The editor-in-chief of this paper recently argued that basketball is a UNC religion.
At the most recent ceremony for our shared obsession, the halftime show was highlighted by the announcement of a branding relationship between the Jordan Brand and UNC’s football team. The sight of UNC’s most famous graduate was enough to electrify the Dean Dome, but the energy spiked even higher when Jordan proclaimed the ceiling is in fact the roof.
In the ensuing excitement and internet tomfoolery there was a significant amount of conversation about both Michael Jordan and Larry Fedora. There was some gentle feting, but the dialogue was mostly positive. Missing from the conversation was what it means for UNC to center the best basketball player of all time and a decent football coach in our understanding of this University. When we celebrate Fedora and Jordan we are implicitly lauding their disinterest in using their platforms for social good.
Larry Fedora has certainly been the most successful North Carolina football coach since Mack Brown. He has won an impressive number of football games and has paired that with an almost complete disinterest in using those accomplishments to give voice to any other issues. The job security that his wins have allowed could be used to talk about the dangers of campus sexual assault, the exploitation of student-athlete labor or even just the economic harms of House Bill 2 that his counterpart Roy Williams has cautiously decried. He has not done so. The only way in which he has interacted with a political space has been negative.
Instead of taking a stand against the exploitation of student labor from which he profits, he hired Tim Beckman, who was fired for pressuring students to play through injuries at Illinois. Even when reports of student-athletes committing sexual assault ricocheted around the conutry, he stayed quiet. Fedora might not be responsible for addressing every social ill, but he has a platform that he refuses to use.
If anything, Michael Jordan has been even more egregiously silent. His Airness isn’t just a mid-level D-1 football coach. He is the most significant sports figure of the last 50 years, an owner of an NBA franchise and the first player billionaire. He has the ability to spread influence that even fellow luminaries like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or NBA owners like Jeanie Buss can’t imagine.
His response to that power and responsibility has been a silence of epic proportions. He has infamously refused to speak out on almost any issues of social importance. This is emblified by his perhaps apocryphal quote “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”
Repeatedly he has prioritized profit over social value. He recently donated $2 million to end police violence, but if anything this only further demonstrates his pattern of reticence — the one notable remotely political donation he’s made over the past 30 years split a negligible (for him) amount of money between the NAACP and a policing institution. Even the accompanying message hedged the impact of the gift by stating police violence was an issue both parties needed to work on, and that the issue didn’t prevent the U.S. from being the greatest nation on earth.
The only reason he visited his alma mater for his first Chapel Hill home game in seven years was to launch a money-making opportunity.
