LeBron puts China issue in perspective — it’s about his money

By Dave Hyde

Sun Sentinel

We get the heroes we deserve. They reflect the causes we value. So Michael Jordan has stood all these years firmly and boldly with Nike’s profits. Tiger Woods’ big social cause became his social life.

Now it’s LeBron James taking a resolute stand in a way that must make a previous sports generation groan. He chose money over freedom. He said it’s fine to call out a free U.S. society, but not a repressive Chinese government.

He did the corporate side-step as fluidly as a basketball Euro-step in the manner every NBA player and American corporation has to keep Chinese money flowing.

LeBron said Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s recent tweet to, “Fight for freedom, stand for Hong Kong,” was either “misinformed or “not educated on the situation.”

“We all talk about this freedom of speech, yes, we all do have freedom of speech,” James said. “But at times, there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you’re not thinking about others and you’re only thinking about yourself.”

This issue, as LeBron framed it, wasn’t about freedom, repressive China or a protesting Hong Kong. It was about a so-selfish tweet that Morey could have “waited a week” to send, he said.

Why wait? Because in a week NBA teams would have finished shuffling preseason games through China. The league and its players could have secured their money stream without facing pesky questions about side issues of freedom and government protests.

Why doesn’t LeBron just say what the NBA really means?

“I’ll shut up and dribble on China to protect my money.”

This is what our times value, what our heroes reflect. It wasn’t always so. Once upon a time a sports generation offered different values. Jim Brown spoke out. Billie Jean King opened minds. Muhammad Ali put his career on the line by refusing to go to Vietnam.

Arthur Ashe, soft-spoken and intellectual, became the center of an international storm by simply applying to play a tennis match in apartheid South Africa. Many whites, obviously, didn’t want him there. Many blacks asked if he’d validate a racist government.

Ashe, who had just won the 1968 U.S. Open, was confronting apartheid. He was denied a visa by South Africa. That caused South Africa to be kicked out of international tennis. That’s the fight he wanted.

In 1973, in a changing world he was helping create, Ashe played in South Africa’s national tennis center just to show a white world a black man could win there. And he did.

“True heroism,” he once said, “is remarkably sober. It’s very undramatic.”

A simple statement. A common-sense thought. That’s how Ashe defined heroism. And it’s not that we’ve lost those voices along the way. LeBron, to be sure, has found his voice starting with the Miami Heat when he and teammates took a powerful photo in hoods, heads down, faces unseen, to say any of them could have been the murdered teen Trayvon Martin.

He has since questioned President Trump regarding their divergent beliefs on race and social issues. He stood last month with a California politician pushing for college athletes to get paid.

He aligned himself with historical activism by re-tweeting a Martin Luther King line that, “Our Lives Begin To End The Day We Become Silent About Things That Matter.”

He went silent on China when it threatened his bank account. He isn’t alone. Every voice in the NBA has gone mum. Golden State coach Steve Kerr, one of the most eloquent on social issues, was asked about China’s repressive society and quickly turned the subject to American gun violence.

San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich, another voice of good reason, went to the old stand-by of attacking Trump rather than involve himself in the sticky China situation.

After talking about Morey’s tweet, LeBron subsequently went to Twitter to, “clear up the confusion.”

He wrote: “I do not believe there was any consideration for the consequences and ramifications of the tweet. I’m not discussing the substance. Others can talk about that.”

What’s to clear up? Everyone has a price. That’s the message here, the story of our times. In another age, Muhammad Ali famously said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” In our bottom-line times, LeBron essentially said, “I can’t profit off Hong Kong.”