Can Etan still speak out?

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports - Basketball player Etan Thomas - Interview

In the world of big-time pro sports, there is really only one current athlete who has been a consistent and outspoken opponent of war and racism. There is only one athlete who has spoken at large antiwar rallies and small anti-death penalty town meetings. His name is Etan Thomas, and when he isn't agitating or writing poetry, he plays center in the National Basketball Association.

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Speaking out comes naturally to him.

"That's kind of always been a part of me from a young age," he says. "That's what my mother taught me: to always speak your mind."

He chose role models along these lines.

"I grew up admiring Jim Brown and Muhammad Mi and John Carlos and Tommie Smith--all the athletes that really used their position as a platform," he says. "To quote Bill Russell, 'You're not going to reduce me to an entertainer. I'm a man who stands up for what I believe in, and you're going to respect me for it.' A quote I live by is, 'I speak my mind because biting my tongue would make my pride bleed.' "

Four years ago, Thomas wrote an acclaimed book of poetry called More Than an Athlete and has been known to read verse and talk politics in front of crowds great and small. If he is a banger as a player, he's more like a sleek two guard on the microphone. He soars.

For the last seven years, Etan has lived and played here in my backyard of Washington, D.C., for the Wizards. Even after having his sternum cracked open to perform massive open-heart surgery for a heart murmur caused by a leaking aortic valve, he has not quieted down. It certainly helped that he played, until recently, for a left-leaning owner in Abe Pollin (Pollin's son is the radical economist Robert Pollin).

But now Etan has been traded to the Oklahoma City Thunder, the team ripped from the heart of Seattle in 2007. It's a team that for many NBA fans symbolizes injustice because of the move, and because it seemed to fulfill NBA commissioner David Sterns mandate after the 2004 elections to make the NBA...