Every game played on Wednesday was an affront to what is left of our dignity. Every team that said the show must go on shamed itself. There should have been a solid wall of "Game cancelled, Kenosha Police Department," a string of "will not be replayed."
And in a related aside, almost all the games that weren't played were due in part to the thing that was supposed to preserve them — the bubble. They gathered together in one place and spoke with a unified voice — "We will not amuse you today because we don't find anything amusing about watching our brothers shot." Frankly, if they don't play another game, their decision could be the voice that clears the throats of those who could not or would not find theirs.
This is the world as we know it now, and the players in the NBA and WNBA (and Kenny Smith) are the mirror by which we comprehend how much entertainment is failing, even refusing, to hide the shames of a society that ought to know better but chooses not to do so. The Milwaukee Bucks, who do their work 32 miles away from Kenosha, were the first to say they would not work, and after some consultation were joined by the other seven teams scheduled to play Wednesday. The WNBA was going to play its three games, then the Atlanta Dream, which has been fighting frontally against its own dogwhistling co-owner, said it would not join in, and within minutes, the other five teams followed suit.
Elsewhere the response was spotty, even disappointing. The Milwaukee Brewers and Cincinnati Reds declined to entertain us, but Jason Heyward's decision not to play was not honored by his teammates on the Chicago Cubs. Dexter Fowler and Jack Flaherty sat out the St. Louis Cardinals-Kansas City Royals game, but nobody else at Busch Stadium did. The San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers refused to amuse, but the Oakland Athletics and Texas Rangers needed the exercise. The Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres didn't take the field except to take a knee, but... well, you know. And the NHL disgraced itself with a few hollow proclamations during the games they felt were too important to the national interest. Broadcaster Kelly Hrudey did say it was wrong for the league to play, but otherwise the hockey intelligentsia pretended that nothing new was in the wind. Gary Bettman, Bill Daly and the owners and television executives they serve all believed that the cardboard cutouts and megapixels had a right to their entertainment, too.
In short, some athletes said no, and some chose "what the hell, we're already here." Or they had it chosen for them, because social justice loses steam the higher up it goes, and we can't speak for the way every team refuses to handle its business.
So here's to the ones who didn't shut and didn't dribble, and the ones who used batting practice to kneel rather than practice their bunting, and wondering why there weren't more of them. Here's to the men and women who gathered with their peers in the increasingly uncomfortable optic of the bubble and in empty ballparks to say their citizenship carries more weight. I'd say an important moment has passed too many others by, but horribly, there are sure to be others. When Washington Nationals reliever Sean Doolittle said, "Sports are like the reward of a functional society," it will surely come to pass that this aphorism works for the operators, players, support staffs and spectators alike. The time has come for the hardest choices to be made, and it's not going away any time soon