If Trump Wins, Athletes Might Just Stop Playing

Oh no please don’t go

I forgot that the NBA pussies shut down their Dribble Ball games for a few days after Jacob Blake got shot fighting with cops while attempting to kidnap small kids. A true hero.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/if-trump-wins-the-election-athletes-might-just-stop-playing.html

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a relatively high-level sports executive about the election, which is to say we were discussing something terrible Donald Trump had said or done. We agreed that Trump was likely to lose. “But he could always still win — even Nate Silver says that,” I remarked.

The executive then said something that stunned me, though the more and more I think about it, the more sense it makes. “If Trump wins, or if he refuses to concede, I’m telling you right now: There won’t be any sports for a month,” he said. “Maybe more. These kids just won’t stand for it.”

Of all the seismic sports stories during this constantly erupting year, nothing was more potentially revolutionary than the week players just stopped playing. It began when the Milwaukee Bucks decided to boycott a playoff game they were about to play after the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha police officers back in August. (What they were technically doing was striking, but the world seems to have collectively agreed to call it a boycott, so I’ll do the same here.) The players were specific and focused in their demands, explicitly asking the Wisconsin state legislature “to reconvene after months of inaction and take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform.” The boycott’s scope quickly expanded to include other teams in the NBA (all games for that day and the next two days were canceled) and, remarkably, other sports, including the NHL, WNBA, and even Major League Baseball. The message was clear: The league-branded #BLM and “It Takes All of Us” slogans were not enough to meet this historic moment. The players demanded action.

The thing is, though, they didn’t really end up with much. Bucks players got the Wisconsin state legislature to convene, but zero Republican senators showed up, so the whole thing was a bit of a bust. (And by then the team was back on the court, anyway.) Some players secured commitments from team owners to use their arenas as early voting sites, but while that’s been a success in some places (such as Atlanta, where Hawks coach Lloyd Pierce has been personally ushering voters through the line), the plan has been thwarted in other areas by local Republican officials — in Miami’s case, the mayor. And the NFL, the league whose players started the whole trend toward activism with Colin Kaepernick’s protest, has been nearly politics-free since the season began, much to the frustration of many players.