EXPORTING THE GLADIATORS TO CHINA.

Yesterday, I suggested that classicist V. D. Hanson missed an opportunity to draw parallels between the gladiator academies of Rome and today's professional basketball.  He's still thinking about professional basketball, today about the reluctance of the managers or players to call out the Han supremacist state run by the mandarins in Pekin.

This growing NBA–China nexus couldn’t come at a more embarrassing time for the league.

During the COVID-19 epidemic, the national quarantine, and the demonstrations, violence, and cultural revolution that has followed the death of George Floyd, the NBA has not been shy about political activism. Players, coaches, ex-players, and obsequious sports writers have all virtue-signaled the nation about America’s supposed sins.

Indeed, part of the NBA woke/hip/cool/edgy brand is to trash the “establishment” that has ensured the foundations of its multibillion-dollar-empire. In scary marketing fashion, NBA players, current and retired, and their acolytes in popular culture have veneered their 1950s-style corporate fealty with woke talk about BLM, the “Jews,” eugenics, Farrakhan, and the usual totems of “resistance.”

Their basic message for young consumers is that you can hate the man and still wear $400 sneakers — the same way that you can wear a jersey with an edgy logo during the game and then retire at night into your Malibu compound. In the spirit of medieval indulgences, paid to help the sinner enter heaven, the more that the players become corporate cut-out pitchmen, the more they voice left-wing boilerplate to square the circle of being privileged rich people who nonetheless cling to street cred for the sake of advertising.

No one knows how long this 30-year disingenuousness can continue. It may come to a head this fall, when the league will soon deal with some players’ plans to kneel during the national anthem next season. The NBA has approved of individual players wearing politicized slogans on their jerseys — politicized in the sense of trashing the U.S., but not offering an ill word about Chinese Communist atrocities. The message is, “Ridicule your own democracy all you want, but censor your incorrect thoughts about racist and totalitarian China.”

Read on, though, and the possibility that the penny will drop comes to my mind.

The NBA is one of the most elite, exclusive, and coveted professions in America, where players de facto become multimillionaire celebrities — on the theory that pure merit, not race, determines who wins these most-sought-after billets. Again, that is nearly the opposite mindset from that of an Asian-American straight-A, 800-SAT student assuming that by merit she should get into Yale, and thereby “overrepresent” her race in the Ivy League, at the “expense” of other “excluded” groups.

So add up all these divergent facts, and there emerges an inconvenient NBA modus operandi. The hyper-rich players occasionally moan that a mostly white ownership controls mostly black players, while their supporters often invoke plantation imagery, channeling Bryant Gumbel’s now decade-old jibe that, during a player lockdown, former NBA commissioner David Stern acted as if he was a “modern plantation overseer.” A few years later, former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s overt racism, at least in one case, bore out Gumbel’s rant.

The mostly white owners nod that they must do something someday about this owner imbalance. No one dares to say that the progressive players themselves do not care much for the progressive admonition of “looking like America.” And then everyone lives and lets live, to make lots of money.

Money is certainly at the center of these contradictions. For the NBA brand, it seems to make much better business sense to routinely damn democratic, diverse, and free America, but not the racialist, Communist, and outlaw China. The former’s audience is changing, touchy, and shrinking; the latter’s is uniform, predictable, and growing.

Wokeness has lost some market share inside the U.S., but such perceived anti-Americanism helps to win it back — and more — in China. Beijing, of course, sees anti-American-sounding American athletes as high-profile useful idiots — a fact no doubt known to the receptive players and coaches of the NBA who willingly and sincerely play their parts.

I submit, dear reader, that there's a great deal of social waste in identifying the finest basketball players (who have a relatively short service life and are subject to injury) and that the A student who doesn't make the cut at Yale still has a pretty good chance studying chemistry at Michigan or Wisconsin or the University of Spoiled Children (or even Marquette) and sooner or later the wokeness machine will turn its attention to the industrial reserve army playing some pretty good basketball in prison yards, and parallels to the Spartacus Academy, with or without the understanding of classical history.