Greg Popovich is My Hero
The Forrest Four-Cast: November 12, 2016
When I grow up, I want to be a lot more like Greg Popovich.
The longtime coach of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs is incredibly intense and focused — skills that I certainly need to develop more fully. His intensity has helped his team win five World Championships for this team over the last 19 years. History will likely view him as one of the best basketball coaches of all time and his place in the Hall of Fame is all but guaranteed.
Fortunately, Pop’s scope of interest and intelligence goes far beyond roundball, as evidenced by his well-worded rant on Donald Trump that hit the interwebs on Friday, November 12. If you haven’t listened yet, then the recording of his diatribe deserves five minutes of your time. Who knew that someone so immersed in the sports world could put it all so succinctly, so passionately and so forcefully:
I’m just sick to my stomach. Not basically because the Republicans won or anything, but the disgusting tenor and tone and all of the comments that have been xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynistic.
I live in that country where half of the people ignored all of that to elect someone. That’s the scariest part of the whole thing to me. It’s got nothing to do with the environment and Obamacare, and all of the other stuff. We live in a country that ignored all of those values that we would hold our kids accountable for. They’d be grounded for years if they acted and said the things that have been said in that campaign by Donald Trump.
I look at the Evangelicals and I wonder, those values don’t mean anything to them? All of those values to me are more important than anybody’s skill in business or anything else because it tells who we are, and how we want to live, and what kind of people we are. That’s why I have great respect for people like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, John Kasich, who I disagree with on a lot of political things, but they had enough fiber and respect for humanity and tolerance for all groups to say what they said about the man.
That’s what worries me. I get it, of course we want to be successful, we’re all going to say that. Everybody wants to be successful, it’s our country, we don’t want it to go down the drain. But any reasonable person would come to that conclusion, but it does not take away the fact that he used that fear mongering, and all of the comments, from day one, the race bating with trying to make Barack Obama, our first black president, illegitimate. It leaves me wondering where I’ve been living, and with whom I’m living.
The fact that people can just gloss that over, start talking about the transition team, and we’re all going to be kumbaya now and try to make the country good without talking about any of those things. And now we see that he’s already backing off of immigration and Obamacare and other things, so was it a big fake, which makes you feel it’s even more disgusting and cynical that somebody would use that to get the base that fired up.
This rant will likely earn him lots of new fans — as well as lots of criticism. That Popovich expressed such opinions in the face of these risks makes his extended statement all the more admirable. In a week where heroes have been few and far between, his actions provide the perfect model for eloquent and elegant protest.
