Republicans Buy Sneakers Too
– By Howard Sierer –
The most-watched basketball game of all time was game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals, played on June 14, 1998, between the visiting Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz in Salt Lake City’s Delta Center. The game is best known for Bulls superstar Michael Jordan hitting a jump shot with 5.2 seconds remaining in the 4th quarter to win the game and complete the Bull’s sixth NBA championship in eight years.
Fast forward to the 2020 NBA Finals, in which LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Miami Heat in another game six to win the championship. Far from setting records in terms of viewership, it was the least-watched NBA Finals game in decades, with only 7.4 million viewers. In other words, the NBA lost 80% of its audience during a time when the population of the U.S. grew by 30%.
The game of basketball itself remains very popular, especially women’s basketball recently propelled by Caitlin Clark. So what explains the NBA’s decline? Arguably, the major factor is that the NBA as a league has embraced woke ideology.
In 2020, the league began painting the slogan “Black Lives Matter” on its basketball courts. Then, players in both the NBA and WNBA began replacing the names on their jerseys with left-wing political slogans. Over a relatively short period of time, professional basketball identified itself with the belief that America is “systemically racist,” rotten to the core.
In parallel, when it was not busy trash-talking America, the NBA was cozying up to communist China. The league groveled when the Chinese complained about an NBA executive who called them out for their treatment of Hong Kong. Per Daniel Victor of the New York Times, “The NBA is widely seen as the most permissive of the major U.S. sports leagues when it comes to freewheeling speech, allowing its athletes and other representatives to speak out on thorny political matters without fear of retribution. Unless, apparently, the autocratic leaders of a lucrative market raise a stink.”
Buying into the whole woke agenda, the NBA supports the radical transgender movement in the U.S. The league pulled its 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte, North Carolina because the state legislature had passed a bill to protect women by keeping men out of their bathrooms.
Yet the NBA continues to hold games in Middle Eastern countries where the mere fact of being gay is a crime punishable by death. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, talking out of the other side of his mouth, offers a half-hearted explanation: “We continue to believe that using sports, using basketball, we can improve people’s lives through sport and that, as Nelson Mandela famously said, sport can change the world. I think that we bring our games all over the world.”
In response to this anti-American wokeness and the league’s double standards, a substantial number of Americans have tuned-out professional basketball. In an expanding market, the NBA’s television viewership has “deep dived” and its last several years have been its least-watched in the last 30 years.
The NBA’s woke fixation has spilled over to some in college basketball. Dawn Staley coached South Carolina’s 2024 women’s team to the NCAA championship. Asked if she supported biological men competing in women’s sports, she said, “If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports or vice versa, you should be able to play.” She said this despite previously thanking a men’s intramural team that her women’s team practices against. She acknowledges that the men are bigger, stronger, and faster than her women.
As Nelson Mandela said, sports can change the world. But institutions, organizations and businesses like sports can best change the world by striving for excellence in their respective fields and avoiding enmeshing themselves in contentious social policy disputes. Bud Light and Target Stores learned this lesson to their financial dismay.
Twenty-six years after his 1998 championship, Jordan remains the most beloved and respected basketball player in history, arguably the best of all time. Nike’s Air Jordan basketball shoes outsell all others combined, year after year. Jordan was once asked why he hasn’t used his popularity to be more outspoken about politics. His reply: “Republicans buy sneakers too.”
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