What would MLK think of Kobe vs. LeBron?
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Before the Lakers vs. Cavaliers smackdown, everyone involved struck all the appropriate notes when speaking about the historic inauguration in Washington Tuesday, and about the significance of Monday, Jan. 19 -- Martin Luther King Day.
It’s ‘not even about playing basketball on this day,’ said LeBron James, standing near his locker, surrounded by an army of reporters. King was a ‘guy who [saw] the future before the future happened.’
There are few people on the planet more aware of the way sports stars are deified these days than LeBron James, but he seemed genuinely humble as he sought to add some perspective. There’s ‘no leader in the NBA or any sport who compares to MLK,’ he emphatically stated.
All of this got me thinking about how Dr. King’s legacy has played out in sports. Of course, were he alive and at Staples tonight, Dr. King would be appropriately pleased about seeing the way African American athletes have been completely accepted by society at large.
When his life was cut short in 1968, this wasn’t necessarily the case. A pro basketball team starting five African Americans, even four, would practically be national news.
A black head coach in the NBA like Cleveland’s Mike Brown? The year King was killed, in all of American pro sport, only Celtics great Bill Russell had ever reached that level. And that year, the notion of black stars like Russell being used, LeBron-like, as national pitchmen for big-time ad campaigns would have been laughable. That didn’t really happen until Michael Jordan.
Yes, Dr. King would be extremely happy were he watching this great game, but in my view he’d be just as pleased by the wave of internationalism we’re witnessing in sports -- and in America, particularly what we are seeing in basketball. The Cavaliers’ starting five included Serbia’s Sasha Pavlovic and Brazil’s Anderson Varejao. Usually, it includes Zydrunas Ilgauskas, from Lithuania, but he’s injured.
The Lakers started Serbian Vlade Radmanovic and Spaniard Pau Gasol. That’s 40% of the starters in this game born and bred outside America.
Much is made of the NBA’s being an African American game, but with each passing year it becomes a world game, and with each passing year the international players are becoming bigger and bigger stars.
And this is where we get to Dr. King again, because it should never be forgotten that while he naturally focused his energies on the plight of the African Americans during the 1950s and ‘60s, his vision was always broader than that. He spoke of world equality, studied Gandhi and other great thinkers from far beyond these shores, and referred to the arc of justice in universal terms.
He frequently reminded us that all citizens of the world are connected in very real ways. That is part of the reason he strongly opposed the Vietnam War. For King, equality and freedom were much more than a matter of black and white.
I just watched Sasha Vujacic nail a three-pointer and lope down the court basking in a huge ovation. If Dr. King were sitting next to me I have a hunch he’d be smiling broadly.
--Kurt Streeter
