Defiance In Sports

Political defiance in sports is not a new concept. Professionals in sports have used their fame and fortune to make humanitarian statements throughout recent history. So, why get upset if football players want to kneel at a patriotic part of a game? If the issue changes to disrespecting our flag then get after the retail stores that profit from making flag underwear and any other accessory in our flag stars and stripes. That is really offensive. Especially our President selling USA hats for personal profit on his website.

Most Americans just want people to keep politics out of sports. The rivalry should only be in the choices we make as to which teem to root for. We shouldn’t be fighting for our points of view at a sports game. Yet there is a long history of American athletes not only fighting for their sport but for a cause as well. For Colin Kaepernick, his fight  began a year ago. He was one quarterback in San Francisco who decided to use his fame to try to draw attention to criminal justice reform and police brutality. What that has to do with our National Anthem or football, I don’t know but it certainly drew the attention of our nation to the debate.

Now he has not been signed for any team to play for yet he is the face for all the protesting team members from all teams protesting in the National Football League. The issue of race relations has a history in sports going back to 70 years ago   when Jackie Robinson was the first black baseball professional to play for the then Brooklyn Dodgers. In the 1968 Summer Olympics United States Track Medalists Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists during the National Anthem as they accepted their Medals. Kareem Abdul Jabba, a basketball great received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 expressed his concern that the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act still has not taken hold with many violations of the law. Life for many black Americans is still a struggle in his opinion.

Athletes have always used their platforms to speak out about injustice. In 1967 there was Mohamed Ali who used his boxing fame of being the Heavyweight Champion of the World status to protest about fighting in a war that he was against because of his religious beliefs. Now activism is Ali’s greatest legacy. Ali was a superstar and that status gave him the power to speak out and be heard Fame makes you get noticed no matter the subject. Because Ali refused to go to war he was stripped of his title and was prosecuted. It wasn’t until 1971 till the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in his favor.

Billy Jean King was a Tennis professional Athlete and became a leader in the women’s movement for recognition.  She advocated for equal rights for women in any profession. In women’s basketball the professional women’s basketball team in the WMBA, Minnesota Lynx, wore tee shirts as their uniform that said Black Lives Matter at a press conference. They said that it is a human issue matter that we all need to speak out about for change. Jackie Robinson was clear on the emotion when he wrote in his memoir, I Never Had It Made “There I was the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Today I look back on that opening game of my first world series. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947 and at my birth in 1919. I know that I never had it made.”

We all need to respect our flag mostly because it represents the countless lives that died so that we can still raise the thing on our land. We also need to respect the thoughts and feelings of those who feel that this nation has betrayed their basic human rights simply because they see a dark color of skin in the mirror or being a woman in a so called man’s world. We must tolerate everyone’s feelings in this error when nothing much has changed to make these issues better for all Americans yet.