I don’t follow basketball much, but the Detroit Pistons are in Phoenix to take on the Suns, and reporters caught up with Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy today to talk shop. He seemed depressed, and was asked if his team’s 32-point loss to the Lakers on Monday was still eating at him. Then the coach went on a long rant, except it wasn’t about his team’s under-performance two nights ago:
“I don’t care what anyone says, I’m sure they have other reasons and maybe good reasons for voting for Donald Trump — but I don’t think anybody can deny this guy is openly and brazenly racist and misogynistic and ethnic-centric, and say, ‘That’s OK with us, we’re going to vote for him anyway.’ ”
Working in a business where most of his colleagues are African American, and where several genuine stars, like LeBron James, supported Black Lives Matter and Hillary Clinton, coach Van Gundy was just getting warmed up:
“Martin Luther King said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice.’ I would have believed in that for a long time, but not today. … What we have done to minorities … in this election is despicable. I’m having a hard time dealing with it. This isn’t your normal candidate. I don’t know even know if I have political differences with him. I don’t even know what are his politics. I don’t know, other than to build a wall and ‘I hate people of color, and women are to be treated as sex objects and as servants to men.’ I don’t know how you get past that. I don’t know how you walk into the booth and vote for that.”
Van Gundy noted that most of the people in the stadium tonight in Phoenix probably voted for Donald Trump but “[expletive] I don’t have any respect for that.” He also doesn’t have much respect for hypocritical evangelical Christians:
“What Bible are you reading? … You’re supposed to be — at least you pride yourself on being the moral compass of our society. And you said, ‘Yeah, the guy can talk about women like that. I’m fine with that.’ He can disparage every ethnic group, and I’m fine with that.”
The father of three daughters, Van Gundy said one of the election’s messages was, “We want [women] to be second-class citizens. And we embrace a guy who is openly misogynistic as our leader.”
When asked about tonight’s game against the Phoenix Suns, Van Gundy didn’t want to talk about it. It’s just a game, after all, but yesterday was no game and it’s sickening:
“I have been ashamed of a lot of things that have happened in this country, but I can’t say I’ve ever been ashamed of our country until today.”
He has a lot more to say about white supremacy, women-hating, and America’s lost moral authority to tell other countries about human rights abuses: “… we don’t got anything to teach anybody.” I might just take in a game tonight.