Game On. This Is The Payback

All-Star Game, Legal Gambling Out. More hits to come for voting law

I like many of the sports talk radio guys around Atlanta. The only one I turned the dial on routinely has moved north. These people are witty, fun, smart about sports, and good people. They will talk about anything…

…except…

….politics. They run from it. They have Black listeners and they have white listeners. They have Black advertisers and white advertisers. Step gingerly around one of those landmines and the other blows you up.

The talk show hosts would rather talk BBQ than politics, and they did, just an hour after Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred stripped Atlanta of the All-Star Game because the Republican state legislature passed a voter suppression bill designed to curtail Black voting. It could have been a lively radio debate, but the hosts wanted none of it. It could have devolved into something nasty.

Thank goodness for MLB, though. No fence sitting. No buying the GOP bunk about election security.

Now it is the turn of the NBA, NFL, PGA, and the NCAA.

The caretakers of Sports in this country have too many Black athletes and Black employees and Black fans to sit on a fence and stay out of this fight. The leagues have talked about what’s right for years and they cannot roll over now. I expected the Braves not to oppose the voting law. Just look at their fan base. The Hawks and Falcons, though, were a disappointment last week with their less-than-forceful responses.

Now that MLB has stood up, who’s next? Can the PGA face enough pressure to take the Tour Championship out of East Lake?

Georgia deserves this ignominy. All of it. The elected men want to cling to power and claim voter fraud when there was no widespread voter fraud. The economic hits need to keep coming.

So that’s two whacks with the moral hammer this week.

If you missed the first, the Braves were one of the professional sports organizations in the city that wanted a statewide vote on legal gambling, but Republicans were split on whether to back a constitutional amendment for a betting referendum. The betting/gambling backers needed help from the Democrats. The Dems refused.

State Senator Elena Parent of Decatur sent me this email:

There were members of the House Democratic conference who took a stand saying they would not support sports betting until the professional sports teams and other business entities who wanted it came out strongly against SB 202, the elections rewrite bill.

So what gets stripped next?

Alabama plays Miami in the Chick-fil-a Kickoff Game on September 4. Bama is a red state through and through and their athletic department will not be able to boycott the game, the first limit on Nick Saban’s power that I can think of. But Miami might refuse to play.

Dan Corso, the president of the Atlanta Sports Council, would not return my email request for a comment on whether he is worried other leagues, or the NCAA might strip Atlanta of events. Atlanta has built a thriving sports tourism business. It is bidding to host the Final Four and future NCAA regionals. If the NCAA can keep its events out of states with the Confederate flag, it will keep its events out of a state with a bill designed to disenfranchise Black voters.

By the way, we have collector’s items because of the Republicans:

I walked around The Battery on Friday night, the multi-use development that is part of Truist Park, the Braves home field. If this had been a game day, the crowd would have been whiter, older, more conservative and steadfast in their belief Trump had the election stolen. They would have been terribly upset at MLB for taking the All-Star Game away. They would have defended the new voting bill which, among other things, makes it a felony to offer a person in line to vote a drink of water, even if they had been standing there four hours.

But this was Friday night without baseball and the younger, hipper crowd was standing tall with Rob Manfred on punishing Georgia.

“I was kind of surprised,” said Keyan Shod, “because Baseball is usually the last to do anything (around a controversy). And I agreed with the decision.”

A man walking his dog and wearing the cap of another National League team, also seemed genuinely surprised by MLB’s decision earlier in the afternoon.

“Baseball came under pressure,” he said, unwilling to give his name, “and did the right thing.”

Jacob Robinson of Smyrna is a Braves season-ticket holder. He had already paid $400 for his All-Star Game package, which included a ticket to the game and the Home Run Derby. His money will be refunded, but he was not unhappy with MLB’s decision.

“The voting law is ridiculous,” Robinson said. “It sucks there is no game, but MLB made the right decision. I mean, there was no voter fraud, yet they put in a law they said would stop voter fraud. How can both things be true?”

I’m delighted by all this push back on the voting bill…and Hank Aaron would have been delighted, too. There needs to be more.

MLB can hold Jackie Robinson Day with its head held high.

Happy Easter!