Before the big NBA game on Tuesday night, there was no talk of basketball: only disappointment, rage and pain.
On Thursday, the sport slipped into the background again, as appropriate, replaced by heartbreaking facts, with the kind assistance of two Major League Baseball teams and calls for something to be done to end the carnage.
Something is wrong in America. We cannot understand how to stop aggression and death.
The frantic killings in Buffalo and Uwalde, Texas, shook us to the core again. We are preparing against the plague of gun violence that threatens every part of the country: grocery stores and churches, street corners and shopping malls and schools full of primary school children.
Everyday life feels at any moment, as if it can turn into horror.
Against the background of all this, our games continue. Important games with the participation of remarkable teams. The Golden State Warriors played their famous brand of beautiful basketball in the finals of the NBA Playoffs Conference. The Yankees and Tampa Bay Race, rivals of the division and contenders for this year’s World Series, played a key series in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Sport can be a tonic in difficult times. Games and great performances offer a chance to wash away the terrible emotion. Let’s move on and even forget. But hours after 19 students and two teachers were killed in Uwalde, Steve Kerr, head coach of Golden State, a man who knows firsthand the suffering caused by gun violence, did not allow us to get rid of the agony completely.
From the opinion: Texas School Shooting
A comment from the Times Opinion on the massacre at an elementary school in Uwalde, Texas.
- Michelle Goldberg: As we come to terms with another tragedy, the most common feeling is the bitter admission that nothing will change.
- Nicholas Christoph, a former Times Opinion columnist: Weapons policy is complex and politically boring and will not make everyone safe. But it can reduce gun deaths.
- Roxanne Gay: For all our cultural mania for courtesy, there is nothing more uncivilized than the political establishment’s acceptance of the persistence of mass shootings.
- Jay Caspian Kang: Sharing memes with each new tragedy, we have created a museum of unbearable grief, full of names and photos of the dead.
Both the Yankees and Reiss will soon come together in a way that requires attention to what matters – and most importantly, not for wins or losses or the battle for first place in the American League East.
In the minutes before game 4 of his team’s playoff series, Kerr sat at the table in front of reporters and powerfully released. None of it is scripted. Everything came from a heart shaped by personal experience. And it had nothing to do with basketball or sports.
“In the last 10 days, we’ve had black adults killed in Buffalo, Asian church people in Southern California. And now we have children killed at school, “Kerr said, his words strong enough to go viral almost instantly. His voice trembled. His eyes narrowed in burning emotion.
He pounded on the table as his voice rose.
“I’m tired. I’ve had enough. We’re going to play the game tonight, but I want everyone who listens to this to think about their own child or grandchild, mother or father, sister, brother. How would you feel if that happened to you today?” ?
Updated
May 27, 2022, 8:26 pm ET
“When are we going to do something?” he added.
“Enough!”
Kerr has long spoken at press conferences and elsewhere about tougher gun laws and against our society’s thirst for violence. He did so again this week, denouncing politicians who do nothing, and specifically criticizing the Senate for not even passing legislation as simple as requiring universal scrutiny.
Watching him at that moment meant watching a man struggling to make sense of the tragedy he was too familiar with. In 1984, during Kerr’s first year at the University of Arizona, his father Malcolm was shot and killed by assassins in front of his office at the American University in Beirut.
With the growing dark cloud of insane gun violence in America, don’t expect silence.
Political statements are rarer in baseball, still nominally our national pastime, although its dwindling audience is aging towards conservatism. Even the stable Yankees – a team so committed to tradition that they don’t even allow players to wear facial hair – and their division rival have collaborated on a unique message. Instead of publishing the usual statistics and noting updates during their match on Thursday, the two teams shared facts about gun violence in front of millions of followers.
When they played on Thursday, their Twitter and Instagram posts focused entirely on the number of gun victims in the country.
“This can’t be normal,” read another. “We can’t stand it. We can’t look the other way. We all know that if nothing changes, nothing changes. “
Another: “Every day, more than 110 Americans are killed with guns, and more than 200 are shot and wounded.”
Jason Zilo, Yankees’ vice president of communications, put the publications in perspective in a text message to my colleague David Waldstein this week. “As citizens of the world, it is difficult to process these shootings and just return to our usual routine,” Zilo said. “For one night, we wanted to consider and draw attention to statistics that are much more important and weighty than the average for cotton wool.”
Well said. And well done.
I am one of the legions touched by gun violence: the suicide of a beloved great-uncle, the murder of a distant cousin, a baby, from a crazy bullet in a gang shootout. My pain floats in the same deep currents that swell across America. We grieve together. Together we decide how to react.
This week, Steve Kerr and the Yankees and Rays were there to remind us not to dive too deep into the easy distractions of the sport – and that action is needed to end this madness.
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