Chennedy Carter got Boston off the hook this week.
But don’t expect it to last.
Thanks to the week-long hiatus between NBA postseason games, the basketball world was bored. Until Carter’s hard foul/assault of Caitlin Clark set off a race war across the WNBA.
Millions of Girl Dads across the color spectrum were magically transformed into unrepentant racists overnight because they did not start watching the WNBA until this season.
Along with nearly everyone else.
Same goes for my fellow degenerates who never bet on women’s basketball until this past March.
Clark is a minority in the WNBA – a white woman from the corn-fed Midwest.
But she can never be a victim.
Instead, she has unwittingly become the new sports face of White Supremacy.
That’s a role long reserved in the national media for the likes of the late, great Donnie “The Celtics are the balls” Beardsley. Those of Donnie’s ilk – a middle class Greater Boston guy who met his wife at a St. Patrick’s Day parade in Medford, according to former Herald columnist Steve Buckley – have for too long unfairly been a stereotypical sports fan villain for everyone west of Pittsfield.
The yawning gap between the end of the Eastern Conference Finals and the start of the NBA Finals Thursday night was supposed to be the time when The Usual Suspects rolled out the stale tropes about how the state of race relations in Boston hasn’t changed since Louise Day Hicks took on Judge Garrity.
Or Charles Stuart killed his wife and then “committed suicide” by “jumping” off the Tobin Bridge.
The would-be tropers never got their invite to Mayor Wu’s “Electeds of Color Holiday Party.”
Any tangible marker of progress does not matter when the “Boston Is Racist” narrative is at stake.
One fan threw a water bottle at Kyrie Irving two years ago.
Boom. It’s that 70s show all over again.
None of this would be tangible if it weren’t for the genuine adoration Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum feel for their former teammate. Tatum shushed the Boston crowd back in 2022 when it jeered Irving during a Celtics-Nets game.
The moment either one of the Jays backs Irving to the chagrin of their own fan base, this series is over, Sun Tzu would say.
These Finals are their final exam.
Can the Jays step on the throat of their basketball BFF and deliver a championship?
Will they be able to see through Kyrie’s smoke and focus on the task at hand?
Why doesn’t Deuce wear a helmet when he’s riding his bike?
Lost amid this looming grotesque race card is the Texas-sized irony that the Celtics are playing a team from Dallas.
Dallas.
It never goes away. In 2017, Adam Jones claims he was called “the N-word a handful of times” during a game at Fenway Park. One fan was ejected for throwing a bag of peanuts toward Jones.
Seven years later, there remains no eyewitness account, no corroboration, no audio, no video of any racist verbiage spewed toward Jones. Jones could never say during which inning(s) he allegedly heard those taunts.
The one “witness” turned out to be a teen-aged prankster. That didn’t stop Mike Lupica from reciting his claims.
The Fenway Faithful gave Jones a standing ovation the next night.
Still, Red Sox ownership backed Jones 100%.
That was when John Henry still spoke.
Of course, Henry & Co. also gave us “full throttle.”
They said Little League baseball “disproportionately” benefited boys over girls when they temporarily cut funding to those teams,
They gave away Mookie Betts – their best Black player – for a bag of nothing.
And they had more “Black Lives Matter” banners in Fenway Park than Black players (Zero) on their Opening Day 2021 roster.
Irving is just one 4-for-25 performance away from playing the race card, as he has done in the past.
And it doesn’t have to be real, especially in a time of AI fakes and social media misinformation. Or local teams willing to believe the worst about their own fans without any evidence.
Kendrick Perkins is one of many who believes the Celtics fans are incapable of acting like adults.
“You can boo him, (but) before it’s taking it over the top, leave that man alone,” Perkins warned.
Kyrie’s mind-games are next-level. Monday, he spoke about his transformation since flipping off the same fans to whom he once promised to never leave.
“Everyone saw me flip off the birds and kind of lose my s— a little bit – that wasn’t a great reflection of who I am and how I like to compete on a high level.”
Kyrie underwent a full emotional and spiritual 180 in just two years. Yet, it will be 1974 all over again the moment someone inside TD Garden fires an f-bomb in Kyrie’s direction?
Don’t buy it.
“A little bit more grace could have been extended my way, especially what I was dealing with during that time as a human being,” Irving said. “I think I’m better at consolidating kind of the emotions now or being aware of what it’s going to be like.”
It’s not you, Kyrie. It’s me. And everyone else.
Irving also delivered a pre-emptive Brady-level passive-aggressive excuse for losing.
“We call it animosity, we call it hate, we call it, ‘It’s going to be hell in Boston.’ I mean, there are real, live circumstances going on in the world that are bigger than the basketball, kind of the competitive side of things and answering those questions,” Irving said.
Sorry. But when you are playing for an NBA team during the NBA Finals, there is nothing bigger than the basketball.
Whether you’re Kyrie Irving, Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, or anyone else on the court.
No matter the distraction. Real or imagined.
Bill Speros (@RealOBF and @BillSperos) can be reached at bsperos1@gmail.com.
