Stand: Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and A Virtually Unknown Sports Activist

 

When the World Series took place in 1918 it did so under multiple clouds. The first was that World War I was going and that baseball had been forced – reluctantly – to have its greatest stars shoulder guns and fight. The owners believed that the 1919 season might very well be wiped out – no one knew that the war would be over by November – and had already shortened their season to end in September. The World Series was going to take place over a short period of time and very likely be the last baseball anyone saw for a while.

Attendance had dropped immensely as a result which dismayed the two teams: the Red Sox and the Cubs. In the era of the reserve clause the World Series share was a major source of income. Upsetting them more was the fact that for the first time baseball was going to diminish the money having made the decision to divide ticket sales for teams that finished anywhere from second to fourth in both leagues. Before the series began, both teams considered staging a strike, demanding more money or they wouldn’t play. The president of the American League Ban Johnson met with the strike leaders and put their strike in the shadow of patriotism with which The National pastime was now connected with. How could they think of letting down the public, especially in a time of war?

The players, led by Harry Hooper of the Red Sox, knew that they couldn’t win this fight. Baseball was always the master of public relations when it came to its image as the national game and to think of money in comparison to that – well, it was practically un-American. The players came out looking like ingrates even though they were in the right.

I mention all of this because during the seventh inning stretch at what was then known as Cubs Field the on-field band chose to use the opportunity to strike up The Star-Spangled Banner. The song, I should mention, wasn’t the national anthem yet: it wouldn’t be adopted as such until 1931. But when it began to play, the spectators began to sing, first only a few, then more and more until by the final note, the entire crowd was singing. And when the final note was played the entire crowd burst into thunderous cheers and applause, no doubt inspired by the national mood. The song was played at every game of the World Series, which the Red Sox won four games to 2 over Chicago. Famously the Red Sox didn’t win another World Series until 2004 and the Cubs, though they would contend frequently over the next quarter of a century, wouldn’t win a World Series until 2016.

Because baseball was associated with the national game – and because the owners never liked to mess with anything that made them sound like that they weren’t an institution rather than a business – the Star Spangled Banner became associated with baseball pretty much from that point forward. And because baseball was the American sport every other league and sport, from football to I suspect high school lacrosse, has been imitated it ever since. That is the deeper story of the connection between the Star-Spangled Banner and professional sports.

I seriously doubt that any of the so-called patriots who condemn any action involving the national anthem as ‘unamerican’  in professional sports know anything about and I seriously doubt that even if they did know, their opinion would change one bit. I also have incredible suspicion that the song was written in the one American war we got our asses kicked in, that it has four verses besides the first one, that it’s set to an English drinking song, or that they even know the words to the anthem. And I’ll be honest during the post-season and World Series year after year I tend not to listen the national anthem. It’s not just that it’s almost inevitably badly sung, no matter which Billboard singer they get to mangle it; it’s that even as patriotic songs go, it’s not a particularly good one. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is a wartime song and sounds like it. Compared to God Bless America or My Country, This of Thee, which are more peaceful and more tuneful, it sounds like – well, like it was written by an attorney rather than a poet or a songwriter. And this is coming from someone for whom it would doesn’t necessarily have the relationship with America that Chris Rock once described in his ‘Never Scared’ special. “For black people America is like the uncle who paid your way through college – but molested you.”

The kindest thing you can say about the national anthem and professional sports – and this is the rare occasion I am loathe to be objective – is that it came during a time when separate but equal was the law of the land, where black people were getting lynched and race riots were considered the faults of the uppity black people. Integration in professional sports was something that was considered unthinkable and probably un-American even by those who went off to fight fascism abroad in World War II.

Jackie Robinson learned that lesson the hard way while serving in the military. He got on a bus and ignored the instructions to move to the back. Transportation had been integrated by the military. The driver either didn’t know or didn’t care. When Robinson refused to do so, he was court-martialed. The jury would acquit him but Robinson never forgot the realization that he was fighting two wars: “one abroad and one against racism at home.” In his autobiography which ended up being published posthumously (he died days before it was published) in his last lines, he made it clear. “When I hear the national anthem, I can not salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in white America. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919 I know I never had it made.”

This last statement is true of every African-American athlete half a century later. And while things have improved immensely for athletes in many ways, particularly in the last twenty years all of them are very aware of the precarious position they are in with white ownership. This case has been made repeatedly but one that I was unfamiliar with both when it happened and until fairly recently was the story of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. It’s unlikely I still would be were it not for the work of the sports documentaries on Showtime.

Until fairly recently Showtime was at least as good as HBO when it came to showing documentary series and they were superior, in my opinion, when it came to those on professional athletes. I saw many fascinating ones over the past few years on sports that don’t normally interest me and people I would have paid no attention to otherwise. I learned the tragic story of Sonny Liston, one of the greatest and most controversial boxers of all time. I saw The Kings the stories of the intertwined fates of Sugar Ray Leonard, Marv Hagler, Roberto Duran and Thomas Hearns, interplayed with the history of 1970s and 1980s America. I saw Goliath the story of Wilt Chamberlain, the athlete before he was everything else. And last year came Stand the story of a man who overcame obstacles to become one of the greatest athletes in 1990s basketball – and then was destroyed because of racism and faux outrage twenty years before Colin Kaepernick lived through a similar experience. The difference was, for him, the consequences were far more severe personally and it is only until recently that we’ve begun to realize just how poorly we’ve treated him.

Unlike many of the documentaries involving sports that I’ve watched over the years the events in Stand took place during my lifetime or at least my childhood. I have no memory of them no doubt because I never followed professional basketball seriously then or now and I certainly wouldn’t have known anything about the  saga of a point guard for the Denver Nuggets. The Nuggets themselves were a relatively new team in basketball: they’d been part of the ABA (American Basketball Association) and had joined the NBA when the two leagues merged in 1976. Relatively speaking they’ve enjoyed some success in their history. During the 1980s they were one of the highest scoring teams in basketball, perennially contending for the playoffs but only winning two division titles in the 1980s and never making it to the conference finals. (They didn’t win their first championship until 2023.) They had gone through a period of decline during 1989 and 1991, but that allowed them to make high draft choices. One of them came in 1990.

Chris Jackson was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, one of three sons in a single parent household. He lived in poverty and constantly had poor nutrition. He missed fourth grade, was later placed in special education classes and it wasn’t until 17 that he was diagnosed with a moderate form of Tourette’s. Somehow he became a basketball prodigy at Gulfport High School. He was named Mississippi Mr. Basketball in 1987 and 1988. He was signed by LSU. He set the scoring record for a freshman, then broke it the same year, setting records for most points  by a freshman. The following year he produced similar numbers and tied his career high for three-pointers. Before his junior year he declared for the draft and was selected third. He was a teammate his second year with Shaquille O’Neal and later he took it personally when O’Neal broke the records he set as LSU, something O’Neal remarks on with ruefulness in the documentary

He was named to the all-rookie second team in 1991, then struggled the following year due to issues with a medication he’d been wrongly prescribed to treat his Tourette’s. The next year he got back into shape and was named Most Improved Player. Listening to his contemporaries and his peers, he is described in awe as this relatively small man who was suffering from Tourette’s absolutely destroying guys twice his size as a point guard. One observer says he was “Steph Curry before he was Steph Curry” and Curry himself says he could not have done what Jackson did.

During the 1993 season Jackson had converted to Islam, something that puzzled more people than it upset. No one in Denver cared who he worshiped as long as he performed on the court – something that he was doing with incredible skill. In the 1993-1994 season the Nuggets had their first winning season in five years, managed to come from a two game to nothing deficit to upset the first place Supersonics and nearly did the same thing against the Utah Jazz before the lost in the second round. The next year they finished .500 but still qualified for the playoffs. (They were swept by the Spurs.) The 1995-1996 season was a rebuilding year but the highpoint came when they played the 1995-96 Bulls who were on their way to a 72-10 season. One of those ten losses came against the Nuggets when Abdul-Rauf scored 32 points against the Bulls. Steve Kerr tried to guard him that night and freely tells the camera had no chance against him that night.

Around that time, however, Abdul-Rauf began to undergo the wrong kind of scrutiny for what was a private decision that got turned into something that led to him being ‘cheated out of his career’. Abdul-Rauf makes it clear that he’d begun to read the writings of such leftist thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and learned about ‘American exceptionalism.” My readers know I have issues with both these men as scholars but Abdul-Rauf makes it very clear in Stand that his interpretation is milder than most current day progressives and even most African-Americans. And when you consider the American flag, as I mentioned, has a different implication for African-Americans then white ones his actions are understandable.

During the 1995-96 season when everyone was saluting the flag, Abdul-Rauf was sitting on the sidelines. That’s all he was doing, not doing a Black Power salute or taking a knee. He did so for somewhere between four to six months to the indifference of his teammates, the attendees both in Denver and on the road, and most importantly the NBA. His teammates and coach said that he told them what was he doing and that they were fine with it – ‘it was no big deal’. And it very likely would have remained one were it not for the interference and bullying of a Denver talk radio host.

A broadcaster for Denver’s KBPI radio station is shown saying simply: “I don’t like him.”  The broadcaster (whose name is mentioned but who no one in the documentary mentions by name) says he went to a game and noticed Abdul-Rauf not standing for the National Anthem. He evokes the usual patriotic cliches “my father fought in World War II” and basically decided to broadcast this fact to his audience. His continued discussion of it on talk radio led to it being picked up by cable and national news (a big deal because partisan networks like Fox News and MSNBC didn’t exist yet). Eventually they went to interview him about why Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem.

In the interview we see, which goes Abdul-Rauf says went on for twenty minutes, he speaks in a completely calm tone, lucidly and intellectually. He gives a full and measured response. But in what was clearly a hack job done by the entire national media, the only clips that ended up playing were ones where he said the flag was a symbol of oppression and that the United States had a long history of tyranny. This is a position, for the record, that a black man in white America would have a hard time disagreeing with and considering Jackson/Abdul-Rauf’s upbringing, it’s an understandable one. But nuance has never been the strong suit of network news and eventually Abdul-Rauf became a polarizing figure.

We see a series of talking heads and it should come as no surprise that all of the people who express the greatest vehemence are white fans (male) and that African-American superstars, among them Charles Barkley and Mike Tyson, offer complete support. Shaquille O’Neal is shown in the present wishing that he’d gone out of his way to support his former teammate because he has two sisters who practice Islam.

Abdul-Rauf described what happened next. He showed up on March 12, 1996 for a home game and was called in by his coach who was clearly upset – at the league, not him. He told him about what had happened, that he was indefinitely suspended until he agreed to stand for the anthem and that the team wanted him to leave the stadium immediately, without dressing for the game or even talking to his teammates. Abdul-Rauf was stunned. When his agent was sent the reasons for the suspension, he knew it was bullshit because the code of conduct he’d supposedly broken was so archaic the union never even negotiated it.

Abdul-Rauf is very clear about the racism involved in this decision, though he does so subtly. He points out that the league never liked the fact that his agent, who was a close friend of his, was also African-American. He points out the hypocrisy of the fact that African-Americans, despite being a majority of the talent in the NBA, have almost no representation in management or the front office. This was under scrutiny at the time as well. Famously in 1987 Al Campanis had come on Ted Koppel to mark the fortieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut and had said that he thought “black people didn’t have the necessities” to have positions in management. The NBA no doubt didn’t want those questions asked either.

And the racism, which the broadcaster denies, was very clear at the time. Four employees of KBI went to a Colorado mosque and were charged with misdemeanors for playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on bugle and trumpet. (One wonders if they even checked to see if this was even a mosque Abdul-Rauf frequented or whether they thought they all looked alike.) It’s worth remembering that in the 1990s Colorado was essentially as deeply conservative as its neighbors Wyoming and Utah. With the exception of LBJ’s landslide in 1964 and Clinton’s victory in 1992, it had been solidly Republican for almost the entire twentieth century, even going for Republican for the last two of FDR’s electoral landslides. (Indeed it went for Bob Dole in 1996 and didn’t become solidly Democratic until Obama’s win in 2008.) Much of Colorado’s politics and fan base was heavily white, even in Denver and as we see in footage later on, Abdul-Rauf is seen being heavily booed at home when the suspension was lifted. Eventually he worked out a compromise with the league where he would stand during the playing of the anthem but could close his eyes, look downward and silently recited prayer. For the fans, it changed nothing and from that moment on he was a marked man.

The following season after having had one of the biggest seasons of his career so far, Abdul Rauf was traded to Sacramento Kings for basically nothing. He played 75 games the next year and averaged 28.4 points a game  but the next year he didn’t start a single game. and one of the greatest players in the league was for all intents and purposes blacklisted. The NBA denies to this day that is what they did but the players and his friends know that it was happened. He ended up signing with a Turkish basketball league but left before finishing the season. He didn’t play for the 1999-2000 season and then signed with the Vancouver Grizzlies in August of 2000. He managed to get through the season intact but then September 11^th put the final nail in his coffin.

In December of 2001, he was interviewed on HBO’s Real Sports. I have no doubt the only reason he was talked too was because they wanted to talk to both a Muslim athlete and a controversial figure. In his interview, where he was unaccompanied he stated that he thought the attacks on the Twin Towers were an inside job and that Israel might have been responsible. It’s telling that there are now many people – including professional athletes like Aaron Rodgers – who spout conspiracy theories on cable news and are treated not only justly but with authority and Abdul-Rauf’s career in the NBA was torpedoed after that broadcast.

And it is worth noting he faced far worse consequences then just being professionally blackballed. He bought a mansion with his earnings for his family in Necaise, Mississippi in 1992. In 2001, it was burned to the ground. Investigators determined there was arson and the FBI investigated. The KKK and white nationalists have always had a heavy presence in Mississippi to this day and some were suspected but no one was charged. A teammate of Abdul-Rauf points out the hypocrisy: “Mahmud never said to burn down the house but the Klan did burn his house down.” Abdul-Rauf moved to Florida.

Abdul-Rauf played with many international teams for the rest of his career, including in Russia and Japan. And he is still very gifted as an athlete in his fifties. He currently plays for the BIG3 basketball league, a league founded by Ice Cube in 2017 and he still plays today and pretty well: at age 49, he was among the leaders in field goal percentage.

Abdul-Rauf has every right to be enraged by what happened to him: the parallels between him and Colin Kaepernick are unmistakable. But I consider what happened to him more outrageous because his actions were not only private but unnoticed by the league for much of the initial period it was happening. Abdul-Rauf was never outspoken the way many of todays professional athletes are and he never spoke with the militancy of other Black Muslims, not just Louis Farrakhan or Muhammed Ali but other polarizing racial figures of the time such as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. Abdul-Rauf had opinions but they were his own and he makes it clear, even now, that they are solely his own and he never tried to preach to anyone at the time.

The racism is, if anything, more blatant then it was in the days of Fox News and talk radio not only because it’s very clear this was the white administration coming down on a Black Islam athlete who they considered ‘uppity’ though compared to his contemporaries like Barkley and Dennis Rodman, he wasn’t even close to their level of outrageousness. It’s equally clear that economics were involved: Denver was never as a big market team as New York or Chicago and it’s likely the league felt freer to stomp on Abdul-Rauf with impunity because he wasn’t Jordan or Ewing even though he was clearly as good as them at his profession. Had his career been even ten years later,  when social media was in full swing, it’s likely he could have survived this; had it happened today, he’d probably be a bigger celebrity for what he said off the court then on. But the perfect storm of events torpedoed his career and did far more damage to his life than any athlete today.

I’m impressed by Abdul-Rauf the way that I am by the measure of other athletes such as Jackie Robinson or Ali and infinitely more than some of the so-called ‘activists’ today. Abdul-Rauf didn’t know he was doing anything controversial at the time but when the going got tough he stood firm to his principles. And it’s clear even today that he still has them. One of the last images of Abdul-Rauf is him in attendance of an NBA game while the National Anthem is being played. While everyone else is standing and singing, he's looking downward with his eyes closed and chanting silently. He does so the same way he did when the whole controversy started – with no one in the stadium seeming angry or even noticing. He has made peace with what has happened to him and he has never compromised. He continues to make his stand.