Athletes going public with personal health problems should always be viewed positively. Professional athletes are some of the best examples of the incredible things that the human body can do as they perform on the playing field or playing court. For pro athletes to reveal that they are dealing with significant health issues is a moment of vulnerability that should be applauded especially for male athletes. In sports, athletes are not expected to show vulnerability or weakness so coming forward about health issues is the opposite of what they have known to do as they have played their sport for decades as a kid, teenager, and then adult as a professional.

During the 2010s, one of the most exciting running backs in the National Football League was Chris Johnson. The former first round pick entered the NFL from a smaller conference school, East Carolina, and Johnson himself did not have the size of fellow first round running backs such as Darren McFadden, Jonathan Stewart or Rashard Mendenhall. However, Johnson’s rare speed set him apart from virtually every running back of his era. A scatback in the mold of former Eagles halfback Brian Westbrook, Chris Johnson was a homerun hitter who began his NFL career with six consecutive 1,000-yard rushing seasons. However, his second NFL season led to his nickname “CJ2K” being born when he ran for 2006 rushing yards in 2009 and displayed that his frame could hold up to be a featured back in a major way.

Finish story here; Chris Johnson’s public bravery deserves public recognition.

I watched the whole circus with a different set of eyes.

Some of that comes with age. Once you have lived long enough to see how grown men come apart, you stop finding the earnest ones so hilarious. I have buried friends who were cooler than Russ ever tried to be. And I have watched slick talkers with all the right one liners lose their families, their money, and eventually themselves. Nobody clipped their bad decisions and set them to funny music. The quiet ruin of a so called real one rarely trends.

So let me say the thing plainly. The corniness people mocked was never the flaw they pretended it was.

Think about what the ridicule was actually built on. Peel it back and you find a television routine, a slogan or two, a husband who bragged on his wife instead of stepping out on her, and a father figure who embraced his stepson and treated him like his own. Somewhere along the way we got these categories twisted. We started treating polish like weakness and treating chaos as authenticity. This culture will crown a brother who cusses out reporters and picks up DUIs while his marriage quietly falls apart. Then the guy who spends his time supporting families and sitting with sick kids at the hospital, him we decide is lame.

That math has bugged me for a long time.

Look at the actual record, not the memes. Across 14 NFL seasons, there were no publicly reported arrests attached to his name. Nobody leaked footage of him swinging on somebody in an elevator. There was no baby mama drama splashed across the blogs, no sideline meltdown that torched a career. He weathered the end of his Seattle run, getting benched and released in Denver, Pittsburgh moving on after one season, and the Giants turning to a rookie after three starts. Through all of it he stayed professional. In the press he kept his mouth clean. He did not go scorched earth on his old teammates on the way out. Knock the throws however you want. Off the field he was not a locker room problem, and he did not hand anybody an off-field reason to regret his signature.

We ought to sit with how rare that truly is.

I coach a little on weekends, youth ball, nothing serious. Those boys hear the same thing out of me every season. The world will hand you a hundred reasons to be angry and only a few reasons to stay steady. Anger is the easier road. It gets the laughs, draws the followers, and reads to everybody like it is keeping things a hundred. Steady looks boring from the outside. It reads as corny. Yet steady is what keeps a household together when the money gets tight and the phone stops ringing.

Here is what the jokes always missed. It takes real backbone to keep showing up as the same person after the crowd turns on you. When his time in Seattle ended, Russ could have gotten bitter and loud. Once things collapsed in Denver, he could have leaked his frustrations and played the victim on any podcast that would book him. Plenty of former stars have taken exactly that route. He chose to keep his family intact, keep his charity work going, and hold his composure while grown professionals openly mocked his contract. Say what you want. That is discipline most of us could not muster with cameras in our faces.

I return again to the family piece because that is where the double standard gets loudest. When a certain kind of athlete flexes his relationship, we swoon and call it love. Let Wilson do the exact same thing and we roll our eyes and call it performance. Why? What did all that scrutiny of that man’s marriage reveal except a husband who genuinely enjoys being a husband? He stepped into a ready made family and treated his stepson like his own blood. In a community that spends a whole lot of breath talking about absent fathers, we sure did give a hard time to a brother who volunteered to be present.

Somewhere our compass got demagnetized.

I am not here to canonize anybody. He fumbled real football moments. On the field he made choices that fans had every right to critique, and the money he was paid invited scrutiny. Criticize the play. Debate the deep ball and the sacks and the price tag. That is the fair game part. What I refuse to accept is the idea that his decency itself was a defect, that his refusal to self destruct made him less of a man than the wreckers we love to celebrate.

Let me tell you who my father was. A quiet cat who went to work, came home, kept his word, and not once put my mother in the position to explain his mess to the neighbors. Nobody made a viral clip out of him either. No one ever will. That kind of steadiness does not go viral, and that is precisely the sickness in how we measure worth now. We reward the spectacle and yawn at the substance.

Young brothers are watching this closely. They are learning, from the way we hand out our respect, that loud dysfunction earns more love than quiet reliability. The lesson sinking in is that a wild man is interesting and a faithful one is a joke. We are raising a whole generation to believe that being good is the same as being weak, and I promise you the bill for that lesson comes due.

More of us need to move like number three moved, and I say that without a trace of irony. Forget the slogans and the branding for a second. I mean the core of it. Handle your business. Protect your household. Serve the folks around you. Lose without becoming a bitter, blaming mess about it. Stay clear of the kind of trouble that follows a name around for years. If that reads as corny in this era, then maybe corny is exactly the medicine we have been avoiding.

I would rather my son grow up dull and dependable than exciting and gone. Better he be the punchline in some comedian’s bit than the cautionary tale at somebody’s funeral. Give me the water metaphors and the goofy optimism all day long over the smooth operator who leaves a trail of wreckage behind his charisma.

The people who laughed were never really laughing at a flaw. They were laughing at a mirror, at a standard most of them will never meet. Russell Wilson kept his family, his dignity, and his integrity through the public unraveling of the final stretch of his playing career. Go ahead and call that corny. Some of us just call it a whole man.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

Bristol later wrapped the whole thing in the soft language of layoffs, part of a larger cluster of cuts tied mostly to ESPN integrating NFL Network and other media assets acquired from the league. Cam Newton got caught in it. Tom Pelissero too. Clark, though, refused to accept that framing. On The Pivot, he called it what he thought it really was. Fired. His case rested partly on timing. Clark was informed on Monday, while the larger round of layoffs was announced Tuesday, which told him that a decision about his future had been reached before the broader cuts gave ESPN cover to carry it out.

Whether he had that read right, I could not tell you. Grown men can disagree about internal politics none of us witnessed. What grabbed me, what should grab any of us who have watched gifted Black voices rise and fall inside institutions that were not built with us in mind, is the part of this story that happened long before the cameras cut away.

He saw this coming. Not the exact date, not the cruel staging of it, but the shape of the thing. Back in 2022, the former safety sat down with Fred Taylor and Channing Crowder and helped build something that belonged to their team. The Pivot. A show where retired players talked ball, talked life, talked to guests who would rarely get that real on a scripted network segment. It grew into a genuine presence. And here sits the quiet genius of the move. When the suits finally decided they were done with him, the chair was theirs to take. They could pull the salary, reportedly more than two million a year. The national television slot that put his face in living rooms every football season went right along with it. Yet one asset they could not touch was the independent platform he had helped build with his partners.

That is the whole lesson, and Black folks in media ought to write it somewhere they will read it every morning.

Visibility and independence are not the same currency. A network hands you the first. Only you can build the second. ESPN gave Ryan a stage, an enormous one, and there is no shame in accepting a stage when somebody offers it. Millions of viewers learned his name because of that association. But a stage you do not control is a rental, and the landlord can change the locks whenever the quarterly numbers get ugly or an executive decides your opinions rub him the wrong way. We have seen this particular movie more times than I care to count.

Think about how many talented brothers and sisters got their shine inside a building they had no claim to. The commentator with the sharp read on the game. A morning host with a loyal following. Some reporter who broke stories nobody else could get. When the institution decided the relationship was finished, most of them started from scratch, blinking in the daylight, wondering where the crowd went. That crowd was not theirs to begin with. It belonged to the logo behind their head.

Clark understood something plenty of peers miss until it is too late. The bond you build directly with people cannot be revoked by a memo. Nobody at Disney can email your listeners and tell them to stop caring about what you have to say. The audience Clark, Taylor, Crowder and their team cultivated through The Pivot remained connected to the platform they built. When the news hit, Clark did not go quiet. He turned the mic back on and spoke straight to that crowd, with nobody cutting him off for a commercial break.

Underneath all of this runs an older story, and I am not going to pretend it away. Black entertainers and athletes and artists have spent generations handing their best work to machines that other men owned. The old record labels did it to our musicians. Movie studios did it to our actors. Sports television has run a subtler version of the same play, elevating charismatic analysts into household names while the actual value, the brand, the archive, the viewer data, stayed firmly in corporate hands. Sam Cooke figured out he needed control over his publishing and business affairs before much of the industry caught up. The principle has not changed. Only the medium has.

What makes this moment different is that the tools finally sit within reach of regular folks. You no longer need ESPN to reach a nation. A camera, a decent microphone, a point of view worth hearing, and the discipline to show up week after week can build something no HR department gets to dissolve. Ryan and his partners proved it. They did not wait for permission. Nor did they assume the good years at a corporation would stretch on forever, because deep down we all understand they never do.

Let me be careful here, because I am not preaching that anybody should turn down opportunity out of pride. Take the job. Grab the exposure. Cash the checks while they clear. Use that big stage to introduce yourself to people who would otherwise not find you. Just do not confuse the borrowed spotlight for a home you actually own. Build the home on the side, brick by brick, while the borrowed light is still shining on you. That is the whole move. It is what separates the folks who bounce back from the ones who vanish.

The men and women who own their distribution get to survive endings like the one Ryan just lived through. They get to grieve the loss of a good gig without grieving the loss of their entire public life, because those two things were never bundled together in the first place. He lost a job. What he did not lose was his voice. His people stayed right where they were. The network handed him a painful education and a strange sort of gift in the same breath, a reminder that everything he truly needed, he had already helped put together himself.

So watch what he does next. My money says he lands fine, maybe better than fine, precisely because the most valuable thing in his possession was never printed on a contract in Bristol. It was printed on the loyalty of everyone who follows him wherever he decides to go. That is ownership. It is the only real security this business has ever offered. And every Black creator watching this play out should be taking notes.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

Let that word sit for a second. Earned.

We are talking about a kid from Akron who walked into the league as a teenager carrying the weight of a whole city on his back, and who somehow carried more each season after. Four rings across three franchises. Regular season MVP trophies, four of them. Twenty two All Star selections, a run longer than plenty of careers last from the first whistle to the goodbye. The all time leading scorer in NBA history, a number nobody thought would ever fall until he simply refused to slow down. Twenty three seasons already completed, with a record twenty fourth waiting for him in Philadelphia. Two full decades as the face of a billion dollar business, the poster on the wall, the reason casual fans tuned in at all.

And still hated.

That part deserves honesty, because it is the strange truth sitting underneath his whole run. Plenty of grown men cannot stand the guy. Some of them look just like us. Brothers who came up watching him, who own the jersey, who quote the highlights, will turn around and tell you with a straight face that they never rocked with him. Ask them why and the reasons get thin fast. Something about the way he left Cleveland that summer. Maybe it is that he got handed too much too soon. For others it comes down to him not being that other fella who wore forty five and twenty three before him. Scratch any of those excuses and the same thing sits underneath. Resentment. Plain old resentment. A brother kept betting on himself, kept cashing those bets, and it drove people crazy that he never once waited on anybody’s permission to do it. For a certain type of person, that alone is unforgivable. We watch that jealousy dress itself up as basketball opinion, and we nod along as if it fools anybody.

Now here comes the last chapter, and watch how the same crowd handles it.

He did not chase a bag to Philadelphia. Eight million dollars over two seasons is pocket change for a man who prints money in his sleep, and the King knew that the moment the pen hit paper. What LeBron wanted instead was a feeling. A locker room stacked with All Star talent, Joel Embiid anchoring the middle and Tyrese Maxey buzzing on the wing, plus rising second year guard VJ Edgecombe soaking all of it up. Even Jaylen Brown is there now, the former Boston rival who used to trade playoff scars with him, an All Star and a proven champion, suddenly wearing the same jersey. A packed arena filled with a fan base that has been starving for another reason to believe. One real shot at a banner before the body finally says no more. Rich Paul called it basketball happiness, and honestly that phrase says everything. None of this is running away. He is walking straight toward the thing that still makes his heart pound inside a gym.

That is his business. Nobody voted on it. No panel in a studio needs to bless it.

Which brings me to the loudest room in all of this, the sports media machine that treats every move the King makes as a crime scene. For more than twenty years these people have built entire livelihoods off his name. They scream about his clutch gene one night, then question if he ducked a rival the next, then argue his jewelry count against a ghost from the 90s. A villain moves the needle. Outrage sells, plain and simple, and they manufactured plenty of it. So they poked and prodded and framed his choices as betrayals when the truth is much simpler. A working professional went where he wanted to go. That is it. Nothing else to the story. Yet somehow the panels will burn a week deciding whether he owed it to Los Angeles to fade away in purple and gold, as if that franchise ever owed him a graceful exit in return.

Let me say the quiet part plainly. He does not owe any of us a thing.

Not a farewell tour. No tidy finish in the city we picked for him. And certainly no retirement podium scheduled around our convenience. This is a person who gave the sport everything for more than two decades. No major off court scandal ever swallowed his career. His sons grew up watching their father put in work. There is a public school back home created through his foundation’s partnership with Akron Public Schools. Whole neighborhoods the country wrote off saw real money from him. And through all of it, the shots kept coming and he kept standing. If somebody like that decides his final act happens in a red and blue uniform on the other side of the country, the only correct response from the rest of us is respect.

I think about my own father when this stuff plays out. Forty years he gave to that job. When his time came, the old man did not poll the room about the proper way to bow out. He shook a few hands that meant something to him. The rest he left behind without a second thought, then pointed the car home for good. No one demanded an explanation. Everybody understood the exit was his call and nobody else’s. We grant that grace to plumbers and teachers and bus drivers without blinking. Why the greatest to ever lace them up somehow has to justify his last stop is a question worth sitting with, and the answer usually reveals more about the person asking than about the fella they are dragging.

So he is a Sixer now. Wild to type, but here we are. Maybe it wraps with a parade down Broad Street. Or maybe it ends with a first round exit and a soft goodbye. Either way the pen belongs to the King, and it always did. The rest of us are just readers hoping to catch the final pages before the book shuts. We do not get a vote on the closing lines, and honestly, we never should have.

More than two decades bought him that. Every bruise, each buzzer, all those late nights dragging a roster past its ceiling, every summer somebody swore he was cooked, added up to a plain privilege that too few folks want to hand over. The freedom to decide when the story ends, and the freedom to decide where.

Let the man write his own last page. He paid for that ink with his whole life.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

For anybody who missed the story, the retired Celtics great is in a Los Angeles courtroom with Princess Santiago, an events director and the mother of his youngest boy, King. She asked a judge for $29,811 a month. He fired back that approximately $4,145 felt more reasonable, leaning on an income picture that he says is changing. His filings reportedly put his average monthly income during the first half of 2026 near a hundred and sixty five thousand, although Pierce argues that amount will fall sharply once his remaining Fox payments end. Read that twice and let it settle.

I am not here to referee whose attorney wrote the sharper brief. Grown folks disagree about dollars constantly, and courts exist for that reason. My trouble runs beneath the arithmetic.

The detail that stuck in my throat came from Santiago’s earlier statement. She says she went through all nine months of the pregnancy without financial support or an in person presence from Pierce. Then he acknowledged paternity and requested joint legal and physical custody after DNA testing confirmed that King was his son. Sit with that timeline. A whole human being was made, grown, and brought into this world while dad allegedly kept his distance, and his legal effort to become involved began after the results came back. To be fair, Santiago later acknowledged that Pierce had started making an effort to see King and was developing a relationship with him. That progress matters, even if it does not erase the pregnancy she says she faced alone.

That is the part nobody at the sports desk wants to slow down and name. We have turned a sacred obligation into a spreadsheet fight, and too many of our brothers with means and platforms are leading the way down that road.

Here is what I need my people to hear, especially the athletes, working or retired. A boy does not need only a settlement. He needs a presence. You cannot wire love through direct deposit and call the account balanced. Visitation is not a line item you haggle over to protect your comfort. It is time, the one thing your bank cannot manufacture and your son cannot get back once it is spent.

Pierce reportedly disclosed roughly $121,000 in legal expenses during the first half of 2026, though the available reporting does not establish that all of it was connected to this particular case. Still, one day his boy may discover that lawyers and accountants were publicly debating his support before he was old enough to understand his own name. That kid is going to grow up, learn to Google, and find each filing, each proposal, and each argument over what amount should be considered reasonable. Picture that for a second. Your own father discussing the cost of caring for you in documents available for strangers to read. Not because the court process is unnecessary, but because children eventually see how the adults around them handled their arrival.

Let me be fair here, because a one sided rant does nobody any good. No man owes a check he has no way to cover, and sure, some mothers run their own games too. Pierce alleges in his filing that Santiago earns more than $400,000 a year, so his position is that she is not without considerable resources of her own. High earners can face support requests that deserve careful review, and a man is allowed to ask a court for something sane. All true. None of it touches the heart of the matter, though, because the heart of the matter was never only the figure. It was the disappearance she says came first.

See, child support and custody and emotional availability are not three separate negotiations you can win or lose independently. They are one covenant, and you cannot ace the money portion while flunking the showing up. A father who mails the check but skips the recitals has not fulfilled everything. He has purchased a clean conscience on layaway, and the interest on that debt comes due in a grown child who never quite trusts him.

Our community knows this wound intimately. A lot of us grew up under a father who mailed his money on time and never once walked through the door, or the flip of that, one hanging around plenty who let the rent slide. Years later we were still working out which of those left the deeper mark. So a brother who earned generational wealth and entered the Basketball Hall of Fame on his first ballot having every resource to break that cycle carries a special responsibility. Pierce has requested joint custody, and that willingness to participate should be acknowledged. Still, the public fight over support cannot be separated from Santiago’s allegation that she endured the entire pregnancy without his financial help or physical presence.

The athlete part matters here, and I will not soften it. You men are watched. Little Black boys wear your jersey and study how you move, on the court and off it. When you retire, that gaze does not retire with you. It follows you into the courtroom, into the podcast studio, into the choices you make about the children you helped create. Plenty of famous names let this exact pattern define them, and it repeats until somebody with a platform breaks it loud and on purpose. Pierce still has an opportunity to do that by building a genuine relationship with his son, accepting where he fell short, and making sure King never has to wonder whether his father truly wanted him.

Instead, much of the public conversation has centered on litigation. We got a man detailing meal expenses, travel costs, declining income, and legal bills while the needs of his own boy sat at the center of the dispute.

Money is real, and I will not pretend otherwise. A support order that ignores what he actually pulls in helps nobody. But the moment your baby becomes a bargaining chip, something precious gets placed at risk. You can teach your own bloodline that everything, including his care, has a price adults will argue over until a judge chooses a number.

To every brother reading this with a kid on the other side of a courtroom, I say this without malice. Pay what is right and pay it without theatrics. Then show up. Show up sober, show up early, show up when it is inconvenient and the game is on and you would rather be anywhere else. Answer the phone. Learn the teacher’s name. Down the road you want to be the story your kid tells proud at the cookout, not the name they punched into a search bar to find out who you really were.

King Rafael is going to remember who fought for him and who fought over him. So will the rest of them. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and no amount of money has ever settled it.

Staff Writer; Lee Walker

This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.

Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com.

It’s only a game. It’s supposed to be a pastime (according to AI, something that “helps make the hours pass pleasantly when you are not working”), not an obsession. There are 162 games a year and letting your emotional state hinge on whether your favorite team scores more runs than the other team is obviously senseless.

And yet.

Generations of Americans have been swept up by the game. Children never forget their first trip to the ballpark or memories of playing catch with their father, or the ball players they elevated to heroes, or observing their elders go ballistic over a dropped ball. My friend Paul remembers being five years old and watching his father rip the radio out of the wall after the Red Sox grounded into a rally-killing double play.

That was in 1958. For New Englanders, that kind of passion hasn’t abated much, even if people are watching games on cell phones.

It’s been ever thus. “Six months out of every year, I may as well be made of stone,” laments the long-suffering wife of a die-hard Washington Senators fan in the 1955 Broadway musical “Damn Yankees”, while her long-suffering husband sings “Those damn Yankees, why can’t we beat ’em?”

Speaking of the Yankees, years ago I was comparing notes about baseball obsession with Floyd Abrams, the great First Amendment scholar/advocate, who has argued numerous cases before the U.S. Supreme Court on erudite points of constitutional law. Abrams, an overcharged Yankees fan, told me that any neurosis I had about the Red Sox paled before his about the Yankees.

“I doubt it,” I said.

“Trust me,” he said, and related that every night, when he watched the Yankees games on television, he had to leave the room while the opposing team was at bat.

“You win,” I said.

Anyone who has ever dropped their kid off to begin their freshman year at college remembers the surge of emotion that the experience triggers: the sad wonder about the time that has flown by, the brooding about the things not done together, the re-discovery of the bedroom, hermetically sealed since age 13, suddenly open to reveal a space, once a pigsty, now deserted.

As in every other New England family, my son and I bonded intensely over the Red Sox. The weekend after we dropped him off at college, while I was still in a post-drop-off funk, the Sox and their archrival Yankees played a three-game series. The Sox won the first game, the Bad Guys the second. In the final game, nationally televised, the Yankees beat the Red Sox in the ninth inning.

I did not throw furniture. I did not rip the television out of the wall. But it’s possible that some of the pent-up emotion over the previous week’s college drop-off seeped out, just a bit.

Perhaps trying to comfort, our teenage daughter attempted to reason with me. “Why does it matter?” she asked. “It’s just a piece of wood and a ball.

This wasn’t helpful.

Exactly at that moment, a text arrived from my son, looking after his old man, albeit from a distance. “Don’t do it,” the text said simply. “You have so much to live for.”

Given the state of the world, there was particular reason to look forward to the Red Sox season this year: part diversion, part reason for hope.

The team did not oblige for the first half of the season. They did not hit. They did not pitch. They did not field. Consequently, they did not win.

Then a miracle happened. Call it a sign from God. The team won 15 games in a row. They are back in contention — for now.

My son and daughter-in-law have been staying with us for a few weeks. The old ritual has returned: sitting together to watch our beloved team and sweat every pitch.

Point is: you have got to hand it to the Boys of Summer. Somehow or other, however bad things are, they give you reason to hope.

And to remember.

Written by Jeff Robbins

Official website; https://x.com/jeffreysrobbins

Man, listen. I have been watching this brother play professional ball since my knees still bent without complaint. My oldest was in diapers back when he was throwing lobs to Tristan Thompson in Cleveland. Now here I sit with gray creeping through my beard and a blood pressure pill waiting on the kitchen counter, and LeBron James is out here agreeing to contracts and changing expectations for an entire conference. None of that is normal. Twenty four seasons is the kind of longevity you expect from kickers and knuckleball pitchers, not from somebody who spent two decades absorbing contact from the largest human beings walking the planet.

What caught me sideways was the money. Two years, eight million dollars, with a player option attached, Rich Paul told ESPN. Read that figure again slowly. Eight million total. Bron collected close to fifty three million from the Lakers last season and just accepted what amounts to a rounding error by comparison. Bench guys who cannot crack a rotation clear more than that. Whatever else you want to say about him, and there is always something worth debating with him, he left serious paper on the table chasing one more parade.

Where he chose to chase it is what has me pacing around my living room.

South Beach forgives. Hollywood forgets. Philly does neither. That town will love you like blood on Tuesday and question your entire family tree by Thursday, and both reactions will be completely sincere. These are folks who booed Santa Claus and never once apologized for it. At no point in his professional life has the King answered to a crowd wired like that. Cleveland worshipped him from the jump. Miami barely paid attention until the playoffs arrived. Los Angeles handed him sunshine, a media empire, and enough distraction to soften any bad stretch. North Broad Street operates on a different frequency entirely, and honestly, that is the part I cannot wait to watch.

Now let me put my critic hat on, because the fan in me will absolutely lie to you if I let him talk first.

On paper this roster is scary. Joel Embiid owns one of the meanest scoring arsenals ever assembled in a big man. Tyrese Maxey finished fifth in the league in points per contest last go round and plays with his hair on fire. Jaylen Brown arrived from Boston in that stunner of a swap involving Paul George and four draft selections, which means Philadelphia is not pretending to rebuild anymore. VJ Edgecombe looks like a real one. Add a four time champion who averaged 20.9 points, 7.2 assists, and 6.1 rebounds while shooting 51.5 percent from the floor, and yeah, Nick Nurse got a beautiful birthday present.

Paper does not play defense in April, though.

Everything in that building runs through Embiid’s availability, and that has been a coin flip for a while now. Fifty seven appearances across two campaigns tells you everything. When he is upright, that squad can beat anybody breathing. When he is in a suit courtside, all those title odds turn into pumpkin. Nobody in that organization can control it, nobody can predict it, and every optimistic projection you read this summer quietly depends on it.

Then comes the touch problem, which nobody wants to discuss during honeymoon week. Maxey needs the rock. Brown has spent his whole career hearing people question whether he can lead an offense, and Philadelphia did not bring him in to stand in a corner. Bron has never been primarily a spot up shooter, no matter how many times commentators claim he has evolved into one. Somebody’s usage has to shrink. Somebody’s ego has to bend. Nurse has to draw up an arrangement where grown men with All Star credentials all feel fed, and he has to do it while managing a center whose minutes require careful rationing. That is not coaching. That is diplomacy.

Defensively, I need to be honest with y’all. At 41 the King picks his spots. He gambles in passing lanes, he saves his legs, and he shows up for the moments that matter while cruising through the ones that do not. Against New York in a seven game war, that math gets uncomfortable. The Knicks are the defending champions and they are not intimidated by anybody’s résumé.

Still, I understand why he did it.

No player in the history of this league has ever won a title with four different franchises. Not Kareem. Not Kobe, who never left. Not Jordan, obviously. Nobody. That record is sitting there unclaimed, and if there is one thing two decades of watching this man has taught me, it is that he keeps a running ledger of every argument ever made against him. Folks spent years saying he needed superteams. Folks said he ran from Cleveland, then said he ran back for the storyline, then said the Lakers ring came with an asterisk stapled to it. Winning one in Philadelphia at 42, on a contract worth less than what some backup guards make, would silence a whole lot of talk radio.

Do I believe it happens? I lean no, if I am being straight with you. Health, age, and a loaded conference are heavy opponents. But I have watched this brother make me look stupid too many times to bet against him with any real confidence.

One thing did make me chuckle. He dropped the phrase “trust the process” at Fanatics Fest a week earlier, and Philadelphia heads immediately started squinting sideways at their timelines. Bron quickly insisted he had been using that phrase since 2003, but sixteen years after that infamous television special, homie is still leaving breadcrumbs for us to argue over. Some habits never die.

He also called this his last decision. I have heard variations of that speech before, from him and from plenty of others, so forgive me if I hold the retirement talk loosely. Athletes rarely know when the end arrives until it has already passed them.

Here is where I land, sitting in my recliner with my own body reminding me daily that time collects every debt eventually. Watching somebody my kids grew up with still competing at this level does something to a middle-aged man. It is not really the rings anymore. It is the refusal. It is somebody looking at the calendar, understanding exactly what it says, and choosing to keep swinging anyway.

Philly is about to get the last chapter, whatever it ends up looking like.

That city deserves a wild one. Something tells me they are going to get exactly that.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

The numbers and facts around the decline in youth participating in sports are eye-opening. 62 percent of children, ages 6 to 12 do not play sports regularly and the average age at which children quit sports is just 12 years old. Some of the biggest names through the world of sports are part of this campaign including NBA player Stephen Curry, WNBA player A’Ja Wilson, and NFL player Lamar Jackson among the ambassadors to encourage and promote youth sports participation.

It is the low 38 percent youth sports participation rate that is one of the reasons for this initiative. Sports ambassadors and ESPN anchors and personalities participated in a different ads and promos, which ran across ESPN platforms, that addressed critical youth sports issues. One of the biggest issues for getting kids to play sports is affordability. Over 900,000 youth received support to participate in athletics through grants and the YMCA was among the avenues for those youth to participate. This is the second year of the Take Back Sports initiative and there were good results.

There has also been some volatility in youth sports leagues with the behavior of adults. It is not uncommon to see local news clips that highlight the parents of some young athletes who are harassing each other or verbally abusing referees or officials for youth sports leagues.  Youth coaches also feel the anger from parents sometimes as well. A recent national survey named “the challenge of managing parents ranks among the top reasons coaches have considered leaving or decided to quit”. Unruly parents in youth sports deters from the enjoyment for all kids who are participating in that particular sport.

The impact of youth sports is multilayered from a health, wellness, stress relief, and teamwork aspect. There are many lessons to be learned from kids and teenagers who play and enjoy sports. According to ESPN Vice President of Corporate Citizenship Kevin Martinez, “Sports have the power to shape confidence, character and community at an early age, but with only 38% of kids playing sports on a regular basis, ESPN recognizes the critical need to build systems that make those opportunities accessible to more young athletes.” It’s not about finding the next great young athlete but the importance of youth sports be part of the childhood experience to become more of a team player and working together as an adult towards everyone’s success.

Staff Writer; Mark Hines

1. Dolan Accepted Without Asking the Players

Dolan accepted the invitation before even asking the players if they would attend. In an interview with New York Magazine, Jalen Brunson explained that he and the other players hadn’t even discussed the possibility of visiting the White House before Dolan announced that the team would be going. “We haven’t discussed it,” Brunson said. “But as a team, we’ll discuss it, and we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” That was not agreement from the players. This is a player being as diplomatic as possible in expressing his team’s position on visiting the White House.

2. This Is a Personal Favor, Not a Presidential Honor

Dolan and Trump have been friends for thirty years. In fact, in Game 3 of the NBA Finals, Dolan personally extended an invitation for Trump to attend the game and then even sat with him in the owner’s box. As political strategist Antjuan Seawright told ESPN, “I think the only reason the Knicks received the invite is because of the relationship with the owner and Donald Trump.’’ This is just a friend doing a favor for a friend and the players will be nothing more than props in Dolan’s attempt to repay a favor to Trump.

3. Trump Was Booed Inside Madison Square Garden

New York spoke on June 8th and it was clear. When the jumbotron at MSG showed an image of Trump at Game 3 of the NBA Finals, the crowd at the home of the Knicks erupted in loud, sustained, and intense booing. The fans who supported this club through 53 years of disappointment made their opinions on Trump’s attendance very clear. Why would the team honor that attendance with a party?

4. The “Trump Curse” Is Real in Knicks Lore Now

Game 3 was the only game in which the Knicks lost in the entire NBA Finals series. It was also the only game in which Donald Trump appeared to root for them. Following the loss, Knicks fans went to MSG to burn sage and try to clear the space of any negative energy left behind by Trump’s visit. That may sound superstitious, but the sentiment is totally real: Trump’s presence at the game felt like a bad omen, not an honor. Visiting him now would be a strange way for the team to celebrate.

5. Josh Hart Has Already Made His Position Clear

On the other hand, another player for the Knicks, Josh Hart, let his voice be heard during the 2020 presidential election. When referring to Donald Trump, Hart stated that Trump is a “dumbass” and wrote this on his social media account not once but twice. For this reason, if the Knicks were to be invited to the White House, Hart would have to be left out of the occasion. This in turn could lead to a huge media circus, with Hart as the center of attention, which would be very awkward for the team.

6. Every NBA Champion During Trump’s First Term Said No

Not a single NBA championship team during Trump’s first term in office traveled to the White House for a celebratory visit. The Golden State Warriors publicly declined two separate invites for the White House visit. With the highly politicized atmosphere of Trump’s White House and the already very divided politics, the players played it safe. The politics would be too much for most of the players, and as we have all come to realize, they are not naive to the political implications that come with a White House visit for a sports team. The Knicks would not just be ending the streak for NBA championship teams, but would add an even greater layer of complexity as fans and media compare the situations to the two previous declines by the Golden State Warriors.

7. New York City’s Mayor Wasn’t Subtle About It Either

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who led the Keys to the City ceremony, represents the political opposite of Donald Trump. The city that hosted this championship parade, packing the Canyon of Heroes for the parade of Jalen Brunson and the rest of the team, voted overwhelmingly against Trump in the last elections. So for the team to celebrate with Mamdani and the rest of New Yorkers in the days following their championship, and then turn around and celebrate with Trump at the White House, would send a contradictory message to the city that made this possible.

8. The Celebration Already Happened — And It Was Perfect

Millions turned out for the ticker-tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes after the Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years. Jalen Brunson held the Larry O’Brien Trophy on a float while the city lost its collective mind. They got to hold the championship trophy, and then they got to hold the keys to the city. That celebration was enough. There is nothing that a visit to the White House could add to that, and nothing that the fans would want added to it.

9. The Timing Looks Like a Political Statement

Visiting the White House is a tradition for teams right after winning a championship. But that does not mean it is mandatory. When a team decides not to visit the White House after winning a championship, it is news for a day, and then it is forgotten for good. But when a team does visit the White House after winning a championship and the visit turns into a political flashpoint, the team and its players are then harassed for years by the visit and the way that it is perceived. Given the current national politics, when the Knicks visit the White House, it will not be perceived as a neutral sports tradition but rather as an endorsement. That is not how the Knicks’ legacy should be defined. The Knicks’ legacy should be defined by the players and by the fans, not by the friendship of one owner and the President of the United States.

10. The Players Earned This Championship. The Choice Should Be Theirs.

Jalen Brunson played through injury and pressure to put the team in position to win its first title in over half a century. His teammates grinded through a 13 game winning streak. The players earned this championship. They deserve to decide how it is celebrated and by who. The locker room has yet to discuss whether or not the team should celebrate at the White House but James Dolan has already signed them up for the event before the team has even discussed it. That was a mistake and the players should have the final say.

Whose Celebration Is This, Really? 

The Knicks won a championship for all of New York — the fans, the city, and the kids who grew up all across the city waiting for a moment like this. The way they celebrate matters greatly. This is not a celebration of a championship that will be enhanced by a White House visit driven by the owner’s personal relationship with the President. It will be a complicated event and the players should determine for themselves whether or not they wish to cross that bridge.

Associate Editor; Stanley G. Buford

Feel free to connect with this brother via Twitter; Stanley G. and also facebook; http://www.facebook.com/sgbuford.

Also his email addy is; StanleyG@ThyBlackMan.com.

Which is why watching the rest of this country finally wake up feels a little surreal. The sport isn’t coming here anymore. It already arrived, and the World Cup just made it impossible to ignore. The whole thing is unfolding right here as I write this, spread across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the first World Cup shared by three host nations. Sixteen cities are carrying the tournament, including eleven in the United States, with stadiums filling up with people who painted their faces and learned chants in languages they don’t speak. And credit where it’s owed, the host nation has shown out. Fan zones packed shoulder to shoulder, strangers from forty different countries swapping jerseys outside the gates, volunteers walking lost visitors to the right train without breaking a sweat. We don’t always nail the big stuff, but we know how to throw a party, and the planet is finding that out in real time.

My neighbor, a man who spent twenty years swearing the beautiful game was boring, texted me at midnight after Türkiye dropped three on the United States. “Bro I’m hooked.” Three to two, last second drama, and suddenly he gets it. That is the part nobody warns you about. You don’t choose this thing. It chooses you, usually when you weren’t even looking.

Folks overseas have known forever. Walk through any neighborhood in São Paulo, Lagos, Naples, or Manchester and you’ll find children using two backpacks as a goal, dreaming the exact same dream. For them this was never a question. The planet stops for a month every four years, schools empty out, grown men weep in the street. America was the last big holdout, the cousin at the cookout who swore he didn’t like the music until the right song finally dropped.

And here’s the bit that still cracks me up. The entire world calls it football. Makes perfect sense, seeing as you play it with your feet. Then we came along, looked at a sport where a fella cradles a ball shaped like an egg in his arms and sprints, and decided that was football. The audacity. We took the one word that already had a job and handed it to a contest built on throwing and tackling. Beautiful country, terrible naming committee.

Respect has to be paid where it’s owed, though, and the names alone tell you why the rest of the globe never doubted. Pelé turned this into art before color television could keep up. Maradona carried an entire nation on one fierce, brilliant left foot. The Brazilian Ronaldo, the original, moved like a man who knew gravity was optional. Zidane had violence and grace living in the same body. Ronaldinho grinned so wide you forgot he was embarrassing grown professionals on national TV.

The current crop is no joke either. Messi spends his weekends in Miami now, suiting up in MLS of all places, which still feels like a typo whenever I say it out loud. The little maestro chose to live among us, and casual viewers are only beginning to grasp what they ignored for so long. Cristiano Ronaldo built himself into a machine through nothing but stubborn will, still banging them in deep into his forties like the calendar owes him money. Kylian Mbappé, a forward for La Liga club Real Madrid and the France national team, runs like a sports car with a conscience. Vinícius makes defenders look stuck in wet concrete. Haaland, a striker for Premier League club Manchester City and the Norway national team, scores the way the rest of us breathe. Lamine Yamal, a right winger for Barcelona and Spain, is barely old enough to vote and already bending matches to his will. Jude Bellingham, a midfielder for Real Madrid and England, struts around like he owns whatever pitch he stands on, and most nights he does.

We’ve grown our own too, which the doubters love to forget. Clint Dempsey competed with a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas. Landon Donovan gave us that goal against Algeria, the one that had office workers losing their minds on a Wednesday afternoon. Tim Howard once made sixteen saves in a single match and briefly turned into a folk hero. Now Christian Pulisic carries the badge, a kid from Pennsylvania holding his own among Europe’s finest, proof this place can produce more than skeptics.

What changed? The young changed it. A whole generation came up with the Premier League on Saturday mornings, La Liga and Serie A a click away by lunch, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 humming in the background, with video games that taught them who plays where, with phone clips of impossible finishes looping past midnight. Major League Soccer grew up right in their backyard while the old heads weren’t paying attention. They never needed convincing. They walked in already fluent. Grandparents griped, parents shrugged, and the youngest among us quietly built a culture while everybody else argued about whether a draw was somehow un-American.

I think about my old high school squad sometimes. We were a mix of everybody, kids whose families came from Mexico, Ghana, El Salvador, and a few like me whose roots ran straight through the American South. On that field none of it mattered. You either passed the ball or you didn’t. This sport has always done that, flattened the differences, handed a common language to people who couldn’t otherwise order lunch together. That’s the secret the rest of the globe figured out generations back, and it’s the lesson landing in living rooms here right now whether folks asked for it or not.

The skeptics will hold out a while longer. Some of them always will, and that’s fine. But the tide already turned. You can feel it in the bars going dead silent before a penalty, in the office betting pools, in the way my once-stubborn neighbor now sends me tactical theories at two in the morning like he personally invented the back three. Conversion looks like that. Loud, sudden, slightly embarrassing.

So welcome, late as usual, but you made it. Pour into the seats, butcher the chants, fall hard for some defender on the other side of the planet you’ll be defending in arguments by August. The rest of us, the ones who loved this through every lean year, we’ll save you a spot. Just do me one small favor while you’re here.

Try, at least once, calling it football. The whole world is waiting on you.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.