Playing Through the Pain

A quarter of the way into his first season in Boston, things are going as well as anyone could have expected for Kevin Garnett. He’s got the Celtics off to one of their best starts ever, and after years of futility the team is considered a genuine championship contender. In the process, Garnett has been embraced by the city—fawned over and bragged about by fans and journalists alike. It’s been a pretty smooth ride. But it didn’t begin that way.

Just six short months ago, news of Garnett’s supposed feelings about Boston had the city cringing. I was in my car when it happened, listening as Michael Wilbon, the Washington Post columnist and cohost of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, spoke on Dan Patrick’s national ESPN radio show, putting the city on the defensive. Again. It was the day of the 2007 NBA draft, and Garnett was said to have opposed any trade from the Minnesota Timberwolves to the Celtics. This was before KG relented, of course, and people were imagining all kinds of reasons for his refusing to come here, chief among them the fact that the Celtics had been dreadful in recent seasons. But Wilbon was pretty sure there was more to it than that.

“First of all, it’s a bad team,” Wilbon opined. “Second of all, you have this history of bigotry against African-American people in Boston. The only place I’ve ever been confronted, multiple times, and been called the n-word to my face, is specifically the Boston Garden.... The fact is, Boston has that history, and black players know that, and they do not want to go voluntarily to Boston.” When asked by Patrick whether he thought that perception factored into Garnett’s unwillingness to be traded here, Wilbon said, “I know it does. Yeah. Sure. Absolutely.” He later added that racism “might have been our issue at one point, but now it’s [Boston’s] issue.”

There were qualifiers before and after those comments. Wilbon credited the Celtics for being one of the first teams in the NBA to feature black players. And he stipulated that he didn’t think Boston today is much different from other major cities. But that didn’t matter. All anyone heard was Wilbon calling Boston racist. And that’s all anyone needed to hear.

Not long after, Angels outfielder Gary Matthews Jr. weighed in with commentary of his own. “They’re loud, they’re drunk, they’re obnoxious,” Matthews told the Los Angeles Times, referring to Sox fans, and added that Fenway is “one of the few places you’ll hear racial comments.” It was an extemporaneous remark, one the reporter never asked him to elaborate on or provide specifics for—and as casually as it was thrown out, it was just as readily accepted as fact, with other national outlets, once again, quickly picking up the story. In that way, it smacked of a familiar pattern: Every few years, someone in the sports world comes along and says something similar. (Back in 2004, it was Barry Bonds telling reporters he wouldn’t play here because “it’s too racist.”)

Months after making his inflammatory comments, Wilbon tells me, “I wasn’t saying that Boston is a racist place. I was saying that this is a conversation that black people have. How separate are the worlds of black and white people for white people not to know that black people have this conversation? And not just black people but people of color. This conversation has been going on forever.” But that’s where Wilbon is wrong. We know the conversation goes on. It’s just that most people around here would rather not join in. Some recuse themselves entirely, some angrily dismiss the assertions, and still others run the other way, tossing denials over their shoulders: That’s not us. They don’t know us. I won’t dignify that. None of which is very effective when it comes to changing anyone’s impressions. Accordingly, just as people “know” it rains in Seattle, they’re certain Boston is racist.

So whatever you may think about Wilbon’s comments on the radio that day, he was right about one thing: It is Boston’s issue.