George Hill, George Hill.
Paging George Hill.
Remember George Hill, the Pied Piper disguised as a point guard who nearly shut down the NBA “bubble” last season? He persuaded his Milwaukee Bucks not to leave their locker room in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, for a playoff game against the Orlando Magic.
Hill said the whole thing “woke the world up” to social injustice after the summer of George Floyd morphed into white cops in Kenosha, Wisconsin, pumping seven bullets into the Black body of 29-year-old Jacob Blake.
The Hill-Bucks protest triggered an explosion of outrage from the rest of the NBA, through all of sports and around much of society.
That was so long ago … in August.
Consider this, for instance: While the Ohio State Buckeyes were making those in Columbus feel warm and fuzzy along the way to what Forbes contributor Kristi Dosh reported will become a $6 million trip to the national championship game of college football, local police officers were having a bad and bloody December.
Near the start of the month, they fatally shot a 23-year-old Black man in the back, and they did so in front of two toddlers and his grandmother in his own home.
The deceased man, named Casey Goodson Jr., lacked a criminal record, and he wasn’t the target of an investigation. Even worse, witnesses said he was holding a sandwich, not a gun, when his life was taken.
Crickets, crickets, crickets.
That was the sound from the sports world.
The same kind of silence reigned near the end of December when Columbus police officers killed another Black man. This time, video from a police body camera showed 47-year-old Andre Hill (no relation to George) carrying only a cellphone in his hand.
Hill died on the driveway of a woman who ran outside to say: “He was bringing me Christmas money! He didn’t do anything.”
Neither did Dolal Idd, if you believe protesters. But maybe you can excuse the non-response last week from leagues, teams and athletes over the first police killing in Minneapolis since Floyd’s death.
It’s difficult to tell from the body camera video released by local cops if Idd fired first before the 23-year-old Black youth was killed by cops in his car at a gas station in a barrage of bullets.
This isn’t in dispute: Those Cleveland cops had no business murdering 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, when they said the Black kid’s toy pistol in a park resembled the real thing. The city agreed to settle a federal wrongful death lawsuit in April 2016 with the Rice family for $6 million.
Despite the lawsuit and common sense, U.S. Justice Department bosses announced last week that they couldn’t find sufficient evidence to support federal criminal charges against the two white officers.
Huh?
Where have you gone, Naomi Osaka?
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Woo, woo, woo.
Or shall we say …
Why, why, why?
Why aren’t we hearing more from Osaka and others, with all of this racial evilness still happening?
According to Forbes, Osaka excelled well enough on tennis courts to become the world’s highest-paid female athlete last year at $37.4 million. The 23-year-old daughter of a Haitian father and a Japanese mother was also crowned the Associated Press’ female athlete of the year for wearing face masks with the names of African Americans murdered by cops. The victims ranged from Floyd to Breonna Taylor to those without much fame.
What about victims of racial crimes?
What about Keyon Harrold’s 14-year-old son?
Unless I missed it on this matter, there hasn’t been a face mask, a tweet or a something else from Osaka or from previously outspoken folks on social injustice such as Jaylen Brown and Malcolm Jenkins.
Harrold is an accomplished Black trumpeter, and he filmed an unidentified white woman last week accusing his son of stealing her iPhone (it was later found in the car of her UberUBER driver) inside an upscale Manhattan hotel. The woman assaulted the teen, and while hotel security devoted more time seeking to inspect the cellphone of Harrold’s son than trying to control the attacker, she slipped into the night before New York officers arrived.
The woman has remained in the shadows to give the media her version of a story that even the hotel management calls “baseless accusation, prejudice and (an) assault against an innocent guest.”
The hotel management should have taken that stance from the start, and such a thing needed to be said from among those screaming loudly and proudly before the leaves began changing.
Still, with winter racing toward spring, nothing.
Not even from LeBron James, the King of the NBA and of using his high visibility to bring light to such darkness.
In fact, here we are, slightly more than seven months after that Minneapolis cop used his knee to choke the life out of Floyd, and the Black Lives Movement that was an inferno throughout sports has become a flame.
A dying one.
Is there still one?
When is the last time you heard about an NFL player channeling his inner Colin Kaepernick by kneeling during the national anthem to protest social injustice and police brutality?
What about any athlete in any sport?
Okay, Ohio State’s Seth Towns took a knee before a basketball game for his Buckeyes at Notre Dame. It was in honor of Goodson, his childhood friend who was killed a few days earlier.
So that’s one kneeler.
A few more may be out there, trying to keep that old Kaepernick spirit alive, but that’s about it.
That’s also a shame.
