioned rebellious players, Renee Montgomery. And on the afternoon before All-Star, the new Democratic Senate majority pushed through a new Covid relief bill after an ugly, drawn-out partisan fight.
That’s still only one battle won.
Georgia’s Republican legislators have spent essentially all of 2021 proposing one voter-suppression attempt after another. It’s a national trend: by one count in late February, there have been 253 bills introduced in 43 states trying to halt the voter surge that tilted the balance of power everywhere up to the White House. Let’s not forget, members of the GOP helped fan the flames of the attempted coup of the federal government.
In opposition, the “More Than a Vote” ad does far more than check another community-service box on LeBron’s image-polishing to-do list. It’s life-and-death for American democracy and the full participation of every citizen, regardless of how Black, loud and inconvenient they are.
Since America will be watching on Sunday night, the stars they tuned in to see plan to give them something special to watch. More than the game, more than the dunk contest and three-point competition, even more than the tributes to historically Black colleges they plan. (Why the NBA and the players can’t honor and fundraise for these institutions without a potential superspreader event in a majority-Black city is another story entirely.)
What you wish the brightest stars in the sports-and-entertainment galaxy had remembered, though, is that they never had more of a grip on America’s attention than they did last August, when they chose to give the nation no basketball to watch at all.
We’ll return when we’re ready, they declared. Here’s what you need to think about until we do. No, better yet, here’s what you need to actually do. When you get that together, we’ll be over here, not shutting up and not dribbling.
It was the right instinct then. It was right a month ago. It’s right today.
And it’s not too late.
