Angered by the President's perceived racism, sportspeople were the face of the resistance in 2017

In his customary brash style, Donald Trump riled sportspeople across the board with a slew of racially insensitive comments. However, with renewed resistance from coaches and players alike, perhaps there is hope for the new year

‘The players are highlighting societal issues that Trump is either blind to, simply doesn’t care about or something far worse’ (Getty)

January 8, 2018. It is just a couple of weeks shy of the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, which hogged headlines principally for its lack of attendees. Trump is in Atlanta for the College Football Championship game, a titanic clash between Georgia’s Bulldogs and the Crimson Tide of Alabama. With two schools from Trumpland reaching the big game, the President’s attendance is a safe bet. If we have learned anything about 45, it is that he loves a big, friendly crowd.

As with seemingly every public appearance, though, Trump gaffes. This time, as protestors project ‘F*ck Trump’ onto the outside of the $1bn Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the under-seige President forgets the words to the national anthem. For a man who has spent much of his first year in office making a song and dance about respecting the Star-Spangled Banner, it is the latest drip of humiliation for the drowning Trump. But, as ever, he brushed it off and bungled onwards.

College football is bigger than the NFL in much of red America, particularly in the south-eastern states where the SEC boasts the strongest teams in the amateur ranks, including the two finalists on that day in Atlanta. Increasingly commercialised and boasting huge television deals, college football sees (mostly black) footballing hopefuls play for no money, while coaches and college executives cream millions from their hard work.

It remains to this day a mystery why this would appeal to Trump or his base.

What the President could be sure of in attending the Championship game was that there would be no anthem protest. That, after all, has been his greatest involvement in sport over the first year of his presidency. In the college game, unlike the pros, the teams do not emerge onto the field until the anthem is done and dusted, the ‘home of the brave’ has been warbled and the obligatory fireworks have thundered into the sky.

But we have already made a mistake here. Even using the term ‘anthem protest’ is falling into the trap set by Trump and the American right.

Colin Kaepernick sparked a movement when he decided to kneel during the national anthem in 2016 to protest the lack of racial equality and policing of African-American men. He has now been blackballed by the NFL and is trying to sue the league owners for colluding to ensure a team would not sign him. He has spent his year off from football in dignified silence, donating $1m to good causes while flames swirled around the movement he started.

His ‘anthem protest’ was, of course, nothing to do with the anthem really.

It occurred during the anthem but it was not about the anthem. Rosa Parks did not hate buses. Gandhi’s hunger strike was not because he had a moral objection to food. Kaepernick – and those who knelt with him – do not lack respect for veterans, or the troops, or any spurious link that Trump and his supporters will attempt to make. They are highlighting societal issues that Trump is either blind to, simply doesn’t care about or something far worse.

At the peak of Trump’s war on the NFL, he was firing off numerous tweets a day about the subject and called the protesting players ‘sons of bitches’. “I guess that makes me a bitch then,” quipped Teresa, Kaepernick's mother.

“He called the white supremacists in Charlottesville ‘very fine people’,” pointed out Denver linebacker Brandon Marshall, “but we are sons of bitches?”

As unbelievable as it was that Trump was engaging in such a vicious campaign against a major sports league – though perhaps not entirely surprising given the NFL’s rejection of Trump when he attempted to buy the Buffalo Bills many moons ago – the real issue that the President should have been tackling was far more important, as Puerto Rico suffered in the wake of a devastating hurricane.

The way that the 45th President of the United States ignored the Caribbean island, an unincorporated US territory, will never be forgotten by those in San Juan, nor the baseball stars who have moved to America for a better life and watched on in horror as Trump’s administration dawdled over aid and then sent their figurehead out there to toss paper towels at bemused hurricane victims as if it were some sort of perverse disaster game show.

“It’s not about politics,” said the LA Dodgers’ Enrique Hernandez. “It’s not about anything, other than [being] moral. It’s not a time to be joking.

“Be respectful to the people who are suffering and are in need. Show some sympathy. Show some humanity. Show some heart. That’s what pissed me off. It’s not anything else than that.”

If the NFL protests grabbed the most headlines and the baseball got more to the point, basketball was seen as a sport where protest might truly come to life. Rather than the players making the biggest stink, though, it has been the NBA’s coaches who have delivered the most scathing blows.

“Our country’s an embarrassment to the world,” said legendary coach Gregg Popovich, in one of his kinder outbursts about the President, having previously also called him “a soulless coward.”

Steve Kerr, coach of the NBA champions the Golden State Warriors, said Trump was “ill-suited” for the presidency, and his team were “uninvited” from the customary league-winners’ White House visit after nearly every player had pulled out.

“That’s not what leaders do,” said Steph Curry, the Warriors’ and NBA’s best player, while Kerr compared it to being spurned from a sixth-grade birthday party.

As with every Trump furore though, it was the President trying to pre-emptively save face.

He didn’t forget the words to the anthem.

The inauguration crowd was the biggest ever.

NFL protestors don’t respect veterans.

‘I disinvited them first.’

The division of truth and lies, white and black, right and wrong have become the biggest trends of Trump’s year in charge and it was only inevitable that it would bleed into sport. But sport is ready to fight back.

“What really is disgusting to me,” added Popovich, “is that even if you wanted to say he is not a racist, or even as he says he is ‘the least racist of anybody’… he is certainly willing to wield race like weapon and use it for his own purposes.”

That, in a nutshell is the story of sport and Donald Trump’s clashes in his first year in power. A reflection of American society in 2017 – divided and simmering – but with the right people in the right places doing the right thing, there is hope 2018 might be better.