Basketball star LeBron James said Friday that the National Football League had a problem with elderly white men owning teams and forcing players to do what they say or get out, connecting the discussion to protests akin to Colin Kaepernick’s demonstrations during the 2015 and 2016 season.
“The NFL. They’ve just got a bunch of old, white men owning teams and they got that slave mentality,” James said on his HBO show, “The Shop,” which features discussions about sports and other topics with athletes and celebrity guests. “‘This is my team, and you’ll do what the fuck I tell y’all to do or we’ll get rid of y’all.’ … The players are who make the ship go.”
James’ comments came as part of a discussion with Los Angeles Rams running back Todd Gurley about whether anthem protests were more muted this year and whether it was due to fear. Gurley said that there were multiple factors, including the possibility of rifts in locker rooms due to so many different people having different feelings. Gurley also said that it wasn’t exactly fear, saying players don’t want to mess up their careers.
James said that the NFL wanted to control players and said he was appreciative of National Basketball Association commissioner Adam Silver, because James said that players were allowed to have “real feeling” and could express it, as long as it was in an educational and nonviolent way.
While the majority of NFL owners are white men, most of them own the team jointly with siblings or spouses. There are also multiple Jewish owners, a couple of female owners, and one Pakistani-American owner, Shahid Khan, who bought the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2011.
