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

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    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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      Lee Elder Paved the Way for Tiger Woods's Masters Dominance

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      Lee Elder forced golf forward by winning his way into the Masters tournament in 1975, the first Black player to do so, laying a path for Tiger Woods and others.How do we measure athletic greatness? By the number of big wins and unforgettable championships?Or by something less obvious but perhaps more profound: an athlete’s resolve to go against the grain and upend the status quo in both sport and society, even at the risk of personal harm?If the latter measure is as true a test as any, we must make room in the pantheon of the all-time greats for Lee Elder. An indefatigable African American golfer, he died on Sunday at age 87, nearly a half-century after he stood against the stultifying stain of racism and became the first Black golfer to play at the Masters, paving the way for no less than Tiger Woods.“He was the first,” said Woods, not long after he stunned the sports world by winning the Masters in 1997, at age 21. “He was the one I looked up to. Because of what he did, I was able to play here, which was my dream.”What a journey, what a life. The hard, tumultuous arc of sports in the back half of the 20th century — indeed the arc of American history during that time — can be traced through Elder.He was a Black man born in the Jim Crow South who taught himself to play golf on segregated courses and polished his trade on the barnstorming golf tour akin to baseball’s Negro leagues.He dreamed of making it to the biggest stage, but professional golf took its own sweet time while sports such as baseball, basketball and football slowly integrated. The Professional Golfers Association kept its Caucasian-only clause until 1961.Elder never wavered. He broke through on the PGA Tour in 1968, as a 34-year-old. In those days, with the battle for civil rights well underway, the Masters began receiving pressure to add at least one Black player to its field. In 1973, a group of 18 congressional representatives even petitioned the tournament for just that. Elder was among the top 40 money earners on tour and had played in multiple U.S. Opens and P.G.A. Championships — so why not Augusta National?But after choosing not to invite outstanding Black golfers such as Charlie Sifford during the 1960s, the tournament settled on a stringent requirement for its participants: victory at a PGA Tour event.Elder earned that at the 1974 Monsanto Open — the same Florida event where, six years earlier, he had been forced to change clothes in a parking lot because Black people were not allowed to use the country club locker room.Elder possessed an understated but firm resolve. He wasn’t quick to raise a fuss about racism, but he wasn’t afraid to speak up about it, either. “The Masters has never wanted a Black player, and they kept changing the rules to make it harder for Blacks,” he said, adding: “I got them off the hook by winning.”Elder served as a ceremonial starter for the Masters in 2021. He was cheered by Gary Player, in black, and Jack Nicklaus, right.Doug Mills/The New York TimesSince its inception in 1934, the Masters has dripped in the antebellum codes of the South. Held at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, on a former indigo plantation, the only African Americans allowed on the course were groundskeepers and caddies. Nobody described the Masters more truthfully than the Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray. The tournament, he wrote in 1969, was “as white as the Ku Klux Klan.”In the months leading up to the 1975 Masters, Elder was the target of multiple death threats. “Sometimes it was sent to the course where I was playing, sometimes it came to my house,” he said. “Stuff like, ‘You better watch behind trees,’ ‘You won’t make it to Augusta.’ It was bad stuff, but I expected it.”But on April 10, 1975, there he stood, at the first tee, surrounded by a gallery full of close friends, including the football star Jim Brown. When Elder smashed his tee shot straight down the fairway, he did not just make history at the Masters, he pried open the cloistered and often racist world of golf to new possibilities.Looking back at the contours of his career beyond 1975, one sees a consistent solidity. He won three more PGA Tour titles and then eight on the Senior Tour and represented the United States in the Ryder Cup. It will always be a great unknown — the heights Elder could have reached if the opportunity had been equal and he had been able to play PGA Tour events in his prime.We can say this much for certain: Elder fixed himself in the sports history firmament at the Masters in 1975. He will always remain there, a North Star for others to follow.Woods came along just over two decades later, winning the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes and announcing himself as the heir not just to Elder but to Jack Nicklaus, who won at Augusta six times. As Woods marched past a gallery of awe-struck fans on his way to receive the champion’s green jacket for the first of five times, he saw Elder, and the two embraced. Past met present, paving the future.And yet the road to equality in golf remains elusive. The sport was overwhelmingly white in Elder’s era and overwhelmingly white when Woods burst on the scene. It remains overwhelmingly white.The game is “still slacking quite a bit” when it comes to diversity, Cameron Champ, 26, whose mother is white and father is Black, said while speaking about Elder this week. Champ is one of the few players of African American heritage on tour and one of the game’s most vocal about the need to diversify.It took until this year — prodded by tumultuous nationwide protests over racism and police brutality in 2020 — for the Masters to truly give Elder his due.In April, aside Nicklaus and Gary Player, Elder sat at Augusta National’s first tee as an honorary starter for this year’s tournament. Tubes snaked into his nose to deliver oxygen. He was too hobbled to take a shot.A gallery of the tournament’s players stood nearby, paying proper respect to a golfer whose greatness extended far beyond the fairway. The cold, crisp morning had a reverent, unforgettable feel, recalled Champ, whose paternal grandfather fell for golf in part because of Elder and then taught the game to his grandson.But it took 46 years for golf to honor Elder at the Masters. Think about that.Why didn’t it happen in 1985, the 10th anniversary of his smashing past Augusta National’s color line? Or in 1995, 20 years after the fact? Or at any other time?Why must change always take so long? More

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      in Football

      NFL Quarterbacks Want Their Voices Heard

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      From Aaron Rodgers to Tom Brady to Patrick Mahomes, quarterbacks are trying to push football’s status quo. The results have lagged behind stars’ achievements in other sports.Aaron Rodgers had a lot to get off his mind.After two years of mounting whispers over his frustration with his team, Rodgers finally laid out his grievances when he reported to Green Bay Packers training camp in July. In sweeping depth and granular detail, the franchise quarterback expounded on all the topics team executives had not asked his opinion about, from the drafting of his potential successor to the team’s letting go of one of his favorite receiver targets.“I just want to be involved in conversations that affect my ability to do my job, and it’s not all personnel, but I think I have a unique perspective being in the locker room and having been the starting quarterback here for 13 years and being here for 16 years,” Rodgers said during his July news conference.Packers management, he said, had tried sweetening his contract, but money was not his primary concern.He wanted his voice heard. The reigning M.V.P.’s standoff with the Packers represented one of the most drastic examples of a quarterback bucking the status quo, but he was not alone among players at his position who pushed for their voices to be acknowledged and for autonomy over their careers.“For every athlete, they have to calculate for themselves the value of winning and then the value of their own personal business,” said Don Yee, the agent who represents quarterbacks Tom Brady and Jimmy Garoppolo. “And the latter part of that equation, at least in my personal view, has become more and more important with each successive generation.”In a league like the N.B.A., star players routinely discuss potentially significant organizational moves with team owners and general managers. Quarterbacks operate the most crucial and iconic position in America’s most popular sport, but in the N.F.L., the team is prioritized over any one player — face of the franchise or not.In Houston, after signing Deshaun Watson to a $160 million contract extension in 2020, the Texans ostracized their quarterback through moves that included trading the All-Pro wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins and not consulting Watson on a replacement for the fired head coach and general manager Bill O’Brien. Watson requested a trade from the franchise before 22 sexual misconduct lawsuits were levied against him in March. (He has denied the allegations.)And in Seattle, Russell Wilson complained that he wanted more say over team personnel after absorbing the most hits of any N.F.L. quarterback through his first nine seasons.Russell Wilson signing autographs in Seattle last month. He has said he wants to “be involved” in the Seahawks’ personnel decisions.Stephen Brashear/Associated PressIn the last few years, as rallies of athlete empowerment swept up leagues like the N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. and individual sports like tennis, the N.F.L. seemingly lagged, and players are starting to take notice.“You saw a lot of those guys get involved in the social justice thing that was going on over the last year, ever since George Floyd,” said Warren Moon, a Hall of Fame quarterback who spent the bulk of his N.F.L. career in Houston. Now, he said, if N.F.L. stars don’t get the support they expect from their teams, “they’re going to voice their opinions.”Patrick Mahomes and Brady, the quarterbacks who have won the last three Super Bowls, have utilized their voices in different capacities.Mahomes, the budding face of the league as Kansas City’s do-everything quarterback, participated with a number of N.F.L. stars in a June 2020 video naming Floyd and other Black victims of violence and demanding that the league condemn racism and systemic oppression.Mahomes told Fox Sports’ “Undisputed” that he had spoken with Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, about recognizing Black Lives Matter. Goodell responded with a video of his own, saying the league had been wrong for not listening to players earlier — he did not mention Colin Kaepernick by name — and encouraging peaceful protest.“I do think that’s a sign of more autonomy and lack of fear,” said Leigh Steinberg, the agent who negotiated Mahomes’s $503 million contract extension in 2020 with Kansas City. “So, what forestalled players of yesteryear from expressing their opinion was a fear that somehow they might go under controversy and might run afoul of the team, right? And now they’re trying to influence the team and the league.”In 2019, Brady asked for a provision in his contract extension that would prevent the New England Patriots from placing a franchise or transition tag on him, allowing him to become a free agent if he and the team did not agree on his future. Brady ended his 20-year tenure in New England to sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the following year.Since winning his seventh Super Bowl in February, Brady criticized the league’s policies on voluntary off-season workouts and in August wrote in an Instagram post that N.F.L. players were “ignorant” about the league’s financial disparities. “The salary cap dropped by 20% and the new media deals were announced the day AFTER 2021 salary cap was set,” he wrote, referring to the league’s March negotiation of over $100 billion in media contracts.“I see him inspiring people to have some confidence in their own thoughts and ideas,” Yee said. “It may sound a bit trite, but in the football world, that’s actually quite innovative.”To Brady’s point, players today have climbed their way back to a 48.5 percent share of the league’s revenue, less than the 50 percent take reportedly in place as part of the 2006 collective bargaining agreement.Boomer Esiason, who was a player representative during the 1987 strike, said he had tried informing players of the increasing disparity between how much team owners received versus the players.“Finally, somebody by the name of Tom Brady alluded to that fact about three weeks ago, how ignorant N.F.L. players are to the amount of money that is available or should be available to them,” Esiason said. “Especially in light that the contracts are not 100 percent guaranteed. I think there is a changing landscape and Tom Brady may have changed it without even realizing that he changed it.”Tom Brady in a preseason game last month. He criticized the N.F.L.’s policies on voluntary off-season workouts.Kim Klement/USA Today Sports, via ReutersQuarterbacks have benefited the most from the increased salaries that are the result of the league’s soaring revenues. For a while, Esiason led the N.F.L. with the highest annual salary of $1.2 million. This off-season, Dak Prescott signed a contract extension with the Dallas Cowboys worth $160 million over four years, with $126 million guaranteed, after a season-ending ankle injury. In Buffalo, Josh Allen inked a six-year, $258 million extension.“You probably feel maybe less pressure to do whatever you’re told to do, and you get more courage to speak up for what you believe in and what you believe is best for the football team,” said Sage Rosenfels, a former N.F.L. journeyman quarterback.But even with the most leverage among their N.F.L. peers, quarterbacks operate within a constrained system. They rarely arrive at free agency because of the franchise and transition tags that are standard practice, and young quarterbacks are often eager to reach lucrative contract extensions, with guaranteed payouts, rather than press for the freedom to test the open market if they’re unhappy with their teams.Those gargantuan contracts further wed a quarterback to his franchise: Teams risk taking a huge salary cap hit letting go of a disgruntled passer, and front offices often can’t add free agents if the quarterback won’t agree to restructure his deal in later years.“We’re getting to a point where the investment in that position is getting closer and closer and, in some respects, exceeds the dollar investments made into athletes from other sports,” Yee said, adding that teams want to see a return on their investment.Steinberg previously represented quarterbacks like Steve Young and Troy Aikman and said those quarterbacks worked in a symbiotic fashion with their teams’ management.“What’s become enhanced is that that position is so critical that teams will search in the draft or through free agency forever and still not be able to solve their problem,” Steinberg said. “So a team that has an incumbent quarterback, over time he almost morphs into another member of the coaching staff. A player that’s been there for years and years, teams want that input. They don’t have to take all his advice, but to not listen to him, they do at their peril.”All the off-season’s smoke from quarterbacks resulted in little fire. Rodgers, Wilson and Watson are still with the franchises they had voiced frustrations about, seemingly changing little about how teams respond to players’ calls for more say-so.“I just go back to the owners,” said Dan Fouts, a Hall of Fame quarterback. “They take care of each other and they’d all like to have a great quarterback, like an Aaron Rodgers, but they’re not going to change the way they do business.”The significant quarterback deals that did occur this off-season involved behind-the-scenes maneuvering that didn’t draw headlines. Detroit dealt Matthew Stafford to the Los Angeles Rams for a package that included the Rams’ incumbent quarterback, Jared Goff. Philadelphia traded Carson Wentz to the Indianapolis Colts for a couple of draft picks.“Everyone is different for their reason for wanting to get traded, released or whatever it may be,” Stafford said. “I just tried to make sure that whenever I got to the new place, I did what I could to make it successful.”Les Snead, Los Angeles’s general manager, said he navigates cases as they come, but it’s natural for players to want their voices acknowledged.“You always have to mix it together and see what’s best for the organization and the player,” Snead said. “Sometimes the organization may think that the player is better for us here, but if he really doesn’t want to be here, then what? We’ve all been a part of somewhere where you’ve worked with someone who really didn’t want to be there. It’s kind of like a toothache. You kind of wish that energy wasn’t there.”In the age of athlete empowerment around sports, players at the N.F.L.’s most crucial position haven’t been able to advance their cause very far.Emmanuel Morgan More

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      in Football

      A Minneapolis High School Football Team and Its Coach Move On

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      Charles Adams, a former police officer, and the Minneapolis North team are warily moving forward after the Derek Chauvin verdict offered a rebuke to one police killing in their community.Third-degree murder. Guilty.Second-degree murder. Guilty.Second-degree manslaughter. Guilty.As he heard a judge hand down verdicts at the Derek Chauvin murder trial last week, Charles Adams, a high school football coach and former Minneapolis cop, did not celebrate. There is no reviving George Floyd, Chauvin’s victim, and much to change in the culture of law enforcement.Adams couldn’t stop thinking and worrying about his team, the Polars of Minneapolis North.“The streets of my city don’t need more unrest,” he recalled thinking, as we spoke last week. “And my players, they don’t need more violence. What they need is relief from all the pressure they are constantly under.”Adams, 40, has a unique view of that pressure.Known as a pillar of the city’s economically depressed, predominantly Black north side, he is one of Minnesota’s best high school football coaches, responsible for turning a moribund team into a perennial power and state champion.He also served 20 years on the Minneapolis police force, a Black cop working the neighborhoods in which he was raised and following the footsteps of his father, a precinct chief who has served nearly four decades on the M.P.D.Just like his father, Adams made it a point to work with residents instead of lording power over them. As I chronicled in a column last October, he has always been focused on helping his community’s youth.“With the verdicts done, people need to know what it’s been like for kids who’ve grown up in this city like the players on my team,” he said. “They’ve lived through so much trauma.”And not just over the past year of the coronavirus pandemic. Adams said all of his players were well aware of the long string of deadly police shootings of Black men that have racked Minneapolis throughout their adolescence, even beyond Floyd in 2020.There was Jamar Clark, shot to death by the police blocks from Minneapolis North in 2015.And Philando Castile, shot to death by the police in a nearby suburb in 2016.And Daunte Wright, shot to death this month by a suburban police officer who is said to have thought her gun was a Taser.Those killings and the long history of tension between law enforcement and Minneapolis’s Black community have given the Polars an understandable wariness of the police. The team’s tight bond with Adams and his assistant coaches, many of whom are Black police officers, allows the players to heed their coaches’ advice on how to act when confronted by cops.North football players lined up to walk to the stadium for their first home game of the season in October 2020.Tim Gruber for The New York Times“For us, it’s kind of like we are always in a pickle,” Tae-Zhan Gilchrist, 17, an offensive lineman on the team, said when we spoke after the Chauvin trial. “We got to watch out for the crime in our neighborhood but avoid the police, too. Everywhere you go, there is always this tension. Even though you might be smiling and having a good time, danger and worry are always in the back of your head.”Gilchrist paused.“It’s heartbreaking,” he said, “but it is life. There are certain things in life you can’t avoid.”Every player I’ve talked to from Minneapolis North’s football team over the last year has expressed similar sentiments.The players also told me how their team has been a refuge.“The way the coaches care about us and understand what we’re going through, being with the team is like therapy for us,” said Azrie Yeager, 15, a freshman who plays on the offensive line. “After a long day of hearing about all the troubles, it’s been great to know that there’s a place where I can open up. It just clears the mind.”When I spoke to the team last October, it was early in a season truncated by the pandemic. North had been favored to make it to the state small school championship game for the second year in a row. It finished with a 6-1 record and a section title, but high school officials canceled the state tournament, cutting off any championship run.Adams and his team didn’t complain about the decision, though. At least they’d had a football season. Through fall and winter, Minneapolis North held classes virtually. Businesses and community centers closed. In the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, with so much of life shut down and so much despair and tension in the air, violence spiked. It touched the team in a searing way: A player from the 2016 state champion team came home from college and was shot to death near the high school.The players needed an outlet. For many of them, football was the only option.“Where would we have been without football this year?” Adams wondered aloud as we spoke. “In serious trouble. We needed it this year more than ever.”He needed the ballast as much as his players did. After 20 years, Adams left the M.P.D. last October for a better-paying job as director of security for the Minnesota Twins. He wouldn’t have taken the position if the Twins had said he would not be given the time to keep coaching North.Being a Minneapolis police officer is still deep in his bones, though. Adams said that as the Chauvin trial wore on and the verdict neared, it was hard for him to let go of the fear that if Chauvin received anything less than guilty on all charges destructive protests would again occur.Adams shuddered at the memory of the night last year, not long after Floyd’s murder, when protest raged in Minneapolis, and he dressed in riot gear to head to the front lines.That evening he spoke to his players over videoconference to tell them he loved them and that he wasn’t sure he’d live through the night to see them again.The memory, he said, caused something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.Deep pain. The coach knows what that’s like.So do his players.With the Chauvin trial over, Adams and his team are warily moving forward.“There’s still so much to be done and we have to continue to be aware and fight for our rights,” Gilchrist said. “The trial is over, but every morning here you still wake up and wonder, ‘What terrible thing is going to happen next?’” More

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      in Football

      The Talk of the Super Bowl Is Quarterbacks, Except One

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsCapitol Police in CrisisThe Global Far RightAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySPORTS OF THE TIMESThe Talk of the Super Bowl Is Quarterbacks, Except OneThe N.F.L. has tried to move on from the controversy over Colin Kaepernick, but recent events suggest his critique of America’s racial climate has remained relevant.Eli Harold, Colin Kaepernick, center, and Eric Reid knelt during the national anthem before an N.F.L. football game against the Seattle Seahawks in 2016.Credit…Ted S. Warren/Associated PressJan. 25, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETKap was right.Let’s not forget that.Let’s not erase his legacy the way the powers running the N.F.L. would like.As we barrel full steam toward the Super Bowl on Feb. 7, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Colin Kaepernick’s protest — his willingness to oppose the status quo and challenge America’s racial caste system — carried the profound weight of truth.Fans should remember. Team owners and the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, should remember.What about the players? Since many of them have dropped their guard and allowed the message to be watered down, they need to remember too.The big game is less than two weeks away, with the Kansas City Chiefs seeking to successfully defend their title against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The narrative will center on quarterbacks, and rightly so. Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes aren’t just among the greatest to ever play, they are among the most captivating.But years from now, when historians assess the connection between professional sports and the state of the world in the current era, which N.F.L. quarterback will loom largest?I’ll bet on Kaepernick, once among the league’s most electric players, censured and shut out of the game since 2016. Kaepernick, whose kneeling protest during the national anthem tore at the heart of the one sport that most embodies America and its myths.Kaepernick, loved and loathed, celebrated as a champion for justice and denounced by politicians looking to hype racial resentment, no matter the costs.He has not just been at the center of the storm. At times he has been the storm. All of the other quarterbacks are throwing their beautiful spirals while watching safely from afar — careers well intact.We’ve just endured a presidential term of brazen demagogy from a man many N.F.L. owners have considered a great leader and friend. We’ve seen the rise of white supremacy. The stream of police shootings. The killing of George Floyd. Protests, the coronavirus pandemic and the deadly storming of the Capitol.Kaepernick’s critique of America foretold it all.But if you think everything is fine now that there’s a new face in the White House, think again. Remember that he began his protest not under former President Donald J. Trump, but in the waning days of the Obama administration. He knelt not just against the cracking structure of modern day racism, but its faulty foundation, laid down centuries ago and built upon ever since.His shadow still hangs over a league that heads to the Super Bowl acting as if he has never existed. N.F.L. owners — and their chief spokesman, Goodell — would rather slice him from collective memory and move on.“There is nothing more humbling for the billionaires who own N.F.L. teams than to be proven wrong, especially by a Black athlete who is seen as a thorn in their side,” Derrick White, a professor of African-American studies at the University of Kentucky and an expert on race and football, said when we spoke last week.That’s why the league settled the union grievance filed by the former 49ers quarterback and his former teammate Eric Reid. The pair claimed they were blackballed by the N.F.L. for protesting. A multimillion-dollar payout, replete with a confidentiality agreement, was easier to swallow than giving Kaepernick more airtime.After Floyd’s killing and protests against police brutality intensified around the world, Goodell was forced to admit the league had been wrong not to listen to players who had been speaking out against systemic racism for years. He summoned the courage to utter the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” And he carefully avoided mention of Kaepernick.The N.F.L. soon began co-opting the message. Sadly enough, the players have largely gone along with the plan. Kneeling protests waned to a trickle. The riot in Washington seemed to offer a prime opportunity for clamoring, unified protest. It didn’t happen. There were games to be played. Money to be made. Jobs to hold on to. And nobody with Kaepernick’s spine.You have to hand it to the czars of football. They’ve neutralized the message. They made just enough room for the previously unthinkable in a sport so conservative, so connected to the police and the military and the flag. Think of the helmets with the social justice messaging and the names of victims of police shootings, and the pithy phrases painted on the edge of fields.One such phrase: “It Takes All of Us.”Well, all of us clearly does not include Kaepernick. As much as he would like to, he will never play again. This season of chaos, when he wasn’t called upon even as teams were steadily depleted by the virus, put an end to any such hope..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1amoy78{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1amoy78{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1amoy78:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Capitol Riot FalloutFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.Another new motto: “End Racism.”This from a league with a long, sordid history of discrimination. A league known to prize Black speed and strength while diminishing Black intelligence and leadership.N.F.L. rosters are 70 percent African-American. There are only two Black head coaches. The league used to tell African-Americans they would get lead jobs if they just put in more patient years learning the craft. Done. Then came an all-too-familiar course correction: The series of recently hired white coaches who are heralded for their genius despite their glaring inexperience.End Racism? Stop with the Orwellian hypocrisy.What if the league had not turned its back on Kaepernick? What if, from the start, it had listened to him and started a sincere dialogue with Black players who emulated his protest?How soon we forget his magnetic talent, lost in the passage of time and obscured by silly arguments that focus on his last struggling seasons leading a 49ers team with little talent and lackluster coaching.To remember his potential, check out the YouTube highlights.Watch his four touchdowns on the frigid New England night in 2012, when he dueled Brady’s Patriots and led the 49ers to a 41-34 win. Skip next to his playoff game in 2013 against Green Bay, when he rushed for 181 yards and outpassed Aaron Rodgers.What might have been is part of the tragedy now. To flourish, the N.F.L. needs singular stars. If Kaepernick had not been rooted from the league, maybe he’s one of the quarterbacks guiding a team to the Super Bowl. Maybe he’s even the talk of it.Of course, you aren’t likely to hear from Kaepernick as we approach the big game. Silence has become his mystique, which fuels an enduring power.So who will do it? Who will bring him up, give him his due and keep telling the story? Who will keep the movement front and center, raw and real, instead of the stuff of manicured public-relations campaigns?What a shame that this is an open question, since there is still so much work to be done.What a shame, because “Kap was right” is not hard to say.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Elizabeth Williams of the Atlanta Dream Continues to Embrace Activism

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesHouse Moves to Remove TrumpHow Impeachment Might WorkBiden Focuses on CrisesCabinet PicksAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySPORTS OF THE TIMESFor Pro Athlete Leading Social Justice Push, a Victory and UncertaintyElizabeth Williams of the Atlanta Dream helped galvanize opposition to one of her team’s owners, Senator Kelly Loeffler, who has criticized Black Lives Matter. But the Capitol riot underscored the work ahead.Elizabeth Williams of the Atlanta Dream.Credit…Ned Dishman/NBAE, via Getty ImagesJan. 11, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETThe challenge seemed simple and direct.Rebuke Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia for her race-baiting derision of Black Lives Matter. Help remove her from her post. Make her continued ownership stake of the Atlanta Dream feel increasingly unbearable.But the searing events of last week provided yet another reminder to the W.N.B.A. and its ubiquitous athlete activists that there is always more to be done.Nobody knows this better than the Dream’s Elizabeth Williams.Unless you are a serious fan of women’s basketball, you probably do not know of Williams. In an era in which athletes are taking star turns for speaking up for justice, she should be a household name.Once uneasy with making her feelings known, she found her voice amid the pain and protest of last summer. She ended up at the center of a unique moment in the annals of American sports: the mutiny by a group of professional players against their team’s prominent and powerful owner.Williams led the Dream’s decision to denounce Loeffler, who controls a 49 percent stake in the team.Then, in her role with the league’s union, she helped guide the move by W.N.B.A. players to endorse the Rev. Raphael Warnock — a political newcomer and decided underdog, as he bid to unseat Loeffler from the Senate.That race, of course, came down to a tense runoff vote. “Just because somebody owns the team, that doesn’t mean they own you, or own your voices,” Warnock said, days before the election, as he thanked the league for its stand.Where was Williams when Warnock beat Loeffler last week?In Turkey, where she has been playing in a women’s league since October — typical of the off-season, overseas grind W.N.B.A. players endure to boost earnings that are a pittance compared with their male colleagues’.She barely had time to savor Warnock’s victory when on Wednesday she watched in horror as a mob of Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol.“An act of terror,” she called it, as we spoke over the phone.“Seeing the faces of those people as they were in the Capitol, seeing their hubris, that’s what pained me,” she said. “They looked so confident that they were not going to face any consequences. That was a reminder of the systemic issues we face. The depth and complexity.”She continued: “For us in the W.N.B.A., it started with this election, but unfortunately, what happened in D.C. reminded us that there are still people out there who feel emboldened to stand against the ideals we believe in.”I could hear the irritation in her voice as she discussed the absence of a clampdown by law enforcement at the Capitol. In June, after the death of George Floyd, she attended a protest in downtown Atlanta. It was her first. Until that day, she had been hesitant to speak out about social justice. She tended to stand back, and let others do the talking.But the demonstration in Atlanta changed her. She recounted the stern and overwhelming police presence. She said she was not alone in having to gird against intimidation. The entire crowd felt wary.And yet she said she had never felt so strong, so connected to a cause. The march changed her. Standing back was no longer an option. Little did she know that days later, Loeffler would attempt to score political points by ripping a page from the Trump playbook and trying to pick a fight with Black athletes.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 11, 2021, 9:50 a.m. ETBiden will receive his second vaccine shot today.How a string of failures led to the attack on the Capitol.Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and others pause their political contributions.In a letter to the league commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, Loeffler denounced Black Lives Matter — which the W.N.B.A., in keeping with its history of activism, had embraced. Loeffler called B.L.M. a political movement and unspooled a string of false claims, including that it promotes “violence and destruction across the country.”To say that players in a league that is 70 percent Black did not take kindly to such words is putting it mildly.Williams sprang to action.Williams read a statement in the wake of Jacob Blake’s shooting in August when the W.N.B.A. elected not to play.Credit…Ned Dishman/NBAE, via Getty ImagesOnce the W.N.B.A. began its pandemic-shortened 2020 season in July, she brought her team together and helped write a sharp rebuke.“We would have been lost without Elizabeth,” Dream guard Blake Dietrick said. She praised Williams, a 6-foot-3 center and the team’s longest tenured player at age 27, for her steady wisdom and understated leadership. “Without her, I’m not sure we come up with such an eloquent, firm response.”When Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back in August by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis., the team chose Williams to respond.Suddenly there she was, live on national television, hesitancy shed as she announced that her team and the league would protest by not playing, even if only for a few nights.“We all hurt for Jacob and his community,” she said, speaking to the camera. “We also have an opportunity to keep the focus on the issues and demand change.”She implored fans: “Don’t wait. If we wait, we don’t make change. It matters. Your voice matters. Your vote matters. Do all you can to demand that your leaders stop with the empty words and do something.”Fast forward to last week, and its vivid displays of American hope and American horror.Williams reeled at the developments from afar.The news that no charges would be filed against the officer who shot Blake.The restless, sleep-deprived election night on Tuesday.The predawn group text Williams received from Sue Bird, the 40-year-old Seattle Storm guard who has become a league sage.“Soooo we helped turn a Senate seat,” the text read.Warnock had won. Williams sat in her darkened bedroom, alone, beaming.A few hours later, news came that Georgia’s other Senate race was over: Jon Ossoff had defeated the incumbent, David Perdue, a Republican, tipping control in Washington toward the Democrats.Not long afterward, Williams found herself on her phone again. Only this time, she was doomscrolling through video clips of chaos in Washington.She is the only American on her Turkish team. Few ask about her activism. But an inquiring teammate saw Williams’s sadness and had questions.“This is the United States Capitol?” the teammate asked, in halting English. “Where is the security?”Williams had no good answers, only strong emotions. Anger at the strife in America. Embarrassment. And more than anything, a firm resolve to continue speaking out.“I see it as my duty,” she told me, “to help keep up the fight.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      No Chiefs, Braves, Blackhawks and Seminoles. Remove Indigenous Names Now.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Race and PolicingFacts on Walter Wallace Jr. CaseFacts on Breonna Taylor CaseFacts on Daniel Prude CaseFacts on George Floyd CaseAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySPORTS OF THE TIMESIt’s 2020. Indigenous Team Names in Sports Have to Go.The Chiefs, Braves, Blackhawks and Seminoles need to follow the Cleveland baseball team in dropping their offensive names.Kansas City Chiefs fans in January, before the team banned headdresses and face paint.Credit…Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressDec. 21, 2020, 3:00 a.m. ETBefore the Kansas City Chiefs play, Rhonda LeValdo does not feel excitement and joy. She feels outrage.LeValdo, a Native American activist, has protested outside Chiefs home games since 2005. Kansas City still allows fans at the unfortunately named Arrowhead Stadium.She opposes traditions that have long been staples at Kansas City games. The horse called Warpaint prancing on the sideline. The beating drums. The battle cries filling the air as thousands of fans pantomime tomahawk chops.She wants the team to change its nickname: No more Chiefs.“Every single game brings trauma for me,” says LeValdo, who teaches communications at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan. The tired customs force her to remember massacres and stolen land. Then there are the glares and taunts from fans as she and the others in her group pass by.“I worry for my life every time we go out there.”The protests seemed hopeless for years. Then came this spring, after George Floyd’s death while in the custody of the Minneapolis police. Amid the nationwide push to re-examine racial discrimination, a clamor from the public and sponsors forced Washington’s N.F.L. team to abandon its racist name.Last week, Cleveland’s baseball team decided that starting in 2022, it would no longer call itself the Indians.For the first time, LeValdo is feeling optimistic. “We’re trying to ride a wave,” she says. “Trying to keep pushing and keep holding teams accountable. The fight for justice has to be addressed with all races, which means it must include the Indigenous people of this land. We are part of this conversation, as well.”Many Native American groups have long opposed sports teams’ using Indigenous names and imagery.Credit…Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune, via Associated PressMy recent conversations with several influential Native American educators and activists revealed a shared optimism with LeValdo. They are buoyed not only by the changes in Washington and Cleveland, but also by the Canadian Football League’s Edmonton Eskimos, who announced a name change, too. And by professional hockey in Sweden, where the Frolunda Indians say they will soon have a new moniker.Activists now say it is time to increase the pressure on big-time American professional and college teams whose insolent mascots, and nicknames have too often escaped scrutiny.Agreed.The Chiefs need a makeover. Patrick Mahomes, are you listening?So, too, do baseball’s Atlanta Braves, hockey’s Chicago Blackhawks and the Florida State University Seminoles.True, there are Native Americans who say they don’t mind the caricatures and tired tropes. Like any ethnic group, Indigenous people hold a full range of views. Nor should it be surprising that a people so subjugated, brutalized and sidelined — who suffered through decades of forced assimilation — would include voices that back the status quo.But among the most important lessons of this year’s reckoning is this: Society had better start listening to those who have been shouting for years that enough is enough — and to the fresh calls for change coming from youth.Objectifying Native Americans, using them as props, failing to acknowledge their complexities, must stop. And in the sports world, that extends beyond the issue of team names and mascots.What do you know about Jim Thorpe? Were you taught his history in school?In 1951, when The Associated Press asked reporters to name the finest athlete of the 20th century’s first half, Babe Ruth came in second. The winner was Thorpe.Jim Thorpe, left, was a Native American and one of the greatest athletes in history, but a fight erupted over displaying his remains.Credit…Associated PressDid you know that Thorpe handily won the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics? That in the same year, he led the football team at Carlisle, his Native American boarding school, to a 27-6 demolition of a powerhouse Army team at West Point? Were you aware of how he was a pioneer in pro football and played six seasons in major league baseball?For all his greatness, Thorpe ended up being treated the same way Native Americans have for centuries: in too many corners, his legacy is either dimly remembered, recalled simplistically, or forgotten altogether.And when he died in 1953, he became a prop.His third wife, a white woman with no ties to Thorpe’s Sac and Fox Nation, barged into a sacred burial ceremony held on his native lands in Oklahoma. Despite protests from tribal leaders and his children from previous marriages, she snatched Thorpe’s body with the help of state troopers. Then she ended up shopping his remains to the highest bidder.That is how the bones of one of the greatest athletes in history ended up where they are today: in a roadside mausoleum on the outskirts of a Pennsylvania town that renamed itself Jim Thorpe, all in a bid to attract tourists and boost the local economy.For years, Thorpe’s tribe and his sons fought to have his remains sent back to Oklahoma. The town fought back. Thorpe is their commodity. Many who live there say they are giving him admiration and respect.You don’t have to look far to find major sports teams justifying their racism by claiming the same.This summer, the Atlanta Braves released a statement saying their team “honors, supports, and values the Native American community.”Native American groups have denounced the tomahawk chop performed by Atlanta Braves fans.Credit…Kevin Jairaj/USA Today Sports, via ReutersBut a name change does not appear in the works for the team. And though the club says it is considering whether to dump its ritual tomahawk chop, such a move is no sure bet.The Braves are said to have appropriated the chop and battle shouts from Florida State University, which still embraces that tradition. Florida State’s mascot is Osceola, a famed leader of the Seminole Indians who is played by a student. At football games, the mascot rides a horse to midfield and plants a burning spear in the turf.The university, by the way, claims on an official website that Osceola is not a mascot. Instead, Florida State calls its faux Native American warrior “a symbol that we respect and prize.”Ugh.The Chicago Blackhawks hold tight to the same rationalization. Since the team’s inception in the 1920s, its jerseys have featured a cartoonish image of the Native American warrior who is the team’s namesake.Like most teams that brand themselves with racist tropes, the Blackhawks have sought cover in the form of endorsements from Native American groups.The team once had a relationship with Chicago’s American Indian Center. Then an emboldened Indigenous youth group fought the connection. Its objections were backed by recent in-depth research showing a psychological toll on the Native community caused by caricatured mascots and team names.The center cut ties with the team. “Our youth said they’d had enough,” said Fawn Pochel, the center’s education director. “They represent the new guard, reimagining a future that many were taught could not exist.“New demands are going to be made.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Putting on a Mask Raised Naomi Osaka’s Voice

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Race and PolicingFacts on Walter Wallace Jr. CaseFacts on Breonna Taylor CaseFacts on Daniel Prude CaseFacts on George Floyd CaseNaomi Osaka after winning the U.S. Open.Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexThe Great ReadHow Putting on a Mask Raised Naomi Osaka’s VoiceShe used her time away from competing during the pandemic to reflect on the world and her place within it. When the time came to speak, she approached it in her own distinct way.Naomi Osaka after winning the U.S. Open.Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyDec. 16, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETAs usual, Naomi Osaka’s postmatch interview struck an emotional chord.It was two years after she had burst to the fore with a moving win over Serena Williams in the 2018 United States Open women’s singles final, where she had stood small and unguarded, crying in front of an audience that had been rooting for her opponent.Now, in September, after winning the U.S. Open for a second time, Osaka was asked by the ESPN analyst Tom Rinaldi to explain why she had entered each of her seven matches wearing a face mask bearing the name of a Black victim of racist violence.“What was the message you wanted to send?” Rinaldi asked Osaka.“Well, what was the message that you got?” she replied. “I feel like the point is to make people start talking.”Her answer, volleyed back at him reflexively, precise and a bit arch, revealed a sharply different woman from the one who had withered under excruciating boos at Arthur Ashe Stadium after her first U.S. Open title.As her star has grown, Osaka has described herself to interviewers as shy and quiet, though her older sister, Mari, likens her to the character Stewie Griffin, from the animated TV show “The Family Guy,” whose malevolent genius is subverted by the constraints of being a baby. That demeanor was sufficient as Osaka navigated the world as an effervescent upstart.When it came to opening up about nearly any deeply felt topic, Osaka used to let the words kink up inside her like an unspooled garden hose. But in 2020, Osaka found her voice and the self-possession to speak up when and how she saw fit, a massive leap for a global superstar who once felt too self-conscious to exhort herself even on the court. With time to engage with civil rights protests because of the pandemic’s pause of tennis, Osaka found the space to unravel her thoughts to convey an urgent and unequivocal demand for change.In doing so, she came to be as precise and efficient in her protest as she has been in her tennis, offering up her version of soft power: deploying bold activism shaped by her unique understanding of the world and her place in it.Osaka eschewed the playbook of other tennis stars.There’s a faction in tennis that has long wanted to hear a more polished version of Osaka.“Forever, whether it was the WTA Tour or other interested parties, everyone was always putting pressure on me to get Naomi media-trained,” Stuart Duguid, her agent, said. “I always thought that would be a mistake for her. That’s the last thing we want to contrive.”After Osaka haltingly riffed through what she called “the worst acceptance speech of all time,” at Indian Wells in March 2018, that push ramped up with executives letting Duguid know they had not been charmed.Osaka posed with the championship trophy at Indian Wells in 2018.Credit…Kevork Djansezian/Getty ImagesStill, he argued that Osaka’s candor made her a star whom fans could connect with. Displaying the mischief and joy of anybody’s teenage sister in her interviews, Osaka racked up deals that proved Duguid right. She rejected prestige for prestige’s sake, bucking the standard luxury watch and car endorsements that mark “making it” in tennis.She instead aligned with brands that made sense for a Gen Z global citizen: She added deals with Sony PlayStation and Airbnb. She took on equity partnerships with performance brands and companies like BodyArmor SportWater and Hyperice, and started fashion collaborations with Comme des Garçons and Adeam, labels coveted not at country clubs but on street style roundups.The haul beefed up her 2019 earnings to $37 million, a figure Forbes estimated was the most any woman had earned as an athlete in one year.In what she termed “a U-shaped” 2019, though, Osaka’s rawness and honesty conveyed the depths of her frustration over how much she struggled after her rapid-fire Grand Slam wins. After a 16-match win streak at Grand Slam events, she was upset at the 2019 French Open in her third match and lost in a first-round stunner at Wimbledon. After Wimbledon, she faced reporters who presented her with variations of the same question — what’s wrong with you?“There’s answers to questions that you guys ask that I still haven’t figured out yet,” she curtly replied to one, during a news conference she left by telling a moderator, “I feel like I’m about to cry.”It was a troublesome showing — her postmatch interviews felt like eavesdropping on a doctor’s stethoscope. She offered only sadness and frustration, with no spin.The year mercifully ended with Osaka’s hiring a new coach, Wim Fissette, an analytics-minded Belgian who had worked with other No. 1s, Simona Halep, Kim Clijsters and, most recently, Victoria Azarenka.When she was ousted in the round of 32 at the Australian Open, Fissette and Osaka pried open a vein of communication. To that point, they had developed a polite repartee about the technical parts of her game, but stopped short of talking about her mind-set entering matches.“She’s not a person that you get to know and she tells you everything you need to know,” Fissette said.Osaka revealed in a come-to-Jesus conversation weeks after the loss that she had told him things were just fine when they weren’t. She had assumed an extreme amount of pressure to win in Australia and wasn’t mentally ready to deal with a match that didn’t go her way. Osaka agreed to open up, realizing that sharing her feelings did not challenge her normal confidence in her game and in her physicality.“I don’t necessarily need that much in terms of strategy, and I feel like my game is always good enough to win,” she said in an email interview in November. “But of course you can’t play your A game every day, so it’s nice to know that I have some information on my opponent in case I need it. That definitely helps to relax me going into matches.”‘I was able to take more personal time.’Of course, her tennis wasn’t tested much in the months that followed because the pandemic shut down the WTA Tour in mid-March along with the rest of major sports leagues. Osaka used the downtime to consider the world from her vantage point. “I was able to focus on things outside of tennis and live my life outside of tennis in a way I never have and likely never will again,” she said. “I was able to take more personal time, more time for self-reflection, more time to understand and witness the world around me.”Tendrils of info on how she spent those months and how they changed her have seeped into her social media accounts where, between family dance-offs, she posted images of Frantz Fanon’s book “The Wretched of the Earth” and appeared with her boyfriend, the rapper Cordae Dunston, on workout bikes in a picture snapped by Colin Kaepernick. Amid Netflix binges and at-home workouts, and learning to cook her favorite of her mother Tamaki’s recipes, Osaka spent time reading about how Haiti became the first Black-led republic in the world. That was a suggestion from Leonard Francois, her father, to learn about her ancestors.Without the tunnel vision of a tennis schedule, Osaka showed the effects of the psyche-scarring onslaught of violence against Black Americans. In the days after George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police in May, she flew with Dunston to protests there and later wrote an opinion piece for Esquire challenging that society “take on systemic racism head-on, that the police protect us and don’t kill us.”Though Osaka’s assertion of each part of her identity — Japanese, Haitian, raised for a time in the United States — has given her profitable endorsement lanes, she has often highlighted her Blackness when commentators minimize it. That erasure has happened in small ways, as when a TV interviewer after a 2019 Australian Open match gave a shout-out to her Japanese supporters there. She thanked them, then gave “big ups” to Haiti.Her Blackness has been overlooked in more troubling circumstances, too.After the 2018 Open win, an Australian newspaper cartoon depicted the final scene with Williams in racist caricature — mammy-esque facial features frozen in twisted rage — which the artist defended against backlash by saying, “I drew her as an African-American woman.” Nearly lost in the controversy was his rendering of Osaka: pale, with blond, straight hair and nearly unrecognizable. In 2019, her sponsor Nissin pulled an ad in which a cartoon of Osaka had skin and hair many shades lighter than she had in real life.Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka after the 2018 U.S. Open final.Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThat same year, a Japanese comedy duo said Osaka needed “some bleach” and was “too sunburned,” remarks for which they later apologized without naming Osaka specifically.With Osaka cut off from IRL social touchstones and without access to her day job, her TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms provided the most candid way for her to speak up as she had pledged. When she tweeted her support for the Black Lives Matter movement in June and encouraged participation in a B.L.M. protest in Osaka, Japan, she faced social media trolls who called her a terrorist and a widespread backlash from Japanese people who viewed the issue as an outsider’s cause.“I think for people in America, the B.L.M. movement is something we have all started to talk about and talk about openly,” Osaka said, “yet globally, it’s not as common, and I hope that changed.”The cultural anthropologist John G. Russell sees Osaka’s emergence in Japan as a significant stride given the country’s long history of touting its monoculture, but one that has opened her and her sponsors up to racist vitriol from some people who view mixed-race Japanese figures as a threat to the national identity.The notoriously savage Twitter user Yu Darvish, a Major League Baseball pitcher who is Japanese and Iranian, and the N.B.A. star Rui Hachimura (Japanese and Beninese) have also used their platforms to clap back and to promote social justice.“They are stepping up to address issues that the Japanese media would prefer not to confront,” Russell said in an email interview, cautioning that though their efforts have increased visibility in Japan, their message “may serve to reinforce the view that hafu are themselves outsiders and not full members of Japanese society.” (“Hafu” is a term used for Japanese people of mixed-race backgrounds.)When tennis returned, Osaka put her protest front and center.The day before Osaka played her first match at the Western & Southern Open in August, Jacob Blake was shot in the back by the police in Kenosha, Wis.By her quarterfinal match, renewed protests had reached American pro sports, with teams in the N.B.A., the W.N.B.A. and M.L.B. opting to stop competing on Aug. 26.Osaka came off the court that day planning to withdraw from the tournament. No call with a players’ union, no team meeting. Duguid, her agent, asked her to hold off announcing for 10 minutes or so while he scrambled to give her sponsors and the tournament a heads-up. That done, she dropped a meticulously framed statement to her various social feeds that explained her stance.“Before I am an athlete, I am a black woman,” she wrote. “And as a black woman I feel as though there are much more important matters at hand that need immediate attention, rather than watching me play tennis.”Officials paused the Western & Southern Open rather than have Osaka withdraw from it to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake. She finished as runner-up, after an injury caused her to pull out of the final.Credit…Jason Szenes/EPA, via ShutterstockWithin minutes, the WTA’s chief executive, Steve Simon, called Duguid to salvage her participation. Simon, along with other tennis and tournament officials, eventually agreed to pause the tournament.“I have never, ever experienced the quickness and the united front for these leaders to come together on what was a very, very critical moment,” Stacey Allaster, the tournament director for the U.S. Open, said.It was an unmistakable display of Osaka’s power within the sport, an authority that is still heavily predicated upon winning.As she entered the U.S. Open, so much had changed for her personally and in the world. Fissette said no player he had coached carried Osaka’s glee and determination entering a Grand Slam event. With a strong showing at the Western & Southern (she advanced to the final, but then withdrew with an injury), a more open relationship with her team and a new expectation that her matches might get tough, she came into the U.S. Open confident enough to have seven face masks made — one for each round needed to win a championship.“I wouldn’t travel to a tournament without expecting to play seven matches, and initially, when I thought about the best way to raise awareness and honor voices that had been silenced, it was more something I had to do on a personal level, for myself,” Osaka said. “I didn’t feel that with all that I was seeing in the world around me I could just show up and play as if nothing had happened, as if lives were not unjustly taken.”As she bounded into Ashe Stadium on Sept. 1 for her opening match, a plume of hair and a bulky headphone tiara framed her mask bearing the name Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old medical worker who was killed in March during a raid of her apartment in Louisville, Ky.Cheryl Cooky, a sociology professor at Purdue who studies gender and sexuality, saw the quiet but impossible-to-ignore protest as contributing powerfully to the iconography of athlete activism.Collectively, she said, we tend to remember the visual shorthand of John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s gloved black fists at the 1968 Olympics, or Kaepernick’s kneeling, rather than women who have been at the vanguard of protest movements. Women like Ariyana Smith, the Knox College basketball player who in 2014 foreshadowed future demonstrations in college and pro sports by protesting the killing of Michael Brown by the police in Ferguson, Mo.“The protests that are happening in the sports space are by Black women athletes, but it’s the men who become these iconic figures,” said Cooky, co-author of “No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport and the Unevenness of Social Change.” Osaka’s protest, she said, was visible enough to stand alongside the most memorable acts.Osaka wore a mask in honor of Breonna Taylor as she celebrated defeating Misaki Doi in the first round of the U.S. Open.Credit…Frank Franklin/Associated PressThe imagery focused a laser beam of attention on Osaka during the most arduous tournament this year, during which she could not have her normal squad of family members and friends on hand for a postmatch hug. Still, positive reactions wormed their way into the Open bubble.The Greek player Stefanos Tsitsipas, who had texted Osaka after both tours paused in August and asked her to explain to him the Black Lives Matter movement, watched matches at the Open while wearing a B.L.M. T-shirt. Osaka regularly found earnest messages from fans all over the world on her social feeds. In an interview on ESPN, she was shown a video in which the families of Ahmaud Arbery and Tamir Rice thanked her for remembering their loved ones.“Once I saw that so many people were talking, those seven masks acted as more of an inspiration for me than added pressure,” Osaka said. “I am not really one to lose composure, but that moment left me speechless and quite emotional.”By now we know how that tournament turned out, how Osaka rallied from down a set and a break to defeat Azarenka, and then the retort to Rinaldi. The triumph left her “completely exhausted — physically and mentally,” and she declined a daytime talk show blitz as an encore.Instead, she wrapped herself the next day in what resembled a shortened version of a karabela dress, a traditional Haitian dress for celebrations, and a head wrap for her official champions portrait. Later, she and her family went to Haiti to reconnect with the past, a trip that she called “an amazing and emotional experience to cherish.”Now, two months removed from her victory and with the year coming to a close, Osaka still cannot give voice to the specifics of how her life, career and goals have changed. “I think that’s something that I won’t have a firm answer to for a while,” she said.When she does, she’ll let us know.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More