NBA professional Enes Kanter Freedom has been campaigning for human rights for years. Most recently, he agitated against hosting the Olympic Games in China – much to the displeasure of the US basketball league. Now he might get the reward for it.
“Nobody cares what happens to the Uyghurs, okay? You bring it up because you really care, and I think it’s nice that you care, the rest of us don’t care. I’ll just tell you one thing very much hard ugly truth. Of all the things I care about, that’s below my line.” These sentences come from Chamath Palihapitiya, billionaire and co-owner of the NBA team Golden State Warriors. He said it in mid-January on the occasion of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing in his “All-In Podcast”.
Palihapitiya’s words caused a wave of outrage on social media. The Warriors, in which he holds a two percent stake and whose board he is a member of, distanced himself from the 45-year-old: “As an investor who has no daily duties at the Warriors, Mr. Palihapitiya does not speak on behalf of our franchise, and his views certainly do not reflect those of our organization,” said the association.
And the billionaire himself rowed back: “If I listen to this week’s podcast again, I realize that I come across as someone who lacks empathy,” he admitted on Twitter. “As a refugee, my family fled a country that had a whole host of human rights issues, so it’s an important part of my life experience. To be clear, I believe human rights matter, whether in China, the United States or elsewhere. Period.”
Enes Kanter Freedom calls Xi Jinping ‘brutal dictator’
Enes Kanter Freedom was among the critics of Palihapitiya’s statements. The NBA professional has long campaigned for human rights. Freedom was born Enes Kanter in Switzerland but grew up in Turkey, his parents’ homeland. He started his basketball career in 2011 as a third draft pick. The supporter of the movement of Fethullah Gülen, archenemy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has repeatedly used his prominence to draw attention to the repressive policies of the government in Ankara. And as long as Turkey was his target, the NBA let him.
But in October 2021, Freedom targeted another regime: China. Just before his club’s Boston Celtics opened the season against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, the 29-year-old posted a video on social media showing him standing in front of a blank white wall, dressed in a black t-shirt with a picture of him praying Dalai Lama on it. “Brutal dictator of China, Xi Jinping, I have a message for you and your henchmen,” says the 2.08-meter giant in the clip, pointing his finger at the camera. “Free Tibet. Free Tibet. Free Tibet.”
For the game against the Knicks, Freedom had his shoes painted with the colors of the Tibetan flag and the words “Free Tibet” by a Chinese dissident. After warming up, two NBA executives warned him to take off his shoes or he could be suspended, the center told the Washington Post. But he had previously reviewed the rules, which do not prohibit players from putting human rights messages on their shoes. Amid the coronavirus pandemic and social justice protests of 2020, the league had even encouraged clubs to take a stand and entire teams and their coaches took to their knees, in shoes and shirts, during the national anthem in protest at police brutality swarming with slogans: Black Lives Matter, Say Their Names, Wash Your Hands.
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“You can’t take away my right to free speech. Tell your boss. I don’t care what happens,” Freedom told officials. At half-time, his cellphone was flooded with text messages, including one telling him from his manager that the Beijing government had banned the broadcast of all Celtics games in the country. “It took them 24 minutes to ban everything,” Freedom reported. “That clearly shows how dictatorial things are there.”
Later, a representative of the players’ union called him again and again and asked him not to wear China-critical shoes, reported Freedom of the US magazine “The Atlantic”. He also spoke to NBA boss Adam Silver. In the half-hour conversation, Silver told him that he could express whatever he wanted with his shoes. In the end, the league boss noted: “Everyone knows that it’s about business.” He understood the remark, Freedom told The Atlantic: You are free to talk about China, but there could be consequences for you, your team and the NBA.
NBA earns $5 billion a year in China
For a decade he spoke out against human rights violations in Turkey and nobody in the NBA complained, but “one day when I was talking about China, my phone rang every hour,” the athlete told the Washington Post. The reason for this from his point of view: “Last year in China more people followed the NBA than the American population – over 400 million. Every year the revenues amount to [der NBA aus China] to five billion dollars.”
Last November, when he was naturalized as a US citizen, Enes Kanter then changed his name to Enes Kanter Freedom – Kanter is to be his new middle name and Freedom his surname. That too was meant as a political statement.
The new American also continued the messages on the basketball court: Freedom wore shoes with slogans against the dictatorship in Venezuela, North Korea’s ruler Kim Jong Un, Syria’s despot Bashar al-Assad and the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. Wearing sneakers that looked like they had blood running down them, he called for the Beijing Winter Olympics to be postponed because of human rights violations in China and the oppression of the Uyghurs. Reports about the athlete are now being censored in China, as are his social media appearances.
“Move the games”: Enes Kanter Freedom’s shoes at a Boston Celtics vs. Washington Wizards NBA game
© Nick Wass / DPA
The more Freedom got involved, the more he felt what Adam Silver might have meant by the consequences: The basketball player’s playing time fell to the lowest level of his career. In some games, the Celtics wouldn’t even let him out on the field during “garbage time,” the final minutes of a game that had already been decided. He felt the end was near, the athlete told the Washington Post last week. His contract would have expired after this season. But recently former teammates and coaches told him: “We love you so we have to tell you the truth. This is your farewell tour. Enjoy it. Smile. Have fun. I hope you win a championship because I don’t think so that you will still get a contract after this year, because the things you are talking about cost [die NBA] millions of dollars.”
Celtics move Freedom to Houston
Worse, Freedom wasn’t even allowed to fulfill its contract. A day after the newspaper interview and just before the end of the transfer period, the Boston Celtics shoved their center to bottom league Houston Rockets, who have a large fan base in China and promptly dropped him from their roster. “Now you don’t play basketball anymore,” a correspondent for the state-run Chinese newspaper China Daily commented maliciously on Twitter after the China critic’s dismissal.
After his NBA exit, Freedom received a lot of support from the US Republicans. Numerous senators from ex-President Donald Trump’s party received the athlete for lunch in Congress on Wednesday and then posted photos together on Twitter, accompanied by sharp attacks against the Chinese government – and against the US basketball league. The NBA has been a red rag for many Republicans since it allowed players and officials to speak out against police violence and social injustice at the games. Trump called the 2020 protests “pathetic”, “disrespectful” and “unacceptable”. “When I see people kneeling and thus not respecting our flag and the anthem, I personally just turn off my television.”
That the Boston Celtics actually deported Freedom because of his criticism of China and the Rockets parted ways with him for the same reason is an obvious thought. But there is no evidence of this. However, one thing is clear: The center was never a top player in the league, but with his skills and his age he would be an attractive backup in his position, who could still throw baskets at NBA level for several more seasons. “I’m 29. I’m healthy. I have six more years to play,” Freedom told the Washington Post.
But Freedom doesn’t really believe himself that he’ll ever play for a US professional league team again. He is already looking towards Europe: “Now that I have my American passport, I would like to visit Greece and meet the prime minister to talk about the repatriation of Turkish refugees,” said the basketball player according to “Eurohoops” the Greek TV channel “Open TV”. “Depending on how our conversation goes, I will talk to him about the possibility of playing professionally in Greece.”
And even if his career as a professional athlete were to end prematurely because of his commitment to human rights, Enes Freedom would be at peace with himself, as he told the Washington Post: “If that’s the reason I’m no longer able to play basketball, you know what? Well. At least then I can look back and say I did the right thing.”
Swell: “Washington Post”, CNN, “The Athletic”, “Talk Basket”, “Hoop’s Hype”, “Eurohoops”, “All In Podcast”, “The Hills”