Wizards' dark episode should shed light on image-damaging actions
WASHINGTON -- Hersey Hawkins entered the NBA in 1988, 20 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. During a 13-year career, Hawkins said Monday, he never once saw a gun in the locker room, on a team bus or anywhere else.
This is saying something, because Hawkins played with Jayson Williams in Philadelphia.
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| Flip Saunders' team remains the center of attention as the NBA tries to fight its ugly image. (Getty Images) |
"I think it's like any profession or any young person in whatever you may be doing," Hawkins said. "You never think it's going to happen to you. You always think it's going to happen to the other person. And when it hits closer to home, you change your habits."
The Wizards were known as the Bullets, until late owner Abe Pollin changed the name to avoid any association with gun violence, which has long ravaged the nation's capital, particularly the African-American community. And so it was against this backdrop that the Wizards continued to go about the long, painful process of returning to normal -- or whatever normal can be for a franchise that has come to symbolize what supposedly is wrong with the NBA.
Hawkins couldn't argue with the Wizards' plight, and nobody will come close to justifying or excusing the actions of Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton, whose ill-fated gun play on Dec. 21 has plunged the franchise into crisis mode and the NBA into a familiar crisis of identity. But everyone involved in pro basketball understands the damage that Arenas and those who share his affinity for firearms have done to the perception of the NBA.
"You never hear that the NBA is a place where guys do charity and give a lot of money away, because that's what we do," the Celtics' Ray Allen told me recently. "All you hear about is that the NBA is a bunch of thugs toting guns around."
This is what infuriated commissioner David Stern, to the point where he suspended Arenas indefinitely while contemplating a ban that could keep the three-time All-Star off an NBA court for the rest of the season. It is what put executives from the National Basketball Players Association in the unenviable position of having to defend Arenas while trying to keep his actions from defaming the other 450 players they represent. And as foolish as Arenas' actions were, it was his role in reinforcing the ugly stereotypes about the NBA that has done the most damage.
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Monday's recap: Wizards 97, Trail Blazers 92 |
"I look at it as an opportunity to teach," Allen said. "When Bill Clinton had his situation with Monica Lewinsky, all the parents were saying, 'What do we tell our kids?' Well, you tell them that he's the most powerful man in the world, and the most powerful man in the world made a mistake just like everybody else makes mistakes. Just because you're a basketball player doesn't mean you're a good decision maker."
The fact that Arenas wasn't here on MLK Day to spread his unique brand of joy to the basketball world was his fault, and his fault alone. It was also sad, and incomprehensible. Arenas' body bears the indelible marks of history, in the form of tattoos depicting what he used to call his "Black Rushmore" -- Nelson Mandela, King, President Obama and Malcolm X. He obviously understood enough about the struggle to permanently sear those images in his skin, yet didn't see anything wrong with bringing four firearms to his place of business.
On Monday, his teammates -- or former teammates, it would seem -- wore a tribute to the late Wizards owner on their jerseys, the simple word, "Abe."
There are things about this we will never understand. Hopefully, we'll never find out if there's enough truth to the stereotype Allen spoke about for something this senseless to ever happen again. We'll never know whether basketball players born 20 years after King's assassination can truly grasp why they should leave the gun-toting to others.
We won't know how many trainers, ball boys, or locker-room attendants around the league went to their bosses after the Arenas episode and asked, with all seriousness, how many players on their teams carry guns -- as one NBA team executive told me last week some of his team's employees did.
What we do know is that players and executives alike, regardless of color, reject an assertion by the Nets' Devin Harris -- taken at face value by a public eager to demonize the league -- that 75 percent of NBA players own guns. We know that the NBA recognized the importance of honoring Martin Luther King Jr. long before it became a national holiday. We know that the NBA is better than any other American pro sports league at hiring and promoting African-Americans; no other league has ever come close to the NBA's performance in the Racial and Gender Report Card issued annually by Richard Lapchick of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.
"Everybody appreciates the sacrifices that were made, whether it's basketball or civil rights," Hawkins said. "We know that we wouldn't be in this position now if it wasn't for people like Martin Luther King Jr. and the players who have come before. There's a history. You make millions of dollars, but it was on the sweat and the labor of people who came before you."
NBA players, 82 percent of whom are black, earned $2.146 billion in salary during the 2008-09 season. That figure is expected to decline between 2.5 and 5 percent next season, owing mostly to the global recession that has hit all sports and businesses. But a portion of the decline that can't be measured is the part attributable to people like Stephen Jackson, Sebastian Telfair, Delonte West and now Arenas and Crittenton -- all walking proof of how the actions of a few can cause many to look at the NBA and spend their money on something else.
Then there is the flip side of that argument, the one that makes you wonder if the Wizards -- playing on MLK Day two miles from where King delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech -- would've drawn more than 12,209 on Monday if Gilbert Arenas had been playing.
