John Riordan on Kyrie Irving: Where does selfishness end and the burden of influence begin?
SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets is a believer in the concept of a flat earth. He is one of a number of NBA players who remain vaccine hesitant. Picutre: Getty
The NBAâs pre-season gets going Sunday and we really shouldnât care about a few exhibition games.
For once, the NBA bosses on Fifth Avenue really wish we didnât.
âLook at the delights on offer elsewhere!â I imagine them urging us.
The NFL campaign is taking shape really nicely as it rolls through the opening quarter of its longest schedule ever. They added an extra game for each team - a first change to their playing structure in 44 years.
Baseball, diminished though it is from its once dominant hold over the American psyche, can still enjoy its traditionally elevated role in October as the World Series lies in wait on the other side of exciting one-off knockouts and bruising best-of fives and sevens.
More than any other live sport offering, College Football is basking in the reopening of packed out arenas and is buoyed by some decent PR around slightly better conditions for some of their top players and teams.
Even the far off delights of the Premier League and the Champions League are enjoying greater prominence than ever.
After a car crash week of bad press, this is probably the one year which basketballâs top brass would have happily accepted those other market realities. No news would be better news until after the conference permutations begin to matter (usually at some point between Christmas Day and the Super Bowl).
Instead of slinking quietly into the regular season while playing second, third or fourth fiddle, instead the anti-vaxxers lurking with intent among their popular stars and superstars have ensured that the media roadshows scheduled this past week were content machines.
Itâs been fascinating to watch - in a grim way - and itâs a good reminder of the factors that fuel the NBA. This is a relatively tiny pool of players - compared with the other big leagues - and their bigger personalities are more recognizable and more marketable on a much more global scale.
They were a powerful and effective force during the summer of 2020 during which they all gathered in a bubble and coordinated perfectly on their endorsement of Black Lives Matter.
So when a few dozen of them express reluctance about the Covid vaccine and cite inane excuses for holding back, they lend powerful validation to a widening fault line in American society. Their words and actions go further than, for example, the NFLâs Washington Football Team.
This latter one fascinated me, more than any other hesitancy story. Washingtonâs coach Ron Rivera - a cancer survivor - gave up the battle internally and took to the microphones to express his frustration at his own squad of playersâ dismal vaccination rates.
Nothing else seemed to be working. Not his own heightened risk due to his all too recent illness nor the fact that his entire coaching staff followed his lead.
He brought in a vaccination expert, Harvard immunologist Dr Kizzmekia S Corbett, to try and reason with his players. She helped invent the Moderna vaccine and she is black, like the majority of NFL players and the majority of Washington Football Team players who would, he hoped, listen to her if not to him. That helped lift things a little but itâs never enough, of course.
"I hope we can get to these guys, get them to understand really it's not just for them, but it's for the people around them," the frustrated Rivera told reporters in August.
And then he gave up and he switched the focus to the task at hand: winning football games. You wonât be surprised to learn that their winning rate is somehow even lower than their vaccination rate and their sole victory was an extremely narrow one against arguably the leagueâs worst team, the New York Giants.
Dr Corbettâs presence, meanwhile, was felt this week. Back during the Spring, as part of her campaign to enlighten this beleaguered nation as to the necessity of the vaccines, she held a high profile Q&A with NBA all-time great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
This happened during a period of time when there was a decent degree of empathy and understanding for the reluctance of people of colour to trust the vaccine. Cultural memory and suspicion were inevitable after decades of medical mistreatment (among other mistreatments). It led to a proactive campaign to incorporate into the discourse iconic black voices, such as that of the Milwaukee Bucks and LA Lakers legend.
Abdul-Jabbar was only too happy to play the voice of reason for the dozens of modern day NBAers who are vocal in their opposition.
He wholeheartedly waded in via Matt Sullivan's brilliant Rolling Stone magazine account of the pained negotiations between the players union and the NBA which stretched back over six weeks. This very 2021 mini-saga showed a power dynamic which sadly tilted towards the loud minority unwilling to play their part by refusing to avail of the scientific miracle most of us have basically taken for granted as safe and easy.
âThe NBA should insist that all players and staff are vaccinated or remove them from the team,â Abdul-Jabbar told Sullivan. âThere is no room for players who are willing to risk the health and lives of their teammates, the staff and the fans simply because they are unable to grasp the seriousness of the situation or do the necessary research. What I find especially disingenuous about the vaccine deniers is their arrogance at disbelieving immunology and other medical experts. Yet, if their child was sick or they themselves needed emergency medical treatment, how quickly would they do exactly what those same experts told them to do?âÂ
If you ever look for Abdul-Jabbar video highlights, youâll inevitably land first and foremost on his famous âskyhookâ - a unique basketball shot which - like that quote I lifted from Rolling Stone - flows beautifully and is impossible to counter.
Instead of using his size to crash in on the hoop, he would instead shimmy backwards from his closest defender and in one fluid motion, hook the ball from behind his body over the pointlessly outstretched arms of the closest opponent, easing it perfectly into the basket. Similar to how he puts vaccine deniers back in their place with words like those above.
But some contests are unwinnable.
Sure enough, several big names rolled out Monday and Tuesday to face the music and they were ready and media-trained to within an inch of their lives. The common fallback is that itâs private to them and even the pro vaxxers like LeBron James and Damian Lillard defended the right of their colleagues to choose.
Of course, the reality of all of this is that the alleged privacy of their health decisions is in direct contrast to the global nature of their profiles. Where does selfishness end and the burden of influence begin?
âLiving in this public sphere, thereâs a lot of questions about whatâs going on in the world of Kyrie,â Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets told reporters from his home on Monday, âand I would love to just keep that private and handle that the right way with my team and go forward with a plan.âÂ
It would be remiss of me not to note a very obvious gag here - Irving is infamously a believer in the concept of a flat earth so the fact that he acknowledged the spherical nature of his fame was progress.
For the sake of balance, itâs worth looking at the words of Lillard, the Portland Trail Blazers star guard who is wildly popular with young fans for all the right reasons.
âThey presented the opportunity [to get vaccinated] and I said, âCan I bring my family, too?ââ he told reporters at the Blazers media day. âAnd they said, âyeah,â and that was it.âÂ
Pretty simple. And what about the common refrain from so many who continuously tell us they have more research to do?
âAs a kid, I had to get shots my whole life. Before I went to college, I had to get shots. And, I couldnât tell you one thing about any of them.âÂ
On Wednesday evening, the NBA announced that unvaccinated NBA players who do not comply with local vaccination mandates will not be paid for the games they miss.
Meanwhile, over at the WNBA, where the season began earlier in the summer, the female basketballers were able to proudly boast of a 99% vaccination rate - technically fully vaccinated.
If you want or need to work at an arena where basketball takes place, you need to be vaccinated. This is very much an indoor sport after all. When the New York Knicks hosted a playoff game at a packed out Madison Square Garden for the first time in 10 years back in May, I sat among vaccinated fans and it was the most exhilarating live sporting occasion Iâd experienced in a long time.
New York saw sense early because we got hit so hard. And like San Francisco, it is illegal to play or simply be indoors at an arena if youâre not vaccinated. Irving may not be permitted to play at home in Brooklyn and Andrew Wiggins could face a similar fate for the Golden State Warriors.
Maybe these reluctant NBA players will get there eventually. Maybe their views - however they were planted - will evolve as sense chips away at doubt. But how many NBA fans will die in the meantime and how many will usurp patients with other ailments at hospitals, denying the compliant majority other necessary treatments while the uncertainty festers?
