Kyrie Irving was back with the Brooklyn Nets for Sunday night’s game against the Grizzlies, his suspension ended after eight games and checking all the boxes the franchise required him to check.
One of those was an apology, which he gave in an exclusive interview with SNY’s Ian Begley Saturday and then doubled down on prior to Sunday’s game – but in that window, he tried to explain why, as much as we know Kyrie Irving the basketball player, we need to understand “Ky” the family man and “Hela” the Native American tribesman – although he did it in a way that was, in its explanation, seemingly condescending to the media.
“I’ll just give you a view into my life. A majority of you know me as Kyrie Irving, and only have a small brief look into who I am as a person day-to-day. I don’t spend time with any of you the majority of my life and you don’t really know what I do when I go home, it’s just more assumptions, so let me give you an introspective look into who I am as Ky, and who I am as Hela in my tribe,” Irving started his message.
Kyrie called his childhood in West Orange, New Jersey a “racially harmonious environment” and “a melting pot,” where “I grew up with black people, Jewish people, Muslims, and Christians.”
Irving then explained how he got to be as curious as he is, being the son of a Lakota mother adopted off the Standing Rock reservation by a white pastor in Washington.
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“That’s what started my journey on my mom’s side: understanding a white Lutheran pastor adopted a Native child in the mid-1960s, when times were difficult and families were trying to find refuge to save their generation from war upon them,” Irving said. “That’s the kind of birth I come out of; those types of individuals have helped me understand the world is bigger than just the issues I may have with it, and in order to survive you have to treat people with peace and love, no matter what you may feel.”
For a young Irving, he said, “there was no conversation that was off the table,” and he “asked all the questions you can think of,” further saying that “if you think I ask questions about the world now, just imagine what I was asking at 14 years old.”
And asking those questions, he noted, was what led him to his world view today.
“Some things were ahead of me in terms of my experience, and it was difficult to sit with the truth of this word, and things that happened to groups of people that I felt were unnecessary,” Irving said. “It inflicted a lot of inter-generational pain, and that’s what I’m dealing with; the cycle that continues across the world across every race is that there is some type of pain or misunderstanding. As a kid, I was asking my family these questions to gain clarity on how I could survive in this world.”
He then closed that thought be saying while “a lot was learned over these last few weeks, my childhood was an experience in itself,” and denied any way he could be seen as anti-Semitic because of his upbringing.
“If you know anything about West Orange, New Jersey, I don't think I could grow up as an anti-Semite in that environment because of how much alliance that we feel to one another,” he said, “and how, all growing up, we had to protect each other.”
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