Still, the capacity crowd\u2019s overwhelmingly negative reaction to 10 seconds of Donald Trump gives us useful information.<\/p>\n
WATCH | Madison Square Garden fans jeer Trump during U.S. anthem:<\/p>\n
The president\u2019s unpopularity isn\u2019t just a columnist\u2019s opinion. Poll numbers bear it out weekly<\/a>. Criticism abounds, and attending a sports event is a chance to shield himself from it.<\/p>\n Except the list of safe spaces keeps shrinking. Trump has been booed everywhere from the U.S. Open tennis tournament to a Washington Commanders home game. He should receive a huge ovation at the UFC Freedom 250 event this weekend, but that fight card will take place in his literal backyard, before guests who, unlike Tom Brady and The Rock, didn\u2019t decline the invitation.<\/p>\n Last Monday represented a level playing field, and organizers tried to tilt it in Trump\u2019s favour by putting him on screen during the national anthem, when most of us figure a true patriot wouldn\u2019t boo.\u00a0<\/p>\n Well, most of us would have figured wrong, because the audience let loose the kind of full-throated catcalls rassling fans reserve for the most odious heels. And they reinforced a valuable lesson about the unifying power of sports.<\/p>\n It\u2019s limited, context-dependent and subject to manipulation by bad-faith actors.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re honest with ourselves, we can concede that unity is rarely even the point.<\/p>\n Canadians don\u2019t revere Paul Henderson because his series-winning goal helped unite us with the Soviet Series in the Summit Series of 1972. We celebrate him because Team Canada\u2019s triumph was supposed to teach the Soviets a lesson, and symbolized a victory for democracy itself.<\/p>\n For Americans, a more useful parallel is track star Jesse Owens, whose four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics still resonate with historical importance, but not because they promoted a sense of unity between the U.S. and Nazi Germany. Americans treasure Owens because his victories took the tall tale of Aryan supremacy and chopped it down to size.<\/p>\n WATCH | Jesse Owens captures 4 gold medals at 1936 Olympics in Berlin:<\/p>\n Then he returned to the U.S. and lived as a second-class citizen.<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n Because he was Black, and his exploits on the track couldn\u2019t inspire white Americans to see past his colour, or anybody else\u2019s. And because when concepts like sports, politics, patriotism and unity overlap, race often ripples just below the surface.<\/p>\n So you could hear echoes of Owens in Wilson, that powerhouse tenor tasked with delivering an anthem so stirring that it would short-circuit the audience’s reflexive tendency to boo Trump.<\/p>\n The Knicks, the Spurs and that anthem were supposed to deflect criticism from a president who posts racist memes. To soften the reaction to a president whose policies disproportionately harm the Black, Brown and foreign-born. To turn down the temperature on the head of state who nominated three of the Supreme Court Justices who last month voted to take a hatchet to Black voting rights in the South.<\/p>\n Just a few sources of the disunity that a basketball game and Wilson\u2019s anthem were supposed to remedy.<\/p>\n Wilson, who is not a Trump fan, reacted like a pro, powered through the boos without missing a note, and delivered the best U.S. anthem at a pro sports event since Whitney Houston in Super Bowl XXV.\u00a0<\/p>\n And the crowd jeered anyway, because the division that allegedly is the real problem doesn\u2019t stem from a simple difference in opinion. If your favourite muscle car is an Audi S7 and mine is a Dodge Challenger, we can agree to disagree and watch the game. But if you\u2019re OK with ICE gunning down American citizens in the streets, or Trump threatening to annex Canada, the NBA Finals can\u2019t close the gap between us.<\/p>\n Not buying it<\/p>\n NBA commissioner Adam Silver was either oblivious to that dynamic, or he ignored it on purpose as he told ESPN\u2019s pre-game panel<\/a> that Trump\u2019s presence would allow him to bond with the rest of us over our shared love of pro hoops.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat makes sport so special, especially when there\u2019s so much that divides people, is that it\u2019s something that we have in common,\u201d Silver told ESPN. \u201cWe should look for those things that we have in common and build off that.\u201d<\/p>\n Judging by their body language, especially Shaquille O\u2019Neal\u2019s deadpan glare into the camera, the Inside The NBA panel didn\u2019t buy what Silver was selling.<\/p>\n The other reality is that sports can only foster meaningful unity if we\u2019ve already addressed the source of the division in question. Otherwise, sports is just a distraction, and not a very good one. It\u2019s like handing me an aspirin for a compound fracture. It might take the edge off the pain for a while, but my leg\u2019s still broken.\u00a0<\/p>\n Trump and his administration could prove me wrong during the World Cup. But instead of promoting unity across geopolitical divides, we have visa problems for Iranian players, fans marooned due to travel bans<\/a>, and the U.S. outright denying entry to a Somali referee<\/a> who had secured the proper immigration papers to work the tournament. If the world\u2019s biggest sports event can\u2019t override the Trump administration\u2019s beef with Somalia, then maybe sport, by itself, isn\u2019t the unifying force that some folks keep telling us it is.<\/p>\n A disappointing development, but it\u2019s something even more valuable for the Sports Can Bridge Any Ideological Gap crowd.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a reality check.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you watched Monday night\u2019s NBA Finals game between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs, then…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":729770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":["post-729769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/729770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"NEW](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1781186530_543_default.jpg\")
Fans in in New York’s Bryant Park react as U.S. president Donald Trump appears on screen during the national anthem prior to Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Monday. (Adam Gray\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n