Jaylen Brown on Danny Ainge pushing back on calling sports a mechanism for control
· Yahoo Sports
Jaylen Brown has been one of the most outspoken players in the NBA, and he did not need to settle into the league before finding his voice. In fact, the Georgia native was making waves in a good way even in his rookie season with the Boston Celtics. The then-19-year-old Brown did an interview caught the attention of the Celtics President of Basketball Operations at the time, Danny Ainge, for speaking to one aspect of how sports can function in society.
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In a recent interview with the folks behind the NBPA "State of the Game" podcast, Brown explained how his rookie self raised eyebrows even within Boston's front office with his heady take on sports. "I was in Boston, and I’m thinking I’m talking to a normal beat writer," he recalled. "It happened to be this big writer for The Guardian. And this dude put me on the cover of The Guardian newspaper saying, ‘Jaylen Brown says sports is a mechanism for control.’"
"That’s when I was 19 years old," added Brown. "Then that went viral. That’s when I got invited to Harvard to go speak about it. So Harvard invited me, based on that article in The Guardian, to come speak about it. That’s why I became the youngest Harvard lecturer."
"I was talking about how sports is a mechanism for control, because that became controversial," said the Cal alum. "How could this 19-year-old player say sports is a mechanism for control when sports — the NBA — just helped him recreate generational wealth? He just changed his whole family’s life through sport. How could he criticize it, right?"
"So I got a lot of pushback, even from my organization. Danny Ainge came and talked to me like, ‘What is this?’ Of course, you’re 19 years old. You just got drafted. Your family — how can you say that sports is a mechanism for control?'"
As much as Ainge may not have understood where Brown was coming from, the Celtics star's supposedly controversial opinion about sport is nothing new. In fact, it dates back to at least Roman times, when prominent societal commentators explicitly said the same.
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This article originally appeared on Celtics Wire: Danny Ainge did not get Jaylen Brown calling sports a mechanism for control