Bob CollinsIt’s not often you hear coaches of professional sports teams dissecting the political scene in America, but San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, probably the best basketball coach in America, isn’t an ordinary coach, and he’s never suffered fools gladly.
As President-elect Donald Trump backtracks on some of his campaign promises and claims, there’s still a barrier to moving on: the campaign was racially charged, and has left deep racial scars and until the new leader acknowledges that there is a problem, his call for unity isn’t going to cut it, Popovich said yesterday in his unusual interview with reporters.
“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. To get elected. And what gets lost in the process are African Americans, and Hispanics, and women, and the gay population, not to mention the eighth grade developmental stage exhibited by him when he made fun of the handicapped person. I mean, come on. That’s what a seventh grade, eighth grade bully does. And he was elected president of the United States. We would have scolded our kids. We would have had discussions until we were blue in the face trying to get them to understand these things. He is in charge of our country. That’s disgusting.”
“I’m a rich white guy, and I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it,” Coach Pop said.
