NBA player Jamal Murray of the Denver Nuggets dropped 50 points, helping secure game seven against the Utah Jazz on Sunday, but basketball isn't the only reason the Canadian breakout star was driven to tears in a postgame interview. He looked down at his shoes, one of which was painted with the face of George Floyd, the Black man held for more than eight minutes with a Minneapolis cop’s knee on his neck, and the other with that of Breonna Taylor, the Black emergency medical technician who was shot and killed in a botched drug raid.
“These shoes mean a lot,” Murray said.
“I just want to win, and in life you find things that hold value to you, things to fight for, and we found something worth fighting for as the NBA, as a collective unit,” Murray added, “and I use these shoes as a symbol to me to keep fighting all around the world. So I can say they give me a lot of power to keep fighting.”
When asked why Taylor and Floyd’s stories were so personal to him, Murray responded: “It’s not just in America. It happens everywhere.
“For us to come together as the NBA, it doesn’t just take one meeting. It takes a couple meetings, a few meetings. It takes phone calls. It takes resistance,” he added. “It’s not going to take one night, and we’ve been trying to fight for 400 years, but these shoes give me life even though these people are gone. They give me life. They help me find strength to keep fighting this world.”
Murray's heartfelt statement follows a short-lived NBA players' strike Wednesday to bring a renewed focus to the Black Lives Matter movement. The NBA announced on Friday that the season would resume Saturday, but with a “social justice coalition, with representatives from players, coaches and governors, that will be focused on a broad range of issues, including increasing access to voting, promoting civic engagement, and advocating for meaningful police and criminal justice reform.”
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