Tyreek Hill getting handcuffed and forced to the ground by Miami police outside Hard Rock Stadium over a traffic citation quickly became a big story from the NFL weekend.
Still, longtime sports commentator Bomani Jones believes the conversation didn’t go as far as it would have even a few years ago.
In an episode of his podcast, The Right Time with Bomani Jones, and an appearance on CNN on Monday, Jones took sports media to task for treating Hill’s altercation as business as usual. Whereas an incident like this in the mid-2010s would have led to deep dialogue about race, policing, and how sports interact with communities, Jones pointed out that kind of conversation was mostly nowhere to be found this week.
“By and large, the way that I’ve seen the commentary about this in sports media go had a lot more to do with football than anything else,” Jones said on The Right Time. “It was almost treated in that uncomfortable way that you would treat it when Kobe Bryant would go to court and then come back and score 35.”
Jones traced the recent history of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to protests by Colin Kaepernick in the NFL to the social uprising around the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis to now, showing how sports commentators have stopped bothering to even analyze what led to the violence inflicted on Hill on Sunday.
While some, including Stephen A. Smith, did point out the larger issues surrounding Hill’s arrest, Jones believes people just flat-out got tired of talking about racial justice in sports.
“What seemed to happen was people just kind of ran out of energy,” Jones said. “As this happened, it made me stop and think back 10 years ago, what a major thing something like this would have been, and how the sports media at that time was very well-equipped to have people get on television … and we were talking about it on all these sort of macro levels.”
With Kaepernick, Jones noted how, over time, the debate centered on whether the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback was blackballed. The ensuing lawsuit and tryouts took up all the oxygen in sports media rather than the central issues beneath Kaepernick’s pregame protests during the national anthem and public comments around that time.
However, Jones noted in an interview on CNN News Central that trends of police violence have not changed dramatically since Brown or Floyd were killed.
What changed is people’s interest and the media’s desire to follow those stories.
“The lesson that we need to learn about this is if you’ve ever needed to be diligent about an issue, chances are you always need to be diligent about an issue,” he said.
“It didn’t look like they gave a damn if he was Tyreek Hill at all…just because he didn’t die doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a ridiculous way to go about handling that situation.” @bomani_jones & @Boris_Sanchez discuss detention of the football star before season opener. pic.twitter.com/U8howMnpkT
— CNN News Central (@NewsCentralCNN) September 9, 2024
Jones also admitted to losing steam himself. While he maintains a contributor role at CNN and is known for his commentary on social issues, Jones said he “read the room” and felt as if he wasn’t “being heard” anymore when discussing those issues.
“It is hard to look at this and not stop and look back and be like, we kind of gave up,” Jones said.
Jones would like to see the Dolphins or NFL stand behind Hill more forcefully to bring attention to the danger he faced, but he doesn’t expect it.
“I don’t think there will ever be a circumstance where those people at those levels of power will ever stand on the side of their players opposite the police,” Jones said.
Outside the Lines is gone at ESPN, while SportsCenter has been relegated to filler content. Studio shows feature entertainment and goofing around more than journalism. Personalities like Jones, Dan Le Batard and Jemele Hill, who were more confident and comfortable weighing in on social issues and empowered to do so under former president John Skipper, are no longer at the network.
It’s harder to find companies where these topics are fair game in the first place, let alone where hosts have paid enough attention since Floyd’s murder to keep it in the day-to-day conversation.
[The Right Time with Bomani Jones on YouTube, CNN]
