https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/...0191019-yhx337tiofenzgo7qx6yjmcmf4-story.html
LeBron took a stand. For Nike.
By MIKE LUPICA
The NBA regular season begins on Tuesday night, at which point the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, and everybody else associated with professional basketball hopes they can start talking about Giannis and the Lakers and the new-look Clips and not about China. Because what the league has discovered, thanks to one tweet about Hong Kong and human rights from Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, is that being a global brand can brand you in a whole bunch of ways you never intended when all you wanted to do was make lots more money.
Nobody understands that better right now than LeBron James, who makes a lot of money ($30 million or so) every year from Nike, which makes a vulgar amount of money ($6 billion a year according to a story Jeff Zillgitt and Mark Medina wrote in USA Today) selling its product in China. LeBron tried to weigh in on China this week, and mostly stuck one of his fancy Nike sneakers in his mouth. Bottom line? James was protecting his.
James, of course, has done amazing work away from the court in an American life that has had him famous since he was 14. Among other things he’s started a school in his hometown of Akron that has changed lives. But when he finally weighed in on Morey this week, he called him “misinformed.” Maybe LeBron thought he sounded tough. Instead he looked as weak as the weakest shot on the playground.
And once he started, he couldn’t stop digging. You kept waiting for him to ask Anthony Davis to help him.
“When we talk about the political side, I think it’s a very delicate situation, a very sensitive situation,” he continued. “And for me personally, if any you guys know me or always cover me, you guys know when I speak about something, I always speak about something I’m very knowledgeable about, something that hits home for me, something I’m very passionate about. And I felt like with this particular situation, not only was I not informed enough about, I just felt like it was something that my teammates or my organization had enough to talk about it at that time, and we still feel the same way.”
So apparently, LeBron decided that even though he wasn’t informed enough to speak about the situation between protesters in Hong Kong fighting a proposed extradition law, he knew enough about the situation to say that Morey was misinformed. Got it.
He eventually added this comment, which you have to say didn’t help his circumstances very much:
“We do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative things that come with that too. I don’t think every issue should be everybody’s problem."
Well, yeah. There can be a lot of negative things that come with freedom of speech. He could probably ask his Nike teammate Colin Kaepernick, who ended his own pro football career because of his own freedom of speech, and because he exercised a profoundly American right to protest injustice, the same way the protesters in Hong Kong believe they are. You know how it all worked out for Kaepernick. He lost out on the millions he could have continued to make as an NFL quarterback, but at least made some of it back from, wait for it, Nike.
Yup. Nike embraced Kaepernick by making him the face of an ad campaign that featured this slogan: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
LeBron isn’t the only one who wants it both ways. So does his sneaker company. They get good and woke when it suits them.
In the aftermath of a situation in China that Adam Silver says has already cost his league a lot of money, James looked like he believed passionately in protecting his own business interests and his own brand in the lucrative Chinese government. And, for the first time in what has been a generally impeccable public life, looked as if he were talking out of both sides of his mouth.
And when the blowback began, the guy still wouldn’t stop talking. He was still trying to explain himself and, in the process, continuing to make things worse. Here’s a tweet he eventually sent out to the world, as if he thought he’d somehow earned the last word:
“Let me clear up the confusion. I do not believe there was any consideration for the consequences and ramifications of the tweet. I’m not discussing the substance. Others can talk about that.”
But he was talking about the substance of Morey’s tweet, seven words -- “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong” – that rocked the NBA world and rocked LeBron James’ world at the same time. And you still wonder, now that all the NBA players who played preseason games this year in Hong Kong are back home and getting ready to start the season, just what he and all the other prominent voices in the league found so complicated about Hong Kong, and about China’s miserable record on human rights; and about that country’s cockeyed idea about what freedom of speech actually means.
You know what it means to the Chinese government? It means that it thinks that it has the right to tell the NBA to fire Morey because of what he actually believes, whether he took down the tweet or not. Whether he has tried to walk away from himself and from this controversy or not. Morey’s a smart guy. Morey saw what happened to Kaepernick. He saw that Kaepernick’s beliefs, about political issues in this country, absolutely cost him his career. He probably doesn’t want the same to happen to him.
LeBron has always been smart and tough and good when it comes to speaking to racial injustice. “At the end of the day,” he said once, “when I decided I was going to speak up and not giving a f--- about the backlash or if it affects me, my whole mindset was it’s not about me.”
He has often acted like the most woke player in the most woke league we’ve got. But he needs to wake up now. If not, he needs to shut up about China once and for all.
LeBron took a stand. For Nike.
By MIKE LUPICA
The NBA regular season begins on Tuesday night, at which point the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, and everybody else associated with professional basketball hopes they can start talking about Giannis and the Lakers and the new-look Clips and not about China. Because what the league has discovered, thanks to one tweet about Hong Kong and human rights from Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, is that being a global brand can brand you in a whole bunch of ways you never intended when all you wanted to do was make lots more money.
Nobody understands that better right now than LeBron James, who makes a lot of money ($30 million or so) every year from Nike, which makes a vulgar amount of money ($6 billion a year according to a story Jeff Zillgitt and Mark Medina wrote in USA Today) selling its product in China. LeBron tried to weigh in on China this week, and mostly stuck one of his fancy Nike sneakers in his mouth. Bottom line? James was protecting his.
James, of course, has done amazing work away from the court in an American life that has had him famous since he was 14. Among other things he’s started a school in his hometown of Akron that has changed lives. But when he finally weighed in on Morey this week, he called him “misinformed.” Maybe LeBron thought he sounded tough. Instead he looked as weak as the weakest shot on the playground.
And once he started, he couldn’t stop digging. You kept waiting for him to ask Anthony Davis to help him.
“When we talk about the political side, I think it’s a very delicate situation, a very sensitive situation,” he continued. “And for me personally, if any you guys know me or always cover me, you guys know when I speak about something, I always speak about something I’m very knowledgeable about, something that hits home for me, something I’m very passionate about. And I felt like with this particular situation, not only was I not informed enough about, I just felt like it was something that my teammates or my organization had enough to talk about it at that time, and we still feel the same way.”
So apparently, LeBron decided that even though he wasn’t informed enough to speak about the situation between protesters in Hong Kong fighting a proposed extradition law, he knew enough about the situation to say that Morey was misinformed. Got it.
He eventually added this comment, which you have to say didn’t help his circumstances very much:
“We do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative things that come with that too. I don’t think every issue should be everybody’s problem."
Well, yeah. There can be a lot of negative things that come with freedom of speech. He could probably ask his Nike teammate Colin Kaepernick, who ended his own pro football career because of his own freedom of speech, and because he exercised a profoundly American right to protest injustice, the same way the protesters in Hong Kong believe they are. You know how it all worked out for Kaepernick. He lost out on the millions he could have continued to make as an NFL quarterback, but at least made some of it back from, wait for it, Nike.
Yup. Nike embraced Kaepernick by making him the face of an ad campaign that featured this slogan: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
LeBron isn’t the only one who wants it both ways. So does his sneaker company. They get good and woke when it suits them.
In the aftermath of a situation in China that Adam Silver says has already cost his league a lot of money, James looked like he believed passionately in protecting his own business interests and his own brand in the lucrative Chinese government. And, for the first time in what has been a generally impeccable public life, looked as if he were talking out of both sides of his mouth.
And when the blowback began, the guy still wouldn’t stop talking. He was still trying to explain himself and, in the process, continuing to make things worse. Here’s a tweet he eventually sent out to the world, as if he thought he’d somehow earned the last word:
“Let me clear up the confusion. I do not believe there was any consideration for the consequences and ramifications of the tweet. I’m not discussing the substance. Others can talk about that.”
But he was talking about the substance of Morey’s tweet, seven words -- “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong” – that rocked the NBA world and rocked LeBron James’ world at the same time. And you still wonder, now that all the NBA players who played preseason games this year in Hong Kong are back home and getting ready to start the season, just what he and all the other prominent voices in the league found so complicated about Hong Kong, and about China’s miserable record on human rights; and about that country’s cockeyed idea about what freedom of speech actually means.
You know what it means to the Chinese government? It means that it thinks that it has the right to tell the NBA to fire Morey because of what he actually believes, whether he took down the tweet or not. Whether he has tried to walk away from himself and from this controversy or not. Morey’s a smart guy. Morey saw what happened to Kaepernick. He saw that Kaepernick’s beliefs, about political issues in this country, absolutely cost him his career. He probably doesn’t want the same to happen to him.
LeBron has always been smart and tough and good when it comes to speaking to racial injustice. “At the end of the day,” he said once, “when I decided I was going to speak up and not giving a f--- about the backlash or if it affects me, my whole mindset was it’s not about me.”
He has often acted like the most woke player in the most woke league we’ve got. But he needs to wake up now. If not, he needs to shut up about China once and for all.
