Byron Scott, a former professional basketball player and coach, greets new people with a “how you doing, my brother,” he told JNS, because “we are all the same.”
“Our skin color might be different but we’re the same race, which is the human race,” said the three-time NBA champion for the Los Angeles Lakers during its “showtime” era in the 1980s, and coach of five teams, including the Lakers.
Scott was one of the speakers at an event last week on building connections through sports and faith at Sinai Temple, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles. The event preceded the NBA all-star game in Los Angeles, which saw the first Israeli-born all star, Deni Avdija, of the Portland Trail Blazers.
Scott, who is Catholic, told JNS at the synagogue event that “if you’re really a faithful person and you really believe in our heavenly Father, he didn’t ever teach anything about hate.”
“It’s all about love,” he said. “Kids learn from an early age, so it’s very important for parents not to teach bigotry and racism and things of that nature.”
JNS asked Scott why more active and retired athletes aren’t speaking out about rising Jew-hatred. “They don’t want to step outside the box, because they’re afraid they can tarnish their image,” he said.
“I would like for more athletes to be a little more vocal about stepping out and being more in front of the problem,” he told JNS.
Rabbi Erez Sherman, senior rabbi at the temple and the event organizer, told JNS that he played basketball in high school and that for him, faith and sports have always gone together.
Sports is about unification rather than division, according to the rabbi, who started the sports podcast Rabbi on the Sidelines in 2021. The show, he told JNS, involves talking about “what’s in your heart and soul” rather than box scores, trad deadlines or statistics.
The same was true of the recent event at the temple.
“These stories are not about winning on the court,” he said. “It’s about when they leave the court. What they do in their real life. How they make a difference.”
Former Davidson College men’s basketball coach Bob McKillop was also on hand. He told JNS that it was “life-changing” to take his team to visit Auschwitz in 2018.
Eva Mozes Kor, upon whom the Nazi physician Josef Mengele experimented, led the Davidson players through the camp and shared her experiences. Kor, who died in 2019, was a “true hero,” McKillop told JNS.
“A torch was lit for our players, and they have carried that torch ever since,” he said.
The former American-Israeli basketball player Tamir Goodman, whom Sports Illustrated has called the “Jewish Jordan,” told JNS at the event that he experienced Jew-hatred when he played, typically “different things from the crowd.”
He tried to follow his father’s advice to “let your game do the talking,” he said. After a game in which audience members had said antisemitic things, they apologized to him after he “played with good sportsmanship,” Goodman said.
He told JNS that he thinks more athletes are going to speak out about Jew-hatred.
“There’s more and more antisemitism,” he said. “But there’s also more and more education.”
Goodman told JNS that Israeli basketball summer camps are bringing players, who don’t know the extent of the Holocaust, to visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s Shoah memorial.
He added that he is impressed with Avdija, the All-Star. “Especially now with the rise in antisemitism, to see the way he handles himself and the way he’s doing everything is unbelievable,” Goodman told JNS.
Eddy Curry, an NBA champion with the Miami Heat in 2012 and a former player for the Chicago Bulls, New York Knicks and Dallas Mavericks, told JNS that he has visited Israel twice.
On the second trip, he visited the site of the massacre on Oct. 7 at the Nova music festival and dined with survivors. Meeting with the Bibas family, he “saw the pain in their eyes and the hopefulness and just hoping that Ariel and Kfir were still alive,” he told JNS. “Obviously, we saw what happened with that. So unfortunate and so terrible.”
Curry has also seen U.S. media coverage of the war against Hamas and the ways some reporters “were trying to frame it, and how some ignorant people here were trying to frame it.”
“It was eye-opening,” he told JNS. “I relish any opportunity I have to go over there now, just because it is such a beautiful place and it is so close to God.”
Eric Rubin, managing director of the nonprofit Project Max, which fights Jew-hatred and other bigotries, told JNS that his group has assembled a community of some 50 athletes in several sports who are “willing to use their voices to speak out against hatred.”
More athletes should be outspoken about rising hate, he said.
Over the weekend, Rubin’s group gave Avdija its first “all-star against hate” award.
“He’s stood up with pride to represent his faith and his homeland, and I can’t think of somebody more deserving of the Project Max all-star award against hate than Deni,” he said.
