The NBA’s Convenient “Non-political” Stance Comes at a Cost
Daryl Morey deleted a tweet he wrote in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement this weekend. It might look like a complicated story of accidental cultural conflict brought about through deep geopolitical nuance. It isn’t. It’s just another nasty little farce about money and power.
Let’s not make this more complicated than it is. Since late March, a series of massive pro-democracy protests have gripped Hong Kong, beginning as a response to a proposed bill that would enable the extradition of prisoners to mainland China and widening to include concerns about police brutality and the erosion of civil rights. On Friday night, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the NBA’s Houston Rockets, tweeted a statement of support for the protests with an image that said, “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” This was, as statements of support go, neither especially inflammatory nor especially specific. Morey didn’t address, much less endorse, any of the protesters’ grievances. He didn’t attempt to reach any soaring heights of rhetoric. He didn’t criticize Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s embattled chief executive. Nor did he say anything at all about the Chinese government. He simply revealed himself to be, in a vague way, pro-freedom—possibly the least controversial position an American sports executive could conceivably take—and supportive, in an equally vague way, of Hong Kong.
Under normal circumstances, Morey’s bland little tweet would have sunk to the bottom of the content swamp without so much as a methane bubble. Instead, it set off an international firestorm. The Chinese government demanded a retraction. Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the Rockets, publicly rebuked Morey and firmly reassured China that his team was a “non-political organization.” Morey first deleted his tweet, then issued a statement that was several times longer and far more detailed than the original statement. The Chinese Basketball Association formally suspended its relationship with the Rockets. With the NBA’s preseason Global Games underway—including two games in China this week—Rockets merchandise disappeared from Chinese e-commerce platforms, and Chinese telecom companies stopped showing Rockets games. The NBA released an incoherent response, in English, that said all it wanted to do was bring people together; then a more sternly incoherent version appeared on the league’s Chinese social media account, in Mandarin, that said the NBA was extremely disappointed in Morey’s inappropriate tweet and all it wanted to do was bring people together. Joseph Tsai, the Taiwanese Canadian billionaire who owns the Brooklyn Nets, released an open letter to NBA fans that somehow made the feelings of Hong Kong’s citizens seem less important to the question of Hong Kong’s governance than the feelings of Chinese people outside Hong Kong. The Ringer’s John Gonzalez learned in the midst of all this that the Rockets were discussing Morey’s employment status because of the tweet. Not even one of the league’s most innovative and successful executives is shielded from this kind of scrutiny.
If you look at the swirl of demands, statements, apologies, retractions, overreactions, and poses that followed Morey’s original tweet, this might look like a complicated story, a story of accidental cultural conflict brought about through deep geopolitical nuance. It isn’t. It’s just another nasty little farce about money and power and the breathtaking speed with which 21st-century capitalists are prepared to sell out democracy for a Skee-Ball token. The Chinese market is strategically important to the NBA’s global expansion. The Rockets, the team that drafted Yao Ming in 2002, are the second-most-popular team in China, according to a recent survey. The Chinese authorities, like most autocratic governments, love manufacturing controversies that let them pretend to have the moral high ground while stirring up nationalist sentiment on social media. Everyone in this situation is acting out the role dictated to them by this set of circumstances. Almost none of it has to do with principle, or even with sincere belief.
The Chinese government does not care what Daryl Morey thinks about Hong Kong. I doubt many people in the league office sincerely think Morey’s tweet was morally wrong—as opposed to strategically foolish—or that the protesters are mistaken to be concerned about China’s encroachments on the “one country, two systems” policy by which Hong Kong has been governed since 1997. But it suits the interests of the government to force a popular American sports franchise to performatively legitimize its actions in Hong Kong. And it suits the financial interests of the Rockets and the league to capitulate to the demands of the government, because not capitulating would make it harder for them to fulfill the deepest dream of all sports owners: make enough money to buy a private island, then move to that island and do favors for its authoritarian government in return for tax breaks.
There’s nothing edifying about any of this, except to the extent that it’s a useful reminder of where we are. We’re in a world where global capital feels perfectly comfortable teaming up with communist autocrats against democracy activists, as long as it keeps the cash registers dinging. Generally speaking, the hypocrisy of sports owners feels more depressing than the hypocrisy of other tycoon varietals, because sports owners represent a product that you’d like to believe has a meaning surpassing commerce. This is especially true about the NBA, because the NBA is so proud of its social conscience, or at least it was before its social conscience started threatening to cost it money.
For the most part, though, you’ll never be surprised if you assume that the devotion of sports owners to their own self-interest, and of sports leagues to their owners’ self-interest, is absolute. The NBA wants you to see it as politically progressive to the precise extent that your seeing it as progressive helps the bottom line and no further. Tilman Fertitta, the Rockets’ owner, occasionally goes on CNBC to praise Donald Trump, from whom he bought an Atlantic City casino in 2011, and to say things like “Obamacare does not work.” He has no problem then turning around and declaring that the Rockets are a “non-political organization” to make nice with China, because what he means by “non-political organization” is that he thinks hundred-dollar bills are nice, and also fuck you.
But deleting a political tweet is of course a political act. Whom you choose to take money from, and what you do to get it, are political questions. It’s more convenient for the NBA not to think about these questions, but not thinking about them doesn’t make them any less relevant or real. It’s likely that the NBA’s pursuit of its own business caused small but actual harm to the Hong Kong protesters this week. In walking back Morey’s brief moment of sincere political conviction, the league put out the message to anyone who was paying attention that the state of affairs in Hong Kong is somehow too sensitive and complex to take on any position at all, as if the only responsible outlook on the protests were a sort of grave, Thoughts and Prayers–ish bewilderment. It also put out the message that the protesters and their cause weren’t worth the work of trying to figure any of this out.
This seems to me like the wrong way to handle the problem, but again, it’s surprising only if you think there’s something moral about the business of sports. In July, The New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan published a piece about the protests. One of the people she spoke to was the Australian China scholar Geremie Barmé, the cowriter of the acclaimed documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace, about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Barmé said he was struck by how young many of the Hong Kong protesters are. “He argued that the power struggle in Hong Kong is a microcosm of the global conflict between frustrated youths and sclerotic authoritarians,” Fan wrote. “‘The old are consuming the young to maintain their longevity,’ he told me.” Maybe sports owners and global autocrats aren’t such strange bedfellows after all.
