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    Riots at Indonesian Soccer Match Leave Several Fans Dead

    After the home team lost, fans rushed the field and were confronted by security officers, who used tear gas that left many struggling to breathe.SYDNEY, Australia — Several people were killed Saturday night after a professional soccer match in Malang, Indonesia, led to riots at the stadium and tear gas being fired into tightly packed crowds by the police, according to league officials and local news reports.The match between Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya took place at the Kanjuruhan Stadium. After Arema lost 3-2 on its home field, dozens of fans rushed the field.The Times of Indonesia reported that security officers tried to keep the crowd at bay by hitting and kicking supporters. As fights broke out, the authorities fired bursts of tear gas onto the field and into the stands. One video from the scene showed fans running away from clouds of tear gas on the field. Local news outlets said thousands of fans struggled to breathe and several eventually fainted.League officials said the riots caused several deaths, but it was not immediately clear how many. Initial reports from the stadium estimated that there had been dozens of deaths, but that could not be independently confirmed.The league immediately suspended play for at least a week.“We are concerned and deeply regret this incident,” said Akhmad Hadian Lukita, president director of PT Liga Indonesia Baru, known as LIB. “We share our condolences and hopefully this will be a valuable lesson for all of us.”Soccer violence has long been a problem for Indonesia. Violent, often deadly rivalries between major teams are common. Some teams even have fan clubs with so-called commanders, who lead armies of supporters to matches across Indonesia. Flares are often thrown on the field and riot police are a regular presence at many matches.Since the 1990s, dozens of fans have been killed in soccer-related violence. After Saturday’s match, those numbers will grow once again. More

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    Iran Soccer Stars Speak Out on Protests; Group Urges FIFA Ban

    Some of the country’s most famous players have expressed support for street protests over the death of a young woman. On Thursday, an activist group went further: It asked FIFA to bar Iran from the World Cup.One of the most beloved players in Iran’s soccer history had his family home raided by the authorities after speaking out against the government. At least two other well-known players have been arrested and detained for lending support to the protests that have roiled Iran since the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, on Sept. 16.And six weeks before the World Cup in Qatar, the Iranian national team’s star forward has suggested that he and his teammates are subject to what is in effect a gag order, warned that even commenting on the protests might cost them their places on the team. Unable to speak publicly, Iran’s players prepared for their final tuneup game this week in Austria with what amounted to a silent protest instead, covering their jerseys in black jackets during the national anthem.Now, a group that has long campaigned for women and girls to be allowed into stadiums to watch soccer in Iran has urged the game’s global governing body, FIFA, to intervene. In a letter to the soccer body’s president on Thursday, the group called on FIFA to throw Iran’s team out of the World Cup for a “blatant violation” of soccer’s rules on governmental interference.As Iranian football fans, with heavy heart we asked FIFA, due to ongoing human rights violation based on Articles 3-4 of its statutes, immediately expel Iran from #Qatar2022 Worldcup.Open letter to @FIFAcom⬇️#MahsaAmini#مهسا_امینی#banIRfromWorldcup#StandwithIranianWomen pic.twitter.com/b1tbOJR3T2— OpenStadiums (@openStadiums) September 30, 2022
    “The Iranian Football Association is an important ambassador of the Islamic Republic and is acting in line with the repressive regime,” the activist group, Open Stadiums, wrote in a letter to FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino. “It comes as no surprise, then, that they have prohibited footballers from showing any solidarity with the Iranian citizens’ call for freedom and the victims of the same authorities’ brutal crackdown.The letter asked FIFA “to immediately expel Iran from the World Cup 2022 in Qatar.”FIFA declined to comment on the letter on Thursday.The request to eject Iran was made more in hope than expectation: FIFA is unlikely to eject the team from a tournament for which it has qualified, especially so close to the competition, nor has it shown any effort to pressure Iran with anything more than public statements. A majority of Iranian fans also would oppose to a World Cup ban; many of them revere the national team, which is known as Team Melli, and see it as a representative of the people rather than the government.More on the Protests in IranA Women-Led Uprising: Casting off their legally required head scarves, Iranian women have been at the forefront of the demonstrations, supplying the defining images of defiance.Economic Despair: While Iranians have a range of grievances to choose from, the sorry state of Iran’s economy has been one of the main forces driving the protests.Attacks on Kurds: Iranian officials, who blame Kurdish groups for fomenting some of the protests, have launched a string of attacks against the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.Power of Protests Wanes: Mass protests like the ones in Iran were once considered a grave threat to even the fiercest autocrat. But their odds of success have plummeted worldwide, a new study shows.But soccer’s leadership could face considerable pressure from the impact of the protests sweeping Iran after the death of Amini, a 22-year-old woman who had been arrested by the country’s morality police; any effort by the government to silence the national team’s players; and repercussions against current and former players who have publicly supported the protests.At Iran’s game last week in St. Pölten, Austria, security officers ejected several fans who had brought signs bearing the picture of Mahsa Amini into the stands.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockInfantino visited Tehran in 2018 to watch the final of the Asian Champions League, a game for which a small group of women was permitted to enter the city’s Azadi Stadium. In the months that followed, he claimed that FIFA had made “repeated calls” to the Iranian authorities to “address the unacceptable situation” of women not being permitted to enter stadiums.“Our position is firm and clear,” Infantino said in 2019, after a fan set herself on fire outside a courthouse where she faced being jailed for having attended a game. “Women have to be allowed into football stadiums in Iran.” He restated that position as recently as last year, when he praised the work of the president of Iran’s federation after a meeting in Doha.Open Stadiums on Thursday said it had concluded that “these were all empty words and promises.” In March, for example, women holding tickets to a match in the northeastern city of Mashhad were denied entry when they tried to enter the stadium. Some were attacked with pepper spray by security officers.“Nothing has changed,” the group wrote to Infantino. “Iranian women remain locked out of our beautiful game, and we are systematically repressed when we try to enter stadiums.” The group accused Infantino and FIFA of allowing a “gross human rights violation” to happen with its “protection and approval.”Female protesters burned their legally required head scarves and cut their hair to protest the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested for failing to cover her hair modestly enough.Getty ImagesSeveral of the country’s most famous players, including Ali Daei — for years the leading scorer in international soccer history — have criticized the government both for Amini’s death and the subsequent repression of protests. “Solve the problems of the Iranian people rather than using repression, violence and arrests,” Daei wrote on Instagram.One of the most prominent soccer voices to speak out has been Ali Karimi, once of Bayern Munich and arguably the most successful Iranian player of all time. Karimi, now 43, has for days used his social media feeds — including his Instagram account, which has almost 13 million followers — to criticize the government; to share footage of the protests and the violent response of the police; and even to advise his followers on how to circumvent blocks on Iranian internet access.Government officials and their allies have called for Karimi to be arrested, and it has been reported that state television is under instructions not to mention either him or his former teammate, Daei, by name.On Monday night, Karimi’s house in the Tehran suburb of Lavasan was seized by the authorities, with a large concrete block placed at its entrance. Other properties were also reported to have been “sealed.” In response, more than a million Iranians added their names to a petition circulating on social media that said, “I stand with Ali Karimi.”Karimi, now believed to be in the United Arab Emirates, responded on Instagram that “a house without soil is worthless.”Iran’s best player, Sardar Azmoun, expressed support on Instagram for the protests in Iran before deleting the post. He suggested that Iranian officials had barred the team from commenting.Jakub Sukup/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis successors on the national team say they have not been able to be quite so outspoken. Sardar Azmoun, a striker with the German side Bayer Leverkusen, suggested in an Instagram post that “national team rules” prevented players from expressing their views on the protest before insisting that he would willingly “sacrifice” his place at the World Cup for “one hair on the heads of Iranian women.”A number of other players posted similar messages. A few hours later, they had all been deleted. Some players “blacked out” their social media accounts, while Azmoun — known as the Iranian Messi and widely considered his country’s best player — removed all imagery from his Instagram feed for several days. When images reappeared on Wednesday, the account featured a carefully worded message of support for Iran’s women.The unease within the national team — which has spent the past two weeks in Austria on a pre-World Cup training camp — became clear before a game with Senegal on Tuesday. At the request of the Iranian authorities, no fans had been allowed to access the stadium, though a group of protesters had gathered outside. As the Iranian anthem played, and the protesters shouts carried through the air, the players remained impassive, the flag on their jerseys hidden beneath thick black coats.The country’s authorities have insisted that they will “take action against the celebrities who fan the flames of the riots,” the INSA news agency reported, attributing the comments to Tehran’s provincial governor, Mohsen Mansouri.On Thursday, they followed through on the threat. State news agencies confirmed that Hossein Mahini, a defender who had been part of Iran’s squad at the 2014 World Cup and had most recently been playing for Saipa, a second-division team in Tehran, had been arrested for “supporting and encouraging riots on his social media pages.”About 24 hours later, Azmoun was back on Instagram. In a new post that was both a subtle challenge to the national team’s gag order and a signal of his solidarity, he posted an image of Mahini underneath a large blue heart. More

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    Climate Activist Sets Himself on Fire at the Laver Cup

    LONDON — A protester set fire to his arm after running onto the court during a match on Friday at the Laver Cup tennis competition, stunning the capacity crowd at London’s O2 Arena and briefly setting fire to the playing surface.Wearing a white T-shirt reading “End UK Private Jets,” the protester, a young man, appeared on the court during the afternoon singles match between Stefanos Tsitsipas and Diego Schwartzman. Sitting down near the net on Schwartzman’s side of the court, the man briefly set fire to his right arm, and to the court, as security officials ran toward him.A man has set his arm on fire after invading the court at the Laver Cup on Roger Federer’s last day as a professional tennis player. pic.twitter.com/g0LcBU8PeJ— Sam Street (@samstreetwrites) September 23, 2022
    The protester appeared to immediately regret the decision to set fire to himself, and quickly put out the flames with his left hand while a small fire burned on the court next to him. A staff member smothered the on-court fire with a suit jacket while the protester calmly waited to be removed.Once the fire was out, and with Schwartzman keeping a safe distance, three security guards carried the man off the court to a chorus of boos from the crowd.“He came out of nowhere,” Tsitsipas said. “I have no idea what this was about. I’ve never had this happen in a match before. I hope he’s all right.”The man did not seem to be seriously injured.Disrupting high-profile sporting events has become an increasingly common tactic by environmental activists in Europe over the past year, and some have succeeded in drawing attention to their causes in a variety of ways, including attaching themselves to goal posts at Premier League soccer matches; breaching the court at the French Open tennis championships; and blocking the path of cycling’s Tour de France.The incident at the Laver Cup appeared to leave the court undamaged, and play resumed after a brief delay. Tsitsipas went on to defeat Schwartzman in straight sets. More

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    Premier League Players Will No Longer Take a Knee Before Every Game

    The gesture, begun by players in 2020 as part of an effort to highlight racism, will continue, but only before certain matches.While Premier League soccer players will continue to take a knee to protest racism this season, they said Wednesday that the gesture would no longer take place at every game.Players will kneel, for example, at the Premier League’s season-opening games this weekend; on Boxing Day (Dec. 26); during two weeks dedicated to racism awareness in October and March; on the final day of the season; and before the F.A. Cup and League Cup finals.“We remain resolutely committed to eradicate racial prejudice and to bring about an inclusive society with respect and equal opportunities for all,” the team captains said in a statement released by the Premier League. The players said they believed the gesture would have more impact if performed less frequently.Premier League players began kneeling for a few seconds after the opening whistle when matches resumed after a pandemic hiatus in June 2020. The protest coincided with Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis.The gesture was inspired by the former N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other American athletes who had taken a knee before games or during the national anthem, and was widely adopted in leagues and sports in Europe and elsewhere. Players on dozens of teams have taken a knee before international matches, and women’s squads — though not all of them — did the same during the recently completed Euro 2022 championship.England’s Georgia Stanway and two Swedish players before their Euro 2022 semifinal last week.Molly Darlington/ReutersPremier League players had continued to kneel before every game, and players at many games in lower-tier leagues in England have done the same.The gesture brought praise in some quarters. “I feel the power every time the players drop down and show solidarity,” said Troy Townsend, the head of development at Kick It Out, a nonprofit organization that promotes equality and inclusion in soccer. But a few Black players dismissed it as a mostly empty gesture that did little to bring real change. Wilfried Zaha of Crystal Palace, who grew up in England but plays for Ivory Coast’s national team, stopped kneeling in early 2021. He said the protest “has just become a part of the prematch routine.”The kneeling occasionally drew boos, both in England and more frequently when English teams traveled abroad. England fans were jeered by some of their own supporters before games leading to last summer’s European Championship.And in June, when the England players knelt before a game in Hungary, they were jeered by a crowd largely made up of children under 14; most adults were barred because of racist chanting by Hungary fans at earlier games.The kneeling was not universal, either. Many teams from other nations did not kneel before games, making for a sometimes incongruous sight at Champions League and international matches: the players from English teams and clubs on one knee before kickoff, while their opponents stood only yards away, waiting for them to rise so the game could begin. More

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    Among Pro Athletes, Bill Russell Was a Pioneering Activist

    Russell marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke out against segregation in Boston public schools and backed Muhammad Ali in his opposition to the Vietnam War.It’s easy to remember the shots that Bill Russell blocked or the N.B.A. championships he won. After all, there were so many of each that he is considered one of the greatest basketball players in history, and in some corners, the greatest, period.But after his nearly nine decades of life, his most consequential legacy has less to do with the sport he dominated than his work off the court. From the time he was a young man to his death at age 88 on Sunday, Russell was a civil rights activist who consistently used his platform as a celebrity athlete to confront racism, no matter whom it alienated or what it did to his public popularity. And he was one of the first to do so.Now, it is common for athletes across many sports to be outspoken, no doubt inspired by Russell. The N.B.A. players’ union encourages its members to be passionate about their politics, especially around social justice. Without Russell’s risking his own livelihood and enduring the cruelties he did as a Black player in the segregated Boston of the 1950s and 1960s, athlete activism would look much different today, if it existed at all.“The blueprint was written by Russell,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said in an interview on Sunday. He continued: “It is now trendy on social media to take a stand. He did it when it was not trendy. He set the trend.”Spike Lee, the director and longtime N.B.A. fan, said in a text message, “We are losing so many greats my head is spinning.”Lee said Russell “is right up there with Jackie Robinson as changing the game in sports and activism in the United States of America, and we are all better because of these champions.”Russell, a native of West Monroe, La., was a trailblazer from the moment he set foot on an N.B.A. court.“My rookie year, in the championship series, I was the only Black player for both teams,” Russell once quipped to an audience while accepting an award in Boston. “And see what we did, we showed them diversity works.”Russell marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 in the prime of his playing career (he played for the Celtics from 1956 to 1969). He was invited to sit onstage behind King, but he declined. That same year, Russell offered his public support for demonstrations against segregation in Boston public schools, and addressed Black students taking part in a sit-in.When the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated, also in 1963, Russell contacted Evers’s older brother, Charles, in Jackson, Miss., and offered his assistance. The elder Evers suggested that Russell run an integrated basketball camp in the Deep South, something that would have been a significant safety risk for Russell. He said yes, and despite the death threats, went through with the camp.Russell, with Kenneth Guscott, left, and Marvin Gilmore, right, spoke at NAACP headquarters in 1964. Hal Sweeney/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesFour years later, when the boxer Muhammad Ali was faced with a torrent of criticism for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, Russell, the N.F.L. star Jim Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor and still playing at U.C.L.A.) gathered in Cleveland and decided to support Ali. This was not a popular stance, not that Russell cared.Russell wrote immediately afterward that he was envious of Ali.“He has absolute and sincere faith,” Russell wrote for Sports Illustrated. “I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is better equipped than anyone I know to withstand the trials in store for him. What I’m worried about is the rest of us.”Russell’s activism made an impact on generations of athletes. That included Spencer Haywood, who played for Russell as a member of the Seattle SuperSonics, whom Russell coached for four seasons. (In 1966, Russell became the first Black coach in the N.B.A.)Haywood said in an interview on Sunday that he and Russell would often dine at a Seattle restaurant called 13 Coins after road trips, and Russell would regale him with stories about the civil rights movement. During these dinners, Russell lauded the young player’s willingness to sue the N.B.A. in 1971 for not allowing players to enter the league until four years after their high school graduation — a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court and was eventually decided in Haywood’s favor.“He was teaching me because he knew what I had stood up for with my Supreme Court ruling,” Haywood said. “And he admired that in me. And I was so overwhelmed by him knowing.”Haywood said his teammates would jokingly refer to Russell as Haywood’s “daddy” because of how close they were. Sometimes, Haywood’s late-night talks with Russell came with surprising advice about activism.“He always used to tell me about not getting too carried away because we were in the ’70s,” Haywood recalled. “He was kind of guiding me, saying: ‘Don’t go out too far right now because you are a player and you need to play the game. But you’ve made one stand and you did great in that, but don’t go too far.’ He was, like, giving me a guardrail.”Russell never feared going too far as a player activist himself. He wasn’t deterred by the racist taunts he absorbed at games, or when vandals broke into his home, spray-painted epithets on the wall and left feces on the bed after he moved his family to Reading, Mass. When he tried to move his family to a different house nearby, some residents of the mostly white neighborhood started a petition to keep him out.“I said then that I wasn’t scared of the kind of men who come in the dark of night,” Russell wrote for Slam magazine in 2020. “The fact is, I’ve never found fear to be useful.”He didn’t always have the support of his teammates. In 1961, for example, the Celtics traveled to Lexington, Ky., for an exhibition game against the St. Louis Hawks. When the restaurant at the hotel would not serve the team’s Black players, Russell led a strike of the game. His white teammates played the game. Bob Cousy, one of Russell’s white teammates, told the writer Gary M. Pomerantz decades later for the 2018 book “The Last Pass: Cousy, the Celtics and What Matters in the End” that he was “ashamed” at having taken part in the game. President Barack Obama cited the 1961 story in giving Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.“For decades, Bill endured insults and vandalism, but never let it stop him from speaking up for what’s right,” Obama said in a statement Sunday. “I learned so much from the way he played, the way he coached, and the way he lived his life.”Russell addressed a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in Boston in 2011.Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe activism didn’t stop as Russell got older. In recent years, Russell has been a public supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and Colin Kaepernick, the former N.F.L. quarterback who began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality in 2016.“Bill Russell was a pioneer,” Etan Thomas, a former N.B.A. player and political activist, said in a text message Sunday. Thomas said Russell was “an athlete who used his position and platform to stand up for a bigger cause.” He added that “he was the type of athlete I wanted to be like when I grew up.”Russell’s influence in leading the 1961 strike could be felt in 2020, when the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play a playoff game as a protest of police brutality. On Twitter, Russell wrote that he was “moved by all the N.B.A. players for standing up for what is right.” In a piece for The Players’ Tribune weeks later, Russell wrote, “Black and Brown people are still fighting for justice, racists still hold the highest offices in the land.”Sharpton pointed to those actions as Russell’s legacy.“He did it before some of these guys were born,” Sharpton said. “And I think that what they need to understand is every time a basketball player or athlete puts a T-shirt on saying something about Trayvon or ‘I Am Trayvon’ or ‘Black Lives Matter’ or whatever they want to do — ‘Get your knee off my neck!’ — they may not know it, but they are doing the Bill Russell.” More

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    Brittney Griner’s Supporters Hold Steady After Guilty Plea

    Griner, the W.N.B.A. star, pleaded guilty to drug charges in Russia on Thursday. But her supporters are still determined to fight to bring her home.For the first time in a while, Terri Jackson, the executive director of the W.N.B.A. players’ union, felt hopeful about Brittney Griner.Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, had spoken on the phone with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday morning. That evening, Jackson attended a rally to support Brittney Griner at the Footprint Center arena in Phoenix. It had been hosted by the Phoenix Mercury and Representative Greg Stanton, Democrat of Arizona, with hundreds of Griner’s supporters on hand.“It was emotional, it was a celebration, it was a renewed hope and renewed spirit,” Jackson said. “And yet, we are very mindful that we are not near the end.”If the American basketball star is convicted, she could face up to 10 years in a Russian penal colony.Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated PressJackson spoke Thursday afternoon, hours after Brittney Griner pleaded guilty to drug charges in a court near Moscow. Griner, the star Mercury center, has been detained in Russia since Feb. 17, accused of having hashish oil in her luggage at a Russian airport. Her trial on the drug charges began on July 1. But despite her guilty plea on Thursday, the support she has received from her representatives, friends, family, teammates and others has not waned.“I think it made us more resolved to demonstrate our support for her and to recognize that Russia’s process is its own,” Jackson said. “It’s nothing like ours. And yet try to stay hopeful that there’s some forward progress to getting her home.”Griner’s agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, called Griner a “model of courage” in a statement on Twitter on Thursday.“BG’s service as an Olympian and global sport ambassador, caring for those most in need, has always distinguished her; but BG is also a human being whose family misses her,” Kagawa Colas said. “She deserves our compassion, understanding, love and support.”Representative Colin Allred, Democrat of Texas, who has been working to secure Griner’s release, urged caution in reacting to her guilty plea, calling her prosecution a “sham trial” on Twitter.“Remember that we should not draw any serious conclusions from this and that she was wrongfully detained in the first place,” Allred said.The rally for Brittney Griner on Wednesday. Many fans have been vocal in their support since Griner was detained in February.Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesW.N.B.A. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert released a statement Thursday afternoon.“Brittney Griner remains wrongfully detained in Russia, and nothing that happened today changes that 140 days later,” Engelbert said. She added: “She has the wholehearted and unconditional support of the entire W.N.B.A. and N.B.A. family, who eagerly await her safe return.”The U.S. State Department first announced that Griner had been classified as “wrongfully detained” in May and said it would look to negotiate her release regardless of the result of her trial.On Thursday, a Russian diplomat suggested to reporters in Moscow that the public clamor about Griner’s release — which he attributed to the Biden administration — was detrimental to getting a deal done.Griner’s supporters, though, have long believed that calling public attention to her situation was necessary to get the attention of the Biden administration. After the State Department classified Griner as wrongfully detained, her closest supporters began to feel comfortable drawing attention to her detention. Many fans have been vocal since February.Starting in early May, Kagawa Colas joined with Griner’s family, the W.N.B.A. and its players’ union and the Mercury to start an advocacy campaign with the hashtag #WeAreBG. Several W.N.B.A. and N.B.A. players began speaking out about Griner’s situation. The N.B.A.’s Boston Celtics wore T-shirts that said #WeAreBG during one N.B.A. finals practice.In June, Kagawa Colas coordinated with dozens of organizations that represent people of color, women and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community to send a letter to Biden and Harris urging them to make a deal to bring Griner home.On Thursday, the W.N.B.A. players’ union released a statement that positioned the organization alongside those groups.“The administration needs to know that this powerful collective is behind them and supports whatever needs to be done to get B.G., Paul Whelan and other detained U.S. nationals home right away,” the statement read.Whelan is a former U.S. Marine who has been detained in Russia since 2018. He was convicted of espionage in a Russian court in 2020.A mural showing Brittney Griner (42) at the Footprint Center arena in Phoenix. W.N.B.A. teams have worn T-shirts with the No. 42 during the season to show their support.Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesThis weekend, the W.N.B.A. will host its All-Star Game and other competitions in Chicago. They are an annual celebration of the league’s best players, and Griner has been selected as an All-Star seven times. The league named her as an honorary starter for the All-Star Game on Sunday.“Sends a very, very strong message from the league recognizing that we are missing not just one of the game’s biggest, brightest stars but an individual who is just very important to us outside of this game,” Jackson said.Before the game, the Rev. Al Sharpton announced he would hold a news conference on Friday in Chicago with Cherelle Griner, Jackson and Los Angeles Sparks forward Nneka Ogwumike, who is the president of the players’ union.“Brittney has admitted to making a mistake, and I hope the Russian authorities recognize that humbling act and respond with compassion,” Sharpton said in a statement. “She is in the fight of her life right now, which is why we’ll be in Chicago to show our support for Brittney and for the administration and their efforts to bring her home as soon as possible. We must all continue to pray she finds strength through this challenging time.”The W.N.B.A. players’ union sometimes calls its membership The 144 — a reference to the 12 players on each of the 12 teams in the league. Jackson noted that the All-Star Game would take place on the 143rd day of Griner’s detention.“It reminds us all — at least those of us who have engaged in this frustrating process of counting the days — it reminds us that we are not The 144 without Brittney Griner,” Jackson said. She added: “The symbolism of that is not lost on any one of us.” More

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    The Public Campaign to #FreeBrittneyGriner

    For months, Griner’s family and closest supporters said little publicly about her detention out of fear that attention would turn her into a political pawn during the war in Ukraine, which began shortly after she was taken into custody. Recently, that strategy has changed.“We’re here to do whatever we can to amplify and keep B.G. at the forefront, which is more important than any basketball game,” Mercury guard Diana Taurasi said on Monday. More

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    N.W.S.L. Players Protest Abuse Scandal as League Returns to Field

    In their first matches since confronting the accusations that have shaken their league, women’s soccer players stopped play to make a point.In North Carolina, soccer players from both teams sprinted to midfield to be part of a silent protest of the abuse scandal that has shaken their league. In Portland, Ore., the home team’s players took the field in shirts bearing the slogan “No More Silence” and demanded — and received — the suspension of a prominent team executive.And at Carli Lloyd’s homecoming game just outside Philadelphia, the retiring United States national team star set aside the celebrations of her long career to note a moment that, she said, was much bigger than herself.“This is something you cannot ignore,” Lloyd said after her Gotham F.C. team played the Washington Spirit to a scoreless draw in Chester, Pa.Wednesday night marked the first tentative steps back onto the field for the National Women’s Soccer League only days after it brought its entire operation to a halt as it confronted accusations of coaches who abused players, team executives who did not stop it, and a league that failed to protect its most valuable assets: its athletes.The Gotham-Washington game was one of three played in the league on Wednesday, the first night of action since the league canceled its entire schedule over the weekend and announced that its commissioner, Lisa Baird, had resigned.In Cary, N.C., the North Carolina Courage, whose coach was fired last week after he was accused of sexual coercion by at least two former players, beat Racing Louisville, which fired its coach in August “for cause” after a separate case of misconduct. And in Oregon, the Portland Thorns’ players released a list of demands before their game against the Houston Dash that included the immediate suspension of their own team’s general manager.In all three matches, the teams stopped play in the sixth minute and players stood arm in arm at midfield — a symbolic pause, they said, that represented the six years it took for a group of former colleagues who had filed abuse complaints to be heard. The protests brought together national team stars like Lloyd, Lindsey Horan and Crystal Dunn, dozens of lesser known pros who make up the league’s rank and file and, in Portland at least, even the match officials.For Lloyd, who acknowledged she has been adept at blocking out the crowds, the noises, the off-the-field distractions, this was a night to focus on the collective over the individual.“This is a huge wake-up call,” she said.Her statement and other brief comments by players around the league made direct references to Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim, the two N.W.S.L. players whose searing accusations of being sexually abused by Paul Riley, who coached the North Carolina Courage to league championships in 2018 and 2019, ignited the recent reckoning in the sport.Many of soccer’s biggest and most outspoken stars, like Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, have weighed in over the last week, and pointedly criticized the league, its officials and even their own teams for knowing about complaints and failing to protect the players.But Lloyd has long been much more reticent to speak out on social issues. So hearing her speak so candidly, and on a night arranged to celebrate her personally, underscored the shared sense of anger and solidarity roiling the N.W.S.L.Fans in Chester, Pa., and other cities showed their support for the players through signs and standing ovations.Charles Fox/The Philadelphia Inquirer, via Associated Press“This is a reset,” Lloyd said in her postgame news conference, and an opportunity “to have policies in place to vet ownership” and coaches. And after “one of the worst weeks this league has ever seen,” she added, “I’m really proud of everyone, even on the Spirit, coming out playing despite what’s been going on.”Before the game, the Gotham players and staff left a handwritten note in the locker room of the Washington Spirit. The note read, “To our friends at the Spirit. Off the field we support you. On the field let’s play. Sending our love to you.”The anger of frustration of players, though, was evident on an emotional night. During a Zoom news conference with reporters after the game, one of Lloyd’s Gotham teammates, Imani Dorsey, pounded the podium when she said: “We are grinding every single day. We just get the wind knocked out of us every single week. It’s heartbreaking. It’s devastating. We’re trying our best every day and it doesn’t feel like the league is doing that.”When asked what she thought about fans who have said they would boycott N.W.S.L. games, Dorsey said: “Any fan that I would say is feeling failed, or don’t have faith in the league, I’d say: Put your faith in the players association and the players. We want this league to be better.”Yet the tumult shows no signs of abating.On Tuesday, Washington Spirit’s chief executive, Steve Baldwin, announced that he would step down after bowing to pressure from Spirit players who criticized him for presiding over a toxic and abusive workplace under the team’s former coach, Richie Burke, who was fired last week. But the Spirit players dismissed Baldwin’s move as mere posturing, and demanded that he sell his share to one of the team’s co-owners, Y. Michele Kang.In Portland, the Thorns players demanded the immediate suspension of their general manager, Gavin Wilkinson. Wilkinson had presided over the team in 2015, when an internal investigation had substantiated claims of abuse against Riley so serious that the team dismissed him. Within months, Riley was coaching a different team in the league.Late Wednesday, the Thorns announced that Wilkinson had been placed on administrative leave. But players and fans quickly noted that his removal did not affect his similar role with the Thorns’ sister club, the Portland Timbers of Major League Soccer.The N.W.S.L. players association, meanwhile, released its own list of demands before Wednesday’s games, including investigations of every club, immediate suspensions for league and team executives accused of failing to protect players, access to previous investigative reports, and a voice in the league’s search for a new commissioner.“We are not bringing the N.W.S.L. down” in demanding action and investigations, Houston Dash defender Katie Naughton said in a brief statement after her team’s game in Portland. “We are rebuilding it into what we know it can and should be.“We believe in our bones that we can do this.” More