Demonstrating pleasure when an athlete gets injured will never go over well, regardless of that player’s beliefs. ESPN Radio’s Dan Le Batard Show was on the losing end of a tweet the staff later deleted for making fun of NBA player Jonathan Isaac’s knee injury.
The Orlando Magic forward suffered a torn ACL Sunday, two days after controversially standing for the national anthem. On Monday, one of the Le Batard Show’s many daily polls asked their Twitter followers if it’s “funny that the guy who refused to kneel immediately blew out his knee?”
Viewing the ACL tear as karma for standing during the national anthem was soon recognized as an error in judgement by Le Batard, who removed the poll and apologized.
“We apologize for this poll question,” Le Batard tweeted. “I said on the front and back end of the on-air conversation that I didn’t think it was funny. Regardless of the context, we missed the mark. We took the tweet down when we realized our mistake in how we posed the question to the audience. -Dan”
The country has come a long way in understanding Colin Kaepernick’s original message and purpose for kneeling during the national anthem in 2016. So much so, that NBA players are not being ridiculed for kneeling during the anthem, instead they’re questioned for standing jonaamid racial tension within the country.
Isaac, a Black, 22-year old forward for the Magic is one of the few NBA players to stand for the national anthem during the league’s restart, pointing to religion as his reason why.
To Jonathan Isaac, taking a knee and wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt is not a sufficient way of building social equality. To Isaac, supporting Black lives is about religion and following God. Regardless of whether you agree with Isaac, he is entitled to his beliefs and he is entitled to stand for the national anthem.