
Therefore you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.
—Romans 2, Verse 1, The Bible
The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.
Let’s get this straight: Outside of those citizens of Hong Kong who are risking most everything protesting for their freedoms, there are few people involved in these contretemps between China, Hong Kong and the NBA who aren’t dipping into the well of hypocrisy.
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Not the NBA, not LeBron James, not Steve Kerr. Not the companies that conveniently ignore the abuses of the Chinese government against protestors in Hong Kong and Taiwan and elsewhere that do not want to live under China’s thumb. Not China, which wants access to Western markets and capital and consumers while pushing back with all its economic and social might against Western ideals of individual freedom of movement and speech and assembly.
Not me.
And, not you.
Not Daryl Morey, for that matter.
Anyone who’s made the determination that China’s economic potency is too big to ignore, or allow to fail, has to wear it.
The hypocrisy shows when people like Morey take a principled stand, after which people like Kerr say next to nothing, and it shows when James tries to hide behind the result of Morey’s tweet (“Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong”) and not the process. LeBron is all about process. He is all about not skipping steps and doing things the right way to bring about the desired result.
While surely unnerving for him and Lakers and Nets teammates who were in China when the controversy erupted, and potentially hard on the numerous people who work on endorsements and other deals between the West and China, China’s response to Morey’s tweet should not have mattered to someone like James. He’s often acted without regard to economic consequences, whether he’s publicly condemned police brutality or taken on the President of the United States. He did an entire series for Showtime, “Shut Up and Dribble,” about people he rightly reveres – Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – who took stands in direct conflict with their own interests after carefully considering the issues involved.
But also, let’s be real: A lot of the people taking shots at James now are doing so merely because it’s convenient for them to do so.
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I doubt many who have come down on James, or Kerr, or the league, or Adam Silver, had spent a second thinking or caring about the Hong Kong protests and what the protestors wanted before now, or at least until they heard about Morey’s tweet and the NBA’s initial reaction to it.
But, as James has had endorsement deals galore in China for more than a decade, he’s left himself open to the charge that his bottom line registered more with him than his principles. Nor has he, nearly a week after his initial comments, said anything critical of the Chinese. This does not make him unique; I don’t recall Allen Iverson, the realest of the real, taking time out of his many promotional tours of China during or after his playing days to slam Beijing’s human rights record.
“If you want to make China a significant part of your business, you have to understand that there are political risks involved,” said a sports industry source this week with extensive history negotiating deals with China. “You don’t see movies about Tibet much anymore. You don’t see Chinese as villains. Look at ‘The Martian’; it was the Chinese coming to the rescue. Hollywood has learned – not without some criticism – and they have accepted. China is about to become the biggest box office in the world.”
James had plenty of time to think about what he wanted to say upon returning to the States. Instead, he tried to thread the eye of a very, very small needle. In making his understandable anger clear that Morey put himself and others in China in peril with his tweet, James nonetheless lost the moral high ground. In short, he made it about himself and otherwise very comfortable NBA players, rather than the thousands of protestors in Hong Kong, who have a lot more to lose than face or endorsements.
A friend way smarter on these matters than me explained that China was especially humiliated when Hong Kong was lost to England in the First Opium War (1839-1842). Hong Kong wasn’t a cultural center of the Chinese empire at the time, but it was most assuredly part of the Chinese empire. And as such, China is especially vexed at any projection of the notion that Hong Kong, which the British returned to China in 1997, is anything now but a province, despite the “one country, two systems” principle that allows both to retain their own autonomous governments for 50 years. (Macau, which was returned to China by Portugal in 1999, operates under similar conditions.)
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And, let’s be clear: I am not skating on this, either.
Am I being hypocritical, thinking the tortured history between China and Hong Kong makes snap judgments about China’s bullying against a people that want autonomy over their own future problematic while having no such qualms about weighing in on what I believe are abuses of power against people of color in this country?
Of course I am.
But, if you sent a tweet or an email lighting up the NBA or Kerr or James for not lambasting the Chinese, I hope you didn’t do so on an iPhone. Or a MacBook. Or an iPad. Because Apple, which makes all of those products, caved to Chinese pressure a couple of weeks ago and removed an app from its online store that those very protestors Morey backed used to monitor police movements during protests, so as to avoid arrest or tear-gassing.
You’ve smashed your new iPhone 11 now that you know this, right?
I trust, also, that you’ve rethought drinking that macchiato latte from Starbucks – which has more than 3,900 stores in China, and which is now the target of at least some of the Hong Kong protestors.
It goes without saying, I’m sure, that you canceled your kids’ subscriptions to Blizzard. And they aren’t allowed to buy Vans at the mall, right? Nor do you fly anywhere, on any U.S. airline, since all of them – all of them – now officially refer to Taiwan, an independent country that China regards as a “breakaway province,” as part of China, bowing to pressure from the Chinese?
I’m sure that Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who said that James “is the one who isn’t educated on the situation at hand,” and who bragged that he was in Hong Kong to witness protestors “fighting for freedom,” will be returning the $65,000 in campaign contributions he’s received during the last few years from NextEra Energy. NextEra – one of Scott’s top contributors, according to the political website opensecrets.org – did a 2018 deal with JinkoSolar, a Chinese company and one of the world’s biggest solar panel companies, and opened a factory in Jacksonville, Fla., last year. I’m sure he’ll be demanding NextEra denounce the crackdown in Hong Kong.
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The point of this is not to rank your hypocrisy, or mine, or Rick Scott’s, in some kind of order. The point is that the world is a terribly interconnected place, where we all, daily, make compromises between our values and our interests. (Or, maybe you’ve forgotten many on the Dream Team – most famously, Michael Jordan – covering up the Reebok logos on their warmup suits at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona because so many of them had deals with Nike.) I do not expect a multi-billion dollar business like the NBA to unilaterally abandon China, nor do I expect players who’d take astronomical financial hits were that to happen to do so. You first, Boeing.
But, that doesn’t mean that Morey doesn’t have to take some responsibility here – and not for the economics.
“It wasn’t that (James) was just put in a bad situation; it was at the worst possible time,” the sports industry source said. “Why the fuck would Daryl Morey send it then, when teams were over there? LeBron got ripped, and I’m not sure what he said that was wrong.”
Few U.S. executives of any stripe have had more dealings with the Chinese government the last 10-15 years than the Rockets’ GM. Houston’s franchise has had deep and long-lasting ties with China ever since the team had to negotiate with Chinese authorities to allow Yao Ming to play for the Rockets upon being drafted in 2002. Those talks involved both Morey’s predecessor, Carroll Dawson, and the previous owner of the team, Leslie Alexander.
But the Rockets have continued those partnerships since Morey succeeded Dawson in 2007 and since Tillman Fertitta bought the Rockets from Alexander in 2017. Morey surely knew the consequences of what he was about to do, and he did it anyway. Whether or not China demanded the NBA fire Morey (which the NBA cannot do, though it could have, conceivably, compelled the Rockets to do so), Morey is an exceedingly intelligent guy, with significant historical and practical knowledge of how the Chinese operate. And, for years, he was fine with the Rockets, and by extension, himself, profiting from the team’s substantial business dealings there.
At the least, Morey was grossly indifferent to the position in which he put the Lakers and Nets, not to mention the league, with his tweet.
“The problem is this guy is a representative of the most beloved team in China,” another source with extensive experience negotiating deals between NBA players and China said, explaining China’s reaction. “They feel like it’s a slap in the face. They are the most popular team in China, and (Morey’s) a representative. In China, it’s about saving face, relationships, trust. You can have a dispute, but if you go there and sit with them repeatedly…the NBA has delivered, and you have this knucklehead inflaming not just the NBA, but the whole culture, the whole ideology. It’s going to take time for that to unwind.”
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China can certainly live without NBA games being aired on Tencent for CCTV. Perhaps Anta can do lucrative shoe deals with athletes other than Klay Thompson or Gordon Hayward, and Li-Ning can go elsewhere other than C.J. McCollum. My guess, though, is that China, ultimately, will view continuing to do business with the NBA and its superstars as worth its trouble, though it will continue to put enormous pressure on all involved not to rock the boat and allow its propaganda to continue unchallenged.
But, there is a commitment to sports on the governmental level. China wants to be in the business of sports, whether it’s the NBA or its own nationalistic interests going into the 2022 Winter Games. And, China wants to do business with the United States. The current trade negotiations between the two nations would not be continuing, and the tariffs flying back and forth, if there wasn’t great desire on the part of both nations to, ultimately, remain in economic partnership with one another.
That’s the macro. The micro is that the Rockets may not be out of the woods for a while.
The industry source thinks the Rockets will continue to be made an example of in China for the near future. The question is, how long will it stay? How long will it continue?
All because Morey forgot what has been attributed to many in the business of leadership as the Three Vital Questions of Decision Making:
Does it need to be said?
Does it need to be said by me?
Does it need to be said by me right now?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, don’t say it.
Or, send it.
(Top Photo: Ivan Cheung / SOPA Images via Getty Images)
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