Athletes & Politics

From the New Yorker -

THE POLITICAL ATHLETE: THEN AND NOW
By Hua Hsu

In January, Haymarket Books published “Long Shot,” the autobiography of the former N.B.A. player and “freedom fighter” Craig Hodges. Hodges was one of the finest three-point shooters of his era, playing in the N.B.A. for ten years and winning two titles with the Chicago Bulls. He was also one of the most politically outspoken players the league’s ever seen, a locker-room agitator, proselytizing to teammates and staff on behalf of grassroots political movements. And, at a time when off-court grievances were rarely aired in public, Hodges was unrelenting in his criticisms of millionaire athletes who didn’t give back to their communities. “How much money did we make here last night?” he wondered aloud to a reporter during the 1992 N.B.A. Finals. “How many lives will it change?” He went on to accuse his teammate, Michael Jordan, of “bailing out” when the superstar was asked his thoughts on the recent Los Angeles riots.

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Athletes have always been political. But until recently they rarely possessed the means to explain themselves. Where Hodges’s generation worked hard to ingratiate themselves with the American mainstream, today’s athletes possess a relative freedom when it comes to speaking their minds, taking risky political stands, or acting with a kind of blunt directness. It’s what makes today’s players seem so different: their capacity to share more in a late-night Instagram post than a decade of carefully stage-managed, Nike-approved Jordan documentaries. Maybe the difference between then and now is just an instinctive awareness that everything is political. The game resists our desire for it to be an escape from the rest of life, where the rules can seem arbitrary and unpredictable, and there can be one winner to every ninety-nine who have lost.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-political-athlete-then-and-now