It shouldn’t be news to anyone that the Chinese government, an authoritarian, communist behemoth based several thousand miles from our shores, holds an effective veto over what even fairly powerful Americans can say and do. We should have been used to that, even before Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey committed the unfathomable error of tweeting in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong last week.
A major alteration to a Hollywood movie here, a Confucius Institute there, maybe the occasional consulting firm retreat held four miles from a Uighur internment camp — the American creative, academic, and business community’s willingness to bend itself to Beijing’s actual and perceived will is kind of a banality by now. So, in a way, last week’s grim spectacle, in which the league office and a well-known player and owner lined up to condemn or distance themselves from Morey, was almost a positive development. For a flickering moment, the banality became a source of outrage.
Senators and presidential candidates and commentators of every political stripe declared that the NBA was wrong to criticize Morey. The cynicism was clear to everyone. China is such a huge market for the NBA that the league set up a training center in the police-state Uighur region of Xinjiang in 2016 — making the association at least no better than McKinsey, the aforementioned consulting firm — and it turned out that the Lakers and Nets were touring the country the week after Morey’s tweet appeared.
Also obvious was the unseemly overkill of the response. The league criticized Morey in both English and Mandarin, with the latter announcement declaring the NBA’s “extreme disappointment in Morey’s inappropriate statement.” Rockets star James Harden, the NBA’s most valuable player two seasons ago and someone who must be highly sensitive about his image in the world’s most populous country, personally apologized to China for his GM’s tweet. Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai, a co-founder of Alibaba and therefore someone whose fortune is dependent in part upon the good graces of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote a lengthy Facebook post that used the Opium Wars to explain why Morey’s tweet had been so deeply offensive.
Americans were treated to an autocratic struggle session featuring an NBA MVP as one of its key antagonists. This was instructive: We all got a glimpse into how dictatorships hound and discredit their opponents, except we got to see this play out on our own soil, involving people a lot of us have heard of and care about. This controversy isn’t the worst of opportunities for those who yearn for change in China, or for people who believe in rethinking the democratic world’s relationship with Beijing. At least more Americans know the lengths to which the rich and powerful are going in order to protect their investments in China. At least more of them know what’s being surrendered in the process.
Still, this awareness-raising comes at a ghastly price. The NBA isn’t like a movie studio or a university or McKinsey. As one of the final bastions of American cultural power of which everyone can be unreservedly proud, it’s actually far more important than any of those other cowering entities.
Basketball is our most democratic sport and a candidate for the single-greatest American thing, period. It is thankfully lacking in football’s violence and martial spirit and doesn’t smooth out the achievements of a transcendent individual talent as baseball does; it has hockey’s geometry and teamwork without any of the barriers to entry. It is played and beloved absolutely everywhere among people of every background every month of the year. For every one of us who has felt the crunch of an outside linebacker, scores more have grasped the dirty rubber of a cheap basketball and conquered the 10 vertical feet separating earth from rim.
The NBA neither claims nor possesses exclusive stewardship over basketball as such, but it has a well-earned reputation as the least cynical of American sports leagues. The association’s latter-day virtues — its high payer compensation, latitude for social and political activism, and very non-NFL-, non-MLB-like approval of fun and excitement — often made it unnecessary to separate the sport from the business. The two have been great for one another: NBA stars are demigods the world over; fans can watch them with little to no real cognitive dissonance.
The NBA has its problems, and no multi-billion-dollar enterprise is an unvarnished good, but Adam Silver has cannily protected the league, and therefore the sport, from becoming a political or culture-war battleground. If the NBA’s special virtue was always something of a fiction, it is one we should all be very sorry to lose.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet Magazine.
