Utah Jazz head coach Quin Snyder was recently the target of a hit job by the state’s largest newspaper after having committed the crime of donating money to a Republican congressional candidate.
Andy Larsen of the Salt Lake Tribune insists that this wasn’t actually a hit job and that the paper was simply “looking to explain what happened with the donation.” Snyder gave a whopping $1,000 to former NFL player Burgess Owens, who is running against vulnerable Democrat Ben McAdams in Utah’s 4th Congressional District.
Snyder has taken Utah to the playoffs each of the last four years, and even Larsen admits that he’s been “vocal about his support of the Black Lives Matter movement.” Snyder even knelt for the national anthem with his team in the NBA’s bubble. But Larsen wants to use the state’s largest newspaper to shame Snyder because Owens has condemned the Black Lives Matter movement.
Snyder has walked the NBA’s social justice line, so Larsen has concluded this is an important story because apparently donating to a black congressional candidate contradicts Snyder’s public stances. It’s also apparently impossible that Snyder is making very small donations to political candidates with whom he disagrees on one issue because he agrees with them on others. All that matters is that it must be publicized that Snyder has run afoul of the social justice creed.
While Snyder and the Jazz appear to have shrugged off the hit job entirely, Snyder isn’t the first sports figure to be the target of a media shaming campaign for not being sufficiently left-wing. Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy was forced into an apology after a CBS Sports writer dug up a picture of him wearing a One America News Network T-shirt on a fishing trip. Orlando Magic player Jonathan Isaac was asked after standing for the national anthem if he thought black lives mattered. If it weren’t ridiculous enough, Isaac is black.
Targeting citizens based on donations isn’t just limited to sports figures, as Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro showed last year when he attacked business owners and retirees in his own district for donating to President Trump, but it appears that it is another tool in the arsenal of media outlets looking to whip athletes and coaches into line. And the media push won’t stop until sports has turned into the same kind of social justice haven as Hollywood and higher education.
Or until enough people of goodwill push back.
