Why the WNBA can’t wait: Kelly Loeffler should get the Donald Sterling boot
I won’t speculate upon our 36th MLK Day, as so many do every MLK Day, what the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who was assassinated in 1968, would think about our station at the moment. But I do know that one of the co-owners of the Dream, the recently sacked U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) from Georgia, revealed herself not in alignment with the ideals of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, originally titled “Normalcy — Never Again” and void of what his counselors called “trite … cliche” dream imagery.
On Monday, Jan. 4 — two days before the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol that was fueled by President Trump’s repeated baseless and debunked claims that Joe Biden didn’t beat him to become president-elect — Loeffler announced that she would go to Washington to challenge the unassailable veracity of Biden’s win. Later that Monday, she even stood at Trump’s side in a last-ditch effort in Georgia, where Trump tried to rally voter support of Loeffler in a runoff against a black preacher, Raphael Warnock, from, of all places, King’s old church, Ebenezer Baptist. She remained as Trump spewed a torrent of lies — and as he implored the crowd: “Never give up … never back down … never, ever surrender.”
“I cannot now, in good conscience, object to the certification of these electors,” Loeffler said on the Senate floor.
Soon, she won’t be a senator. Warnock defeated her and will be sworn in. But she remains a co-owner of the Dream.
A spokesperson for the NBA, the parent company of the WNBA, confided to me recently that the league expected Loeffler to be out of its ranks soon. The other Dream co-owner, Mary Brock, was expected to sell her half share.
“We understand a sale of the franchise is close to being finalized,” the spokesperson texted me. “Once the sale negotiation is concluded, additional information will be provided.”
That action does not, however, require Loeffler to sell her share. Which is why the league should act. It shouldn’t wait for LeBron James or former NBA star Baron Davis to bring an end to this dream-turned-nightmare by buying the club, as both have expressed interest in doing. Black people have done enough to clean up what happened at the Capitol, figuratively and literally.
Instead, the league should present Loeffler the Sterling boot. I am referring, of course, to the walking papers the NBA handed former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling.
If Sterling, despite years of being a housing discriminator, was found to be antithetical to the NBA’s ideals, then Loeffler, after her rejection as a Trumpist, should be jettisoned from the league post haste.
In 2014, Sterling was banned from the league almost immediately by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. Silver then sought to have fellow owners force Sterling to sell. It was fast action that afforded the NBA its reputation as some sort of paragon of progressivism among our sports leagues — despite its policy that players must stand for the national anthem and WNBA players initially being fined for protesting unchecked police lethality against Black men.
Sterling was easy. Loeffler is a real test. But hardly difficult.
After all, Warnock had little name recognition even in Georgia until two events: 1. His officiating the funeral of civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis in late July, and 2. The Dream players donning black T-shirts emblazoned in white letters reading “Vote Warnock” in early August.
The players did so because of Loeffler’s denouncement of the civil rights movement of the 21st century, Black Lives Matter. They did so because Loeffler criticized the WNBA for eventually allowing players to use the national anthem as a backdrop for performative protest. They did so because, simply, Loeffler was adverse to Black women’s empowerment and freedom. The T-shirts spread through the predominantly Black league.
In the end, they abetted one of the biggest upsets in politics. A Black man won statewide in Georgia. Against a woman in the league’s ranks who not until the nation’s Capitol building was ransacked and people were killed did she utter some words suggesting the folly of her ways.
Trump, who was impeached last week on a charge of incitement of insurrection, was not alone in turning downtown Washington into what it is now — and will continue to be until after Biden is inaugurated Wednesday — an armed stronghold defined by red zones and green zones and no-go zones like we heard about in post-invasion Iraq. Trump was aided by Republican politicians who echoed his lies. Loeffler was one of them.
And as such involvement has brought publishers and hoteliers and social media corporations and other American companies to dissociate themselves with those involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection or helped foment it, so, too, should the WNBA. Loeffler, be gone. Appropriately, on MLK Day.
Kevin B. Blackistone, ESPN panelist and visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, writes sports commentary for The Washington Post.
