Brave & Strong.

Sportswriter Royce Young posted this on Twitter.

The prelude: "First question for (San Antonio Spurs coach) Gregg Popovich today was about Marco Belinelli's status for the game against the Grizzlies. This was his answer."

"Our number one priority as far as the country and society is concerned is racial justice, actually racial injustice that exists in our country and trying to make everything just for all people. Just as a reminder, in this world a lot of people really do not understand the breadth and depth of this horrific situation that Black people have been in for so long. And I just want to give you one example. We're all doing this on our gamedays as we find an opportunity, just so people understand how gross we have been. Not just now, but in the past. It didn't just happen; it's been this way for hundreds of years. As an example: Today, 120 years ago in North Carolina a constitutional amendment was approved and what it did was it established a literacy test for Black people that they had to pass before they could vote. White people did not have the same literacy test and it was so gross that they made a rule that if you had a relative before 1863 that had voted, and you're still illiterate now, you can vote. So that meant White people could vote if they had a relative before 1863 who voted. Well, Black people were enslaved and didn't have any relatives before 1863 who voted. So they were disenfranchised.

"There was a former Confederate officer, William Guthrie, who on the eve of the election made a statement and basically said ... this was very necessary to protect the White women, that they can't go out in the streets and don't feel safe when they're alone. We have to keep the quote-unquote colored people away from them. So he emphasized this just on the eve of the election , to make sure that their way would be the rule that people had to live under. This sort of activity went on over and over and over again, for all this time. And again, it's about education and culture, and none of us knew these kinds of things, none of us were taught these things. Black, Brown, Asian, Native American -- it doesn't matter, none of us were taught these things. Hopefully if people understand how gross this situation really is and how long it's been this gross , maybe we can make some headway.

Marco Belinelli is out tonight."

Transformational vs transactional, and why Gregg Popovich invited John Carlos to speak but Mayor Gahan never would.

Dave Zirin is one of the few sports writers who matters, and this brief essay pertains to John Carlos' recent visit with the Spurs.

But it's more than that.

Zirin also provides a priceless insight by means of a brief reference to being transformational as opposed to transactional in player development (or similar situations; passage underlined below).

In short, never would Gregg Popovich "present" the San Antonio Spurs, and never has he built a cult of personality around himself. It's been about developing humans, not stoking egos.

Then there's Carlos himself.

"It felt great to spread the message that it has to be about more than just the game, the check, the fortune and fame. It’s imperative for me to let them know they can do so much more and just how they can make nonviolent change in such a violent world. I’m just blessed I had the opportunity to be here."

These are selfless men, and I live in a selfish city. JeffG finds the center of the target.

Legit question: How many hundreds of thousands of public dollars could we save in New Albany if we just stopped making plaques, banners, billboards, signs, videos, and electronic ads that prominently feature Jeff Gahan? I've never seen that much spent on self-promotion. Boy, egos are expensive.

There's simply so much to learn, and you never know where the next lesson will originate.

John Carlos Meets the Spurs, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

This past weekend, I traveled to Texas with 1968 Olympic Sprinter and medal stand protester John Carlos to speak to the San Antonio Spurs. At the request of their head coach, Gregg Popovich, Dr. Carlos addressed the team and then we attended a practice. I delivered an intro about the social context of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and then turned it over to Dr. Carlos for a brief talk and Q&A ...

The main reason I am not going to write about any of this is that if I learned one thing about Gregg Popovich this weekend, it’s that praise legitimately makes him uncomfortable. Pop is cool as hell ... even though he wouldn’t want to hear it, 

Popovich embodies what InSide Out Coaching author Joe Ehrmann means when he writes that coaches need to be “transformational” instead of “transactional”; in other words, caring about developing players as human beings as opposed to using them to gratify their own egos.