Who Should Steve Kerr Be Mad At?
To actually move the needle on gun control measures, figures from the sporting world need a better strategy than yelling at Mitch McConnell.
Dear Readers,
In the face of another tragedy like the one that unfolded this week in Uvalde, Texas, it’s sort of hard to see how writing our usual blogs about sports can be useful. Chelsea Janes, the national baseball reporter at The Washington Post, put it well on Twitter this week when she said,
“I’m always so unsure of whether to tweet about baseball things in the wake of tragedies like Uvalde. Like, how can the usual baseball news matter at all? Or does it help distract people and is it worth it for that reason? But I just had the really jarring realization that I end up tweeting the usual stuff because if I stopped every time something like this happened I would never report at all. How are we at the point where we are somehow used to this?”
We generally try to keep it light(ish) in this medium, but honestly, the only way not to feel completely hopeless is to start thinking strategically about how to direct our anger and frustration. We wrote about that concept this week.
-Ian and Calder
What can Steve Kerr do?
On Tuesday evening, after news broke that an 18-year-old gunman had murdered 19 fourth-graders at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr sat for a pre-game news conference before the Warriors’ matchup against the Dallas Mavericks in Game 4 of the NBA’s Western Conference Finals. A victory in the upcoming game promised to put Golden State into the Finals, but Kerr, who has never been shy about wading into national politics, didn’t want to talk about basketball.
Instead, he delivered an impassioned, 3-minute-long speech about the shooting, which had unfolded just over 300 miles from the site of the game in Dallas. And in the course of his remarks, Kerr did not hesitate to pull some hefty political punches. In the span of a few minutes, he called out Mitch McConnell by name, pilloried the 50 members of the U.S. Senate who refuse to vote on H.R. 8—the Bipartisan Background Checks Bill—and denounced Republican elected officials for “holding Americans hostage” on gun control legislation. At the end of his statement, he slammed his fist on the table and walked out of the room:
Kerr is right to be mad, and this issue is more personal for him than most. In 1984, when Kerr was only 18-years old, his father, the academic Malcolm Kerr, was shot and killed by two gunmen while serving as the president of the American University in Beirut. Like many people who have been personally affected by gun violence, Kerr sees Republicans’ efforts to depoliticize mass shootings for what they really are: self-interested attempts to maintain an intolerably violent status quo.
In the days since his remarks, Kerr has rightfully been praised for calling out members of Congress who refuse to reform America’s gun laws. The righteousness of Kerr’s anger and the depth of his convictions is beyond doubt.
But given the political challenges that stand in the way of curbing gun violence in the U.S., righteous anger is, unfortunately, not enough. As his recent comments have demonstrated, Kerr is a voice of moral authority in the national conversation over gun violence, but even his exhortations are not going to convince Republicans to move on H.R. 8—or on any other gun-control measure, for that matter.
This doesn’t mean that Kerr should shut up, but it does mean that he should direct his anger toward a group of people who might actually be forced to listen to it: namely, the NBA’s owners.
Between 2015 and 2020, the league’s owners collectively donated almost $15 million to Republican candidates and Republican-aligned groups, representing over 50 percent of owners’ total donations, per The Ringer. When you exclude the donations of Steve Ballmer, the (nominally) left-leaning billionaire owner of the L.A. Clippers, those numbers look even worse: a full 81 percent of owners’ political donations during the 2020 election cycle went to Republicans.
Of course, these owners aren’t the people who will ultimately vote on H.R. 8, but they are, in a nontrivial sense, the people who decide who gets to vote on H.R. 8. Just imagine what would happen if, in addition to denouncing Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues in Washington, Kerr also called out these NBA owners for spending millions of dollars to put those very Republicans in Congress. On the eve of the NBA Finals, the league’s beat reporters would be forced to ask owners about their support for pro-gun politicians, forcing the media spotlight to fall squarely on the owners’ right-wing politics. Kerr would almost certainly get pilloried by Fox News and the Barstool-aligned faction of the sports media, but it wouldn’t really matter: the Warriors owners’ are largely apolitical venture capitalists who have thus far been tolerant of Kerr’s political interventions, so his job would probably be safe. And it wasn’t — well, we imagine he would land on his feet. Political “courage” sometimes means taking a risk.
Now, we imagine that most NBA owners aren’t Second Amendment absolutists or NRA hard-liners. Instead, most of them are just generic rich dudes who think that Republicans are likely to lower their taxes even further. But if Kerr were to force them to publicly reckon with the moral implications of their support for Republicans—in this case, the bullet-ridden bodies of 19 children—the impact could be massive. Instead of being just another drop in the national conversation over gun violence, his comments would be front-page news. And even more importantly, they might force the NBA’s owners to think twice before writing their next round of campaign checks.
What Kerr has already done is not easy. In a corporate atmosphere like the NBA that explicitly discourages political speech, it takes guts to speak your mind clearly and with conviction. The same is true of San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kepler, who announced in a fiery blog post this week that he’ll be sitting out the National Anthem at the Giants’ upcoming games.
But at a certain point, railing against issues that you can’t change isn’t savvy politics—it’s just cultural catharsis. To actually move the needle on national gun control policy, Kerr, Kepler, and other sympathetic figures in the sporting world need to identify real political pressure points within their leagues and relentlessly hammer away at them. And in this case, those pressure points lie smack in the middle of the owners’ suites.
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