LeBron James responded to Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s criticism of the political role of sports stars after the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory over the Portland Trail Blazers.
“I have more than 300 children in my school (I Promise School) who need a voice and I am their voice. I will never shut up when something is wrong. It won’t limit me to just the derpote. I’m the wrong guy to go to: I always do my homework,” said the Los Angeles franchise forward.
“There is no way that I limit myself to just dedicating myself to sports because I understand this platform and how powerful my voice is. It’s funny that he says that: I think in 2018 he was the one who said, when he was back in Sweden, that He felt racism because his last name was not a normal last name (in Sweden). Right? He said that, right? I think he said it,” he continued. The words to which the NBA champion refers were the following:
“When I came to Malmoe, I was not accepted like the others. Why? Because I was Ibrahimovic. It wasn’t Andersson, it wasn’t Svensson, all those typically Swedish surnames. I was a foreigner. I had an incident in training, they made me a tackle and I headbutted a teammate, because he was angry. His father was a police officer. He signed a letter to the club asking that he be sent off and gave that paper to all the players on the team and said: ‘sign this if you agree that Zlatan should be sent off. I was in juniors. Can you imagine how I felt when that happened? I felt like I didn’t fit in, like the black sheep. They didn’t accept my attitude, they didn’t accept me as a person, they didn’t make me feel welcome. He was different, he had a different face, he wasn’t blond, he didn’t have white skin like the Swedes. I suffered in the sense that it was not as easy for me as it was for others. I felt like I had to do ten times as much to be seen as everyone else,” Ibra said in January 2018 in an interview with Canal + France.
James is one of the most politically active players in the current NBA. Very critical of Donald Trump and his racist attitudes, LeBron helped Joe Biden defeat the last president of the United States in the November elections.
He did it through the platform More Than a Vote, which informed and helped citizens, mainly African Americans, to vote. He also recruited hundreds of people to help in the elections.
“Shut up and dribble“
A position that the Swedish striker does not seem to like. “What it does is phenomenal, however, I don’t like it when people with any kind of status talk about politics. You do what you are good at. I play soccer because I am the best playing soccer. I don’t do politics. If I were a politician, I would go into politics. This is the first mistake celebrities make when they feel like they have arrived. For me, it is better to stay away from these issues and do what you are good at, otherwise you risk not making a good impression,” he said in an interview with Discovery+ Sport Sweden.
Those kinds of words don’t sound strange to LeBron. Two years ago, Globe Live Media anchor Laura Ingraham attacked both James and Kevin Durant following their criticism of Trump’s policies. Mainly, regarding racial injustice.
“Shut up and dribble (shut up and dribble)“, snapped the journalist from the conservative chain: don’t get involved in politics, just play basketball. The same as Ibrahimovic, although with different music.