Sports Biblio Digest, 10.13.19: The NBA’s Moral Cowardice in China
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Curt Flood; The Adventures of Astroman; Gerrit Cole; Ancient Baseball; Simone Biles; Montreal’s Olympic Stadium Architect; IOC’s Transgender Dilemma; The Ugly Side of the Beautiful Game; The Two-Hour Marathon Man; Joe Frazier’s Southern Roots
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The National Basketball Association’s carefully cultivated reputation as a progressive, tolerant and diverse organization has won it many plaudits from people who painfully care about such things.
The league worked out a deal with players allowing them to make Black Lives Matter-style statements before games but not take a knee, avoiding a practice that embroiled the National Football League.
When the North Carolina legislature passed a transgender bathroom law decried as discriminatory, the NBA promptly moved its scheduled All-Star game out of Charlotte.
And the pro hoops circuit consistently gets high merit points for its hiring practices, including several full-time female assistants recruited from the WNBA and women’s college coaching ranks.
While much of this is to be commended, there’s a heavy dose of virtue-signaling going on here, which has made it easy for woke sports journalists to use the NBA’s hammer to whack away against the NFL anvil.
But when it came to a much more significant test of living up to what commissioner Adam Silver has called “NBA values,” the increasingly global basketball brand tragically capitulated this week, as a new season looms.
After Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey issued a Tweet of support for Hong Kong freedom protestors, the Chinese government acted swiftly. The Chinese Basketball League, led by former Rockets star Yao Ming, nixed its dealings with the Houston franchise. Exhibition games in China pitting NBA teams against Chinese teams were pulled from television.
Silver tried to have it both ways, saying the NBA supported Morey’s right to speak his mind (his Tweet was quickly deleted), but trying to assuage the angry Chinese. New Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta, whose longstanding business dealings in China began as a restaurateur, threw Morey under the bus by reflexively insisting his GM didn’t speak for the club.
It got progressively worse. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, took the fifth when asked about the China issue, saying he wasn’t as well-versed on what he called a complicated matter.
If that wasn’t enough of a cop out, how about what happened to NBA fans attending preseason games at home? On consecutive nights in different towns, some were escorted out of arenas after bringing signs in support of Hong Kong protesters.
These weren’t just any American cities, but Philadelphia, the home of the Liberty Bell and the birthplace of our founding documents, and Washington, the nation’s capital.
But wait, there’s more: Back in China, a CNN reporter tried to ask Rockets’ star James Harden—who had apologized for what Morey, his boss, Tweeted—what he thought of the China issue. A Rockets’ staffer blocked him from answering the question.
The next day, the NBA cancelled all media availability in China as it wrapped up what turned out to be a trainwreck of a tour.
The NBA is hardly the only business, government or other entity to learn the hard way about China’s hardball tactics for doing business. It’s either their way, or no way.
Hollywood, Silicon Valley and other powerful entities have succumbed to Beijing’s wishes on bended knee in order to stay in the country.
But if the NBA hadn’t waltzed into Asia with such a celebrated aura of enlightenment, and with Silver as an overwhelming media favorite, it wouldn’t be taken to the woodshed as it has.
Naturally, media types who get defensive about fans imploring them to “stick to sports” found great irony in all this.
But they’re smugly missing the point. I don’t think most people care what Kerr, LeBron James or anybody in the NBA thinks about the weeks of protests in Hong Kong, and China’s repressive regime any more than their genuflecting on why they don’t want to visit the White House.
What’s startling is that these self-appointed arbiters of being on the righteous side of important issues bailed out—they were muzzled, most likely—when it came to making a simple statement in defense of democracy, and against a government that kills, tortures and imprisons those who speak out.
Free speech is easy when it comes to lambasting Trump, who typically called Kerr a “little boy” about the China fiasco. Kerr had an eloquent response to that, but then offered a false equivalence about China’s repression, saying “People in China didn't ask me about, you know, people owning AR-15s and mowing each other down in a mall. I wasn't asked that question."
That’s appalling and disappointing coming from a thoughtful individual who’s paid the price for repression. His father, a professor and president of American University in Beirut, was murdered by Islamic extremists during the Lebanese civil war in 1984, when Kerr was playing at the University of Arizona.
More than anyone, Kerr's would have been a perfect voice to defy not only Chinese authoritarianism, but the NBA’s increasingly tortured position.
It’s all about business, and the years and billions of dollars the NBA has invested in the world’s largest consumer market matters above all. It’s clear that, despite some suggestions, the NBA needs China more than China needs the NBA.
Four decades ago, the beginning of trade with China was promised as a way to democratize a Communist nation.
But as China marks 70 years since the rise of Mao Tse-tung, Chinese totalitarianism continues to strengthen its grip on not only 1.4 billion people, but thousands of global “brands” the more they engage with the dictatorship.
The NBA, proud of its humane track record, has been badly exposed for not espousing its vaunted values when it mattered the most.
A Few Good Reads
On Saturday in Vienna, reigning Olympic marathon champion and current world record holder Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya ran a marathon in under two hours, the first such time ever recorded, and amid worldwide hype and euphoria. It won’t count as an official record, since Kipchoge was the only runner—the event was staged specifically as a time trial for him to achieve this objective—and he was aided by professional pace runners who protected him from headwinds. Kipchoge also was wearing a pair of new Nike shoes made especially for him that’s raised controversy;
American gymnast Simone Biles won the vault at the world championships in Stuttgart on Saturday, her 23rd world medal. That ties her with Vitaly Scherbo of Belarus at the top of the all-time list, and she should have the individual record to herself as the meet ends Sunday;
The International Olympic Committee’s new guidelines on transgender participation may be scrapped for next summer’s Games in Tokyo because of scientific disagreements. The bar was lowered drastically in 2016, an expedient act of sheer madness. Even if female-identified biological males meet the new lowered testosterone levels, it’s a threshold higher than the top end of the female T scale, and they retain other permanent biological advantages that come with puberty. I’m not a scientist, but elevating gender identity above sex would wipe out many gains for females in sports and make women’s sports pointless;
It’s been 50 years since Curt Flood’s unsuccessful legal challenge to the baseball reserve clause, and Bill Rhoden thinks the former Cardinals outfielder deserves proper recognition for sacrificing his career;
After flying out of ballparks all summer, there are suspicions that the baseballs being used in the postseason are different, namely, not nearly as potent;
The Houston Astros are playing the New York Yankees in the American League Championship series after winning a majors-best 107 games. Part of Astros’ lore includes the story of a fan named Astroman, said to have lived for 10 days atop the roof of the Astrodome in 1979, waiting for a pennant. It’s a tale Rustin Dodd of The Athletic tried to track down to find out whether it’s even true;
Astros’ starter Gerrit Cole has been virtually unhittable in the postseason, including a brilliant Game 5 performance this week to eliminate the Tampa Bay Rays. At Five Thirty Eight, Travis Sawchik unravels Cole’s ascent, as he reworked his approach to improving the simplest pitch, his fastball, with an explanation that reads to me like—ahem—astrophysics;
Still more about the Black Sox, and the continuing centenary, from baseball historian John Thorn in The New York Times, writing that what’s most notable about the scandal is that it “was a cataclysmic event in the game’s history not because it was the first time anyone had cheated, but because it was the first time the public knew about it." PBS NewsHour talks to Jacob Pomrenke of SABR, head of the Black Sox study group, who explains many recent revelations counter the myths of “Eight Men Out,” the Eliot Asinof book and 1988 hit film directed by John Sayles;
With (legalized) sports gambling making a renaissance in America, Steve Wulf wonders whether another Black Sox scandal could occur, and muses about the irony of Major League Baseball’s approval of wagering as it resists calls to consider reinstating not only Black Sox figures like Shoeless Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver but also an admitted gambler in Pete Rose;
Poet and performance artist Mikhail Horowitz has penned a new, slender volume called “Ancient Baseball” that was inspired by the author’s growing distaste for the major leagues;
Catcher Rick Dempsey enjoyed a solid career in the big leagues, but his high school friend and teammate Jim Loll, who was drafted the Dodgers, struck out in the minor leagues, then descended into a life of heroin addiction that ultimately killed him. Given his own struggles to succeed, and similar problems in his own family, Dempsey remains deeply introspective today;
Curt Smith, an historian of baseball on radio and television and author of “The Presidents and the Pastime,” has begun a series at Sports Broadcast Journal to expand further about the topic, starting with Barack Obama.
Sports Book News
Early reviews are favorable for sports historian David Goldblatt’s latest book, “The Age of Football,” which plumbs populist fervor connected to the game and against the backdrop of economic globalism. It’s a rather grim scenario in Goldblatt’s telling (reviews in New Statesman and The Guardian), with autocrats like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán linking their ambitions to the fate of the domestic game:
“This is not a book for the armchair reader of either football or global politics, but it is an irrefutable argument against anyone who might still suggest that either is only a game.”
Now Hear This
From “Only a Game,” how Joe Frazier fought his way from a childhood in rural South Carolina to become the world boxing heavyweight champion. Biographer Mark Kram Jr. says his subject was:
“Someone who understood that being the champion meant more than just holding a belt in your hand. It meant that you had a voice. And, even if you did not use that voice in the public square, you could use it privately and in ways that helped people along the way. He understood that."
Passings
As far as modernist sports architecture goes, the stadium Roger Taillibert designed for the 1976 Montreal Olympics remains notable and even useful, if not universally admired. Taillibert, who died this week at the age of 93, installed a 175-foot tower next to the stadium with a retractable roof that was the home for many years for the long-departed Expos, as well as the CFL’s Alouettes and the Impact of Major League Soccer. He was given full freedom by Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau, who lauded the French architect’s work as “poems in concrete.”
Other reviews of the stadium were not as charitable, especially due to astronomical cost overruns, and it continues to need substantial repairs.
“Some people say he was stubborn. I call that determination,” former mayor Denis Coderre said in defense of Taillibert. “Some people talk about a white elephant. I say, no! It’s probably one of the most magnificent pieces of architecture that defines what Montreal is all about.”
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 182, published Oct. 13, 2019.
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