GEORGIA SENATE RACES PROMISE NEW MODEL FOR SPORTING PROTESTS

Basketball had quite the 2020. First, Kobe Bryant’s tragic death put the sport in the global spotlight. Then, more happily, The Last Dance dominated Netflix and introduced a new generation of fans to the phenomenon that was Michael Jordan and the 1990s Chicago Bulls. In August, as the delayed NBA playoffs got underway, NBA players walked off the court in protest at the police shooting of Jacob Blake. More than all those moments though, it was protests by the W.N.B.A that will go down as the sport’s most important 2020 legacy. Of all the two pointers that basketball players shot, the one they scored in Georgia, where the Democrats flipped the Senate in January 2021, will be the most enduring.

In July, Kelly Loeffler, co-owner of the women’s basketball franchise, the Atlanta Dream, criticised Black Lives Matter and asked the W.N.B.A commissioner to reconsider the decision to introduce BLM branding in stadiums as part of the league’s return to play agreement.

As a sports franchise owner, she was hardly alone in not supporting the movement. Plenty of NFL owners have been criticised for not supporting BLM more vocally, or for paying lip service to the movement while continuing to voice support for Donald Trump.

The difference is that Loeffler also happened to be a United States Senator, and, crucially, one who would soon be up for re-election. And so, to paraphrase Jordan’s much shared quote from The Last Dance, the players took that personally.

More importantly, they found a way to do something about it. When Loeffler doubled down rather than backed down on her comments, The Atlanta Dream moved from criticising Loeffler to supporting her opponent, the Democrat Reverend Raphael Warnock. In August, as the Dream prepared to take on the Phoenix Mercury, Loeffler’s team took to the court wearing shirts openly urging fans to ‘Vote Warnock’. Other teams quickly took up arms alongside the Dream, and, not content to stop there, nine WNBA teams announced a “unite the vote” registration effort.

It was not the first time that the W.N.B.A has taken a stand. In 2016, the league’s players were among the first to join Colin Kaepernick’s protests against racial injustice. After issuing fines against the players for their stance, the W.N.B.A relented and annulled the penalties.

The difference this time was that circumstances were coalescing that would ultimately allow the Atlanta Dream’s players and their fellow W.N.B.A professionals not just to make a powerful statement, but to enact real, tangible, political change in a specific vote.

With the W.N.B.A’s support, Warnock began a steady advance from his status as clear underdog, polling around 9% of the vote at the time. Within two days of the t-shirts appearing on court, the campaign had raised 3,500 new grassroots donors. As funds and press attention poured in, Warnock became turned himself into a fierce challenger, then made the election a coin toss, and now becomes the first black Senator ever elected by the State of Georgia.

As for exactly how influential the protests were, the Washington Post argues that ‘it is impossible to isolate the effect of the W.N.B.A’s support’, and it is true that the campaign enjoyed other notable advantages, including an endorsement from Barack Obama and the chance to deliver the eulogy at civil rights leader John Lewis’ funeral.

Alongside the W.N.B.A’s contribution were myriad other contributors to Warnock’s success, and that of his fellow Democrat John Ossof who won the other run-off election, defeating incumbent David Perdue. Democrat Stacey Abrams, who serves on the board of advocates of the W.N.B.A players’ Union, will go down in history for orchestrating an extraordinary registration drive, a model that Democrats will now surely be looking to take nationwide. Loeffler and Perdue also contributed to their own destruction, refusing to condemn Donald Trump’s misinformation campaign to undermine the election, and running adverts that darkened Warnock’s skin colour and enlarged the Jewish Ossof’s nose.

Nevertheless, it is an inescapable conclusion that the W.N.B.A’s targeted protests against Loeffler contributed to a specific senatorial race in a way that could prove a landmark moment at the crossroads of sport, society and protest. While sport has long been good at prompting broad social change and raising awareness of history’s most heinous crimes, from Nazism to Segregation to Apartheid, it has less often organised itself to back specific, measurable campaigns. Marcus Rashford’s herculean efforts to extend free school meals in the UK were one 2020 exception. Now, like Abrams’ model for flipping states, sports voting drives could be about to go national.