Kieran Shannon: Informed athletes no longer willing to simply shut up and play

Sporting activism would be too late to prevent Donald Trump from getting into the White House but it would play its part in denying him a second term there

Rory McIlroy has changed his tune since playing a round of golf with Donald Trump in 2017. Following the appalling events from Capitol Hill last week, even golfing associations are trying to distance themselves from the US President. Photo: ClearSports Twitter

At the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, it’d be fair to say that several Irish golfers were hopelessly unaware of the influence they or any sportsperson could have on social and political matters.

Four long years ago next month, Rory McIlroy accepted an offer to play a round in West Palm Beach with the new occupant of the White House. After continuously spending his election campaign deriding Barack Obama for his occasional fondness to spoil a good walk and vowing that he himself would be too busy working for the American people to indulge in such a triviality, Trump immediately and unsurprisingly reversed that policy. While Obama had waited until three months after his inauguration to tee off, Trump’s round with McIlroy was his sixth in as many weeks. The way he rationalised it on the eve of his election, he’d make exceptions to play “with leaders of countries and people who can help us”.

At the time it was lost on McIlroy that he was helping Trump by subliminally legitimising him but he was far from alone in pleading political ignorance.

The following weekend Pádraig Harrington and Shane Lowry sat down in Los Angeles with Paul Kimmage for the Sunday Independent. Lowry confessed to having next to no interest in politics. Harrington revealed that he actually had a huge interest in such matters but felt that just because he could hit golf ball shouldn’t give him the right to stand on a big soapbox. 

“I don’t have to use it — and I don’t believe I should,” he’d say. No sportsperson should, he felt. “There are professors and educated people [who] should be given the soapbox, not me. But the problem is that the sportsperson will be listened to.”

To be fair to Harrington, he was only just out of step with the times. For most of the previous 40 years, athletes in America, either black or white, had little sense of political activism. In the case of the Iraq war, the NBA, which is so woke now, had only one outspoken opponent of the war, Steve Nash — a Canadian. 

In language that would be borrowed by other commentators over a decade later, Nash was duly slammed by Skip Bayless, now of Fox Sports News but then a newspaper columnist, who wrote that the Phoenix Suns guard should just “shut up and play”. Because for decades, from Jordan to Kobe and Tiger to Rory, that was how athletes looked at themselves too. This is America, man. We just wanna party, party for you. We just want the money, money just for you.

In 2016 though, that drastically changed, albeit without the likes of McIlroy and Harrington in their country clubs noticing. Events that year, just like in Washington last week, brought home for a LeBron James how he and his brothers and sisters “live in two Americas”, one in which black lives didn’t seem to matter and white privilege was rampant. A month prior to Colin Kaepernick taking the knee in a San Francisco 49ers pre-season game, James, along with fellow Team USA stars Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony appeared on the stage at the ESPY Awards and declared they were re-embracing the tradition Ali, Jim Brown, Bill Russell and others established in the 1960s.

“No more sitting back and being afraid of tackling and addressing political issues anymore,” Anthony would tweet to fellow athletes after five police officers were shot dead in Dallas. “We can’t worry about what endorsements we gonna lose or whose going to look at us crazy. Take Action. DEMAND CHANGE.”

Such activism would be too late to prevent Trump from getting into the White House but it would play its part in denying him a second term there.

This past summer NBA teams walked off the floor in their bubble in Orlando and threatened not to return for the season in protest to no charges being pressed against the Kenosha police officer that shot an unarmed Jacob Blake. But after going into conclave and seeking the counsel of one Barack Obama, they realised the power they had over their team owners (all of which are white, bar one Michael Jordan of the Charlotte Hornets) and the power those team owners had in their respective cities. 

By returning to play, the players were able to get those owners to pledge to convert 23 of the league’s 30 arenas into polling stations to foil Trump’s attempts to suppress and undermine in-person and mail-in voting.

And so they rocked and brought out the vote, with thousands of masked voters wrapping NBA arenas across the land, from Madison Square to the Spectrum Center in Jordan’s Charlotte. Have no doubt about it, several swing states went blue because of votes cast in NBA arenas like the Atlanta Hawks’ State Farm Arena.

But that wasn’t even the most impressive political intervention a group of professional basketballers had in Georgia or elsewhere. While they were playing in their own bubble in Florida over the summer, the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream protested after their one of their owners, Kelly Loeffler, the junior Republican US senator from Georgia, publicly disparaged the Black Lives Matter campaign and the WNBA’s support for it. In their next game her players and those of the opposing Phoenix Mercury took to the court for a nationally-televised game wearing black tee-shirts endorsing her Democratic opponent Raphael Warnock.

At the time Warnock, a leader of the Atlanta Baptist church were Martin Luther King once pastored, was only a measly 9% in the polls. But the more the Dream kept mentioning and endorsing him, the more his poll ratings increased. Last Wednesday Trump and his army of domestic terrorists weren’t just up in arms that he’d lost the presidency; they’d have also been incensed that the Republican party was about to lose control of the Senate with the news that Warnock defeated Loeffler in the Georgia senate runoff to become the first black Democrat senator from the state. Just like their NBA brethren, the Storm had rocked the vote.

Since the appalling events from Capitol Hill last week, even golf is trying to distance itself from Trump, with the British Open and US PGA organisers reversing their decision to host their tournaments at Trump-owned courses. And to be fair to a certain player from the north, they’re well behind Rory McIlroy who on numerous occasions has expressed his disapproval of Trump and how he didn’t behave “like a leader should act”.

And he isn’t the only Irish golfer who got it wrong back in early 2017 when it came to American politics. After the events of the past four years but especially this past one, Harrington will have come to realise the political influence and merits of the informed athlete.

Thankfully they didn’t — and won’t — just shut up and play and dribble.