PHILADELPHIA — If he still was a producer at NBC Sports Philadelphia, if he still was charged with arranging sit-downs with the sports stars who play in and pass through Philadelphia, Brian Schiff would be at the Wells Fargo Center on Tuesday night for the 76ers’ game against the Brooklyn Nets, searching for an opening to coax a juicy sound bite out of Kyrie Irving. Get him to talk. Get some insight. That was his job for 18 years. Once the camera was off, though, Schiff also would be sure to seize the opportunity to press Irving for answers on behalf of the community he cares for and represents.
A member of the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, a local legend for a basketball coaching career that stretches more than 25 years and includes 15 gold medals at the Maccabi Games, Schiff has enough experience and credibility in the sport to challenge Irving on his endorsement of the kind of cockamamie conspiracy theories that can get Jewish people killed.
He assisted Steve Chadwin at Abington Friends when the school was a Friends League power. He hired Sandy Pyonin, who was Irving’s trainer for four years at the YM-YWHA of Union County (N.J.), in 1999 to coach a Maccabi team. He has boarded buses for Maccabi tournaments in Mexico City, Santiago, and Buenos Aires — buses that trundled along cordoned-off city streets and were escorted by police cars to make sure he and his players were safe from any terrorist threats.
So, yes, Schiff would have some questions for a space-cadet superstar who has spread antisemitic filth to 22 million followers across his social-media platforms. Who posted on Twitter the link to a “documentary” denying that the Holocaust ever happened. Who reportedly will return to the Nets lineup Sunday after the team suspended him more than two weeks ago. But Schiff would intend those questions not to interrogate or shame Irving, but to understand and educate him. He would approach him in good faith and give him the benefit of the doubt.
“I would say to him,” Schiff said in a recent phone interview, “something like, ‘One of your main mentors was Jewish. It wasn’t like you had zero exposure to Jewish people growing up. You can say you didn’t realize what might have been part of that documentary, but you’re not a dumb guy. So I would innately think you would have been a little more aware of what that was and what the inaccuracies were. How could you not realize that what you did was that wrong, that hurtful, that inappropriate? What would you say to that?’ ”
Irving is so stubborn and arrogant, fancying himself an intellectual, reveling in his status as American sports’ most annoying iconoclast for his refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine and his belief that the earth is a giant pancake, that he might decline to engage in any such dialogue.
“You have to hope that the party who caused it understands enough that they can learn,” Schiff said. “They have to be willing to accept that they messed up.”
It’s possible that Irving will never be so willing, that he’ll leave it to those who knew-him-when to vouch for his character.
“He was never antisemitic. He’s not antisemitic. He’s not prejudiced,” Pyonin said in a phone interview. “Him being a bright kid, he didn’t realize what he was doing. How do you promote something of that nature? Do your research. With the position you have, you have so many followers. Got to be a lot smarter.
“I want the best for him. I hope he’s working toward forgiveness for what he did.”
That has to be the hope, because there isn’t much else that the NBA or the Nets can or ought to do. Granted, had Irving dared to lend public support for freedom and democracy in Hong Kong — as Sixers president Daryl Morey did in 2019 when he was with the Rockets — and threatened the league’s lucrative and morally fraught partnership with China, commissioner Adam Silver and Nets owner Joe Tsai would have come down on Irving harder and faster than they did here.
But Irving always was going to return to play at some point. Even if there were a scenario in which he could be expelled from the league, what good would that do? It’s instructive that Alex Jones — the repellent conspiracy theorist whose “New World Order” nonsense Irving has endorsed — had Apple, Facebook, Spotify, Twitter, and YouTube deplatform his company, Infowars, in 2018. Yet, according to Bloomberg News, Jones’ revenue has skyrocketed since.
Throwing Irving out of the NBA would create a similar dynamic. It would elevate him from a useful idiot to a martyr for the worst kind of cause.
“I don’t want Kyrie sitting on the sidelines,” said Steve Rosenberg, former CEO of the Jewish Federation of Philadelphia. “I want Kyrie back in action talking about what he’s learned. That’s how we advance this. Having him not play and being silenced is not helpful to anybody.”
The shunning of a person is an act of hopelessness, an acknowledgment that either the individual is beyond redeeming or the community has morphed into a mob.
“It shouldn’t be like a death sentence for him,” Schiff said. No, it should be a punishment that allows for the best of outcomes. It should be a rehabilitation project that grants Irving a measure of grace that is too rare these days, that gives him the chance to learn and grow and make amends. Only if and after he turns down that opportunity and reaffirms his inner ugliness should everyone reconcile themselves to living with one of the timeless and discomfiting realities of professional sports: Just because an athlete is great doesn’t mean he’s good.
