he would support. You see, Gantt was black and also a Democrat. Get it? Black people supposedly always vote based on color and party without regard to the thinking of those running. Wow! Worse, Obama’s dismay similarly implied that Jordan had the time to bone up on North Carolina politics at the same that he was playing basketball at a level that it had never been played. Translated for those who need it, Obama’s disappointment signaled an all- too-common belief about athletes in general (and basketball players in particular) that it’s all instinct... as opposed to genius born of endless studying. Yes, how very offensive, and how very untrue about basketball players. As San Antonio Spurs assistant coach Becky Hammon once said about Jordan, the best thing about him “was his mind for the game.” Hopefully readers have started to detect a pattern here. The greats in sports are that way because they’re very talented in addition to being very smart. Jordan was the smartest basketball player in the world. Once the late Kobe Bryant made the NBA, he too studied endlessly. As former Sports Illustrated basketball writer Lee Jenkins explained about Bryant entering the league, “He asked a hundred questions, of teammates but also opponents. He once asked Michael Jordan at a stoppage about the release angle on his fadeaway.”
The expectation that black NBA players would pull the lever for Biden just because of the color of their skin brought to mind the 1990 race between Republican Jesse Helms and Democrat Harvey Gantt for one of North Carolina’s U.S. Senate seats. By 1990, Michael Jordan was the biggest star in the NBA, and a global brand unto himself. Very shamefully, the expectation was that Jordan had to weigh in on the election, mostly because he was a North Carolina native, and a former national champion UNC Tar Heel. This was when he famously quipped that “Republicans wear sneakers, too,” but it’s sad that it even came to that. Really, why was Jordan expected to have an opinion on a Senate race at the same time that he was the world’s best basketball player and easily one of the world’s greatest brand builders? Wasn’t that enough? Apparently not... Supposedly to be true to his race, Jordan would have to comment on Gantt versus Helms. Even former President Barack Obama weighed in on Jordan’s quietude years later in the 2020 ESPN documentary about Jordan’s last year with the Chicago Bulls, The Last Dance . Obama expressed light disappointment that Jordan didn’t come out in favor of Gantt way back when. Obama insulted his hero. Indeed, not asked of Obama was why Jordan, assuming he had a political bent, would have automatically been for Gantt. Obama’s reasoning seemed to be that Jordan’s knowledge of politics and policy was so surface that it would have to be a given whom
A FOUL POLICY In modern times, LeBron James sits at the
American Consequences
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