Why Bomani Jones Won’t ‘Stick to Sports’

DAVID GREENE, HOST: Welcome to Sports in America, everybody. I’m David Greene. And the question we are tackling today is who killed former college football star Bryan Pata? We might actually never know for sure. This is a case that in the world of college sports has been unresolved for two decades now. Just recently there was a trial and it ended in a hung jury and a mistrial. So no feeling of justice yet for the Pata family, for the family of this former Miami hurricane standout star. ESPN did a ton of amazing reporting on this story over the years, including the 30 for 30 podcast, “Murder at the U.” The investigative reporters, Paula Lavigne and Dan Arruda, who are responsible for much of that reporting and for the podcast, join us now. Thank you both for being here to talk about just a crazy story that I know has taken up a lot of both your lives.

PAULA LAVIGNE: It’ s an honor to be here.

DAN ARRUDA: Yeah, thanks for having us, David.

DG: I guess, can we start just for folks who listen to our show who don’t know, like who was Bryan Pata?

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DA: Bryan Pata was a high school football star in the Miami area, born and raised here. The youngest of nine from a Haitian family, grew up in Little Haiti and the surrounding areas. By the time he became a junior and senior high school, highly recruited defensive tackle, eventually ended up at the Miami Hurricanes where he starred in his four years there, played as a freshman, continued to get better as he went on. In his senior year he was heavily considered to be a second or third-round draft pick, and was only months away from graduating and being drafted when he was brutally shot and murdered in November of 2006.

DG: Outside his apartment, right?

DA: That’s correct, he had just returned home from a day of practice, basically just stepped out of his car and was shot as he walked from his car to his apartment.

DG: And so this case opens and then ends up going cold for so many years. I mean, how did that happen?

PL: Well, for the first few months, there was a flurry of activity. There were tips coming in, there were interviews being done. There were, you know, leads being followed. And then I’d say within like a year, year and a half, they seemed to sort of stop pursuing a lot of those leads and, and leaving a lot of these possible trails just sort of dangling out there. I mean, they’ve ruled out some people, but they still weren’t any closer to figuring out who had killed Bryan Pata definitively. Although we would find out much later there was one person in particular they were considering as a suspect, but they hadn’t really landed that plane at the time. And so this case, you know, I’d say probably, I think we determined the last definitive tip they got in this case that they put in the police report at least was in 2009, 2010-ish. And then nothing really happens on this until 2017\. And in 2017, two things happen. One is that the Pata family have a press conference with the Miami-Dade police department in which Jeannette Pata basically called out the police for not doing anything the last 10 years. And the police department, they also do something that we rarely ever, and I would say I’ve never experienced as a reporter, which is, they reached out to ESPN and asked us if we could do a story on Pata’s slaying with the, under the, you know, at least from what they told us, they wanted to try to develop some leads, possibly see if they could get someone to come forward. I think some of it also was to show the Pata family, “Hey, look, we’re doing something on this case. We’ve actually reached out the ESPN to get some coverage. Like, you, this is, this was how we’re trying to move forward.” And

DG: That’s totally crazy. That’s crazy.

PL: They didn’t get what they asked for, but they certainly got us to take a look at it.

DG: And was that the first kind of contact that ESPN had with them when the police reached out and said, hey, can you follow this story and see what’s up?

DA: It was, yeah, I think the original idea was for College Game Day, which is our, you know, one of our shows that focuses on college football to kind of do a, “Hey, it’s been 10 years. Do you remember when Bryan Pata, University of Miami star was shot and killed?” And I think their reasoning for the police was the players that were on that team, maybe at the time were weren’t really invested in finding Bryan’s killer. Maybe they knew something, maybe they were worried about getting drafted, maybe they were worried about graduating from college. Maybe they just weren’t ready to talk to police at that time, but I think what Miami-Dade hoped was that 10 years later or 15 years later, whatever it might be, they would see the story, they’re now mature, they have families of their own, and they think, “Okay, now I can come forward, now I’m ready to tell my story.” But that never happened.

DG: What happened instead? I mean, little did they know that they were gonna be triggering two amazing investigative reporters who were gonna start digging into what strikes me as a lot of their incompetence and weird behavior in this investigation.

PL: Yeah, David, instead of the piece that they wanted on College Game Day, which they never got.

DG: It’s scrutinized! (Laughs)

PL: (Laughs) They didn’t give their nice little feature piece. No, they got a team of reporters. I mean, Dan and I are, are two of a team looking at this in great detail and asking them questions and going back and back and back and pushing them for more information. And the thing that was frustrating to us was they came to us and asked us to do a story on this yet as we push them for information and as we asked them to give us the full police report, to tell us everything that they had done. They really shut down. There was a point where we were going back to Miami and it seemed like every conversation we were having with them, we were just going in circles.

DG: It’s amazing that they came to you first and then suddenly they start trying to shut down on you. I guess the key character, other character might not be the right word. The key other person in this story is Rashaun Jones, who was Bryan Pata’s teammate. How did he emerge and become a very important suspect in all this?

DA: You know, David, the interesting thing about Rashaun Jones is while the public never knew about the police’s interest in Rashuan Jones, they had let it slip. Or someone who was close to the investigation a few years after Bryan’s murder, let it slipped to the family that they had a strong suspicion that Rashaun Jones was a suspect in the case. So the family for many years were walking around believing that Rashaun Jones was responsible because that’s what Miami-Dade had told them. It wasn’t until our 2020 digital story where we finally got to release the information that Rashaun Jones was in fact the primary suspect in the case. Rashaun Jones was a junior in 2006\. Came into the University of Miami a year after Bryan, is from the Northern Florida areas from a place called Lake City. Was a star defensive back in his own right. But when he got to Miami just didn’t quite fit in, didn’t quiet shine like he had thought he would and how his family thought he’d would. So we turn into kind of a role player there. And he and Bryan did have several interactions, several beefs. And that’s why the police investigate him so thoroughly. And that why they ended up believing he was a suspect.

DG: But then we get this hung jury and, Rashaun Jones is not not convicted. And now where does this case go from here? I mean, is he still considered the prime suspect? Do we get another trial at some point soon? Does the Pata family ever get some kind of resolution?

PL: Well, two out of three of those questions I can answer yes. He is still the person who is charged with this murder under Florida law. They have, the state has 90 days under which to re-try him. They already have a trial scheduled for mid May. And, you know, the question will be, do we see the same testimony at this trial as we did at the original one? And one of the other things that is worth mentioning is, you know, the jury did not hear all of the other evidence that, that we put forward in our reporting of all the different leads that the police went down on this case. I mean, there were several legitimate leads, leads that had promise outside of Rashaun Jones. And that’s part of the defense’s argument is, You know, you put all your eggs in this one basket and you never really finished investigating these other angles of some of which they would argue had more motive and more reason than Rashaun Jones. But Rashuan is the one who will get tried again. And, you know, and we’ll see this, this hung jury from talking to the jurors. There was only one juror out of the six who was definitively wanting to convict. So, you, that I think both sides take that into consideration as they, as they move forward and see what sort of case they present to a new jury coming up here in several weeks.

DG: In a lot of ways and particularly the fact that you covered this amazing journey in a podcast, this certainly seems to fit in the true crime, kind of, genre. I wonder, is there something about this story that makes it a sports story and not another true crime story?

DA: I think when you look at this story, it is true crime, obviously, because of what happened. But it’s a sports story because it’s about unfulfilled potential. Bryan Pata was going to be a star in the NFL. There’s no doubt about that. He was going be a second or third round draft pick and he was ready to do what a lot of young athletes do who come from the inner cities. He was ready lift his family up out of poverty. And that’s, again, a very strong sports theme that we see regularly nowadays. So while, yes, it does tick off that true crime niche. There’s no doubt it’s a sports story because not only was Bryan Pata a highly regarded athlete, but Rashaun Jones was his teammate. And it’s not often you see stories about teammates killing each other on a team.

PL: Not often is an understatement. I mean, I can think of as we were going through this, I can think only one other case that received a lot of media attention and maybe like two or three others where you’ve had a teammate accused of murdering another teammate on an active team, you know, college or professional it is this is rare.

DG: And do you think it tells us anything about, I don’t know, some of the tensions, red flags inside a locker room that we might not think about enough? I mean, should college programs, should other sports programs take some kind of warning sign from this if this was indeed kind of a relationship between two teammates that turned really bad?

DA: You know, it’s interesting being in the trial and watching the state present their evidence, as you mentioned, they brought all this forth that, that two guys who did not like each other, they had arguments over women, they had arguments about other things. This is a testosterone filled room, and you’re bound to have issues. But what the defense was able to kind of fight that with is this happens in every locker room. This happens in, in every high school and every college and every professional locker room in the country. What it doesn’t lead to is murder. And that’s the big difference here. Testosterone filled lock rooms are nothing new, but murder is.

DG: You know, I think about the work that you two have done. I think back to a conversation I had recently with Pablo Torre, who’s been doing a lot of investigative journalism, you know, on his show when it comes to the sports world. And he said something that really has stuck with me, like that we invest so much energy and time and passion into sports. There’s also so much money. I mean, money is just rampant in sports. People are getting rich. I mean colleges and universities, we know how much money go into, you know college football programs. There really is a weight of responsibility, I think, for sports content to not just be sort of commenting on a game or game day style, all that’s important. I, as a sports fan, love it all, but the kind of work you’re doing is so important because we all, the fans and people who pay to go to games and with all of this money going around, like someone has to hold people, organizations, teams, college programs accountable.

[MUSIC]

PL: Absolutely. I mean, I, it is a multi-billion dollar global industry. And to leave it out there, you know, just treat it as sort of a, you know, something we’re just going to talk about as games and fun and so forth is so unethical. I mean, this isn’t entity that we have to, as you said, hold accountable. These are athletes who are role models for young children. These are industries that employ, you know, millions of people. I mean, when you think about the World Cup coming to the United States. I mean, just these are things that involve national security. You know, so sports is, it’s not just a game. I mean it is a tenant of society. It’s a means for social change. And I tell people that all the time, like people who don’t like the type of work we do, they say it ruins sports. Well, you know, if you love sports, you should want them done right. And you should people to call out the bad actors and the people who are, you know, being disingenuous and who are harming the athletes or cheating the fans. And it’s the type of work that I hope we continue doing because I think it is incredibly important.

DG: Yeah, no, there’s no doubt. You bring up the World Cup. We’re going to be talking to Bomani Jones, you know, award winning sports commentator used to be at ESPN now has his own podcast and own platform, but chatting with him a lot about the intersection of politics of sports and, you know, just all of those reminders that sports are not just a game, especially with this World Cup coming to the United States. But I want to thank you both, Paula Lavigne and Dan Arruda, investigative reporters for ESPN, following the case of Bryan Pata. Amazing work, and thanks for being here to talk about it.

DA: Thanks for having us, David.

PL: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.

DG: Coming up, our conversation with Bomani Jones

Hey everybody, so for this week’s episode, we’re doing something a little different. Just after the closing ceremonies at the Olympics in Milan, we recorded our conversation live on stage at On Air Fest in Brooklyn, and our guest was Emmy award-winning commentator, Bomani Jones.

[MUSIC]

DG: Jones has become one of the most distinctive voices in American sports media. Someone who treats sports not as an escape from the real world, but as a window into it. That perspective isn’t an accident. He grew up in a household steeped in activism. His father studied politics in America. His mother, an educator, who participated in the lunch counter sit-ins in Oklahoma City in the 1950s. In other words, the idea that sports might intersect with power and culture was in the air long before Bomani ever picked up a microphone. Over the past two decades, Bomani Jones has taken this idea and brought it to a national stage across radio, TV, and podcasts, building a reputation for being unusually direct.

He’s thoughtful, he’s funny, and he is rarely shy about saying what he actually thinks, even if it makes people uncomfortable. So we got right into it. We were talking about what happens when politics walks directly into the locker room and who gets to define America when we host big international sports events like the World Cup. I also just wanna say that especially these days, when words feel cheaper than they used to, when truth gets bent and blurred until it’s hard to tell what anyone actually stands for, the world could use more voices like Bomani’s. We felt lucky to spend a little bit of time with him.

EMCEE: Please welcome to the stage, David Greene and Bomani Jones.

[ AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

DG: Thank you all for coming at lunchtime to hang out and talk sports. Bomani, thanks for doing this.

BOMANI JONES: I appreciate you.

DG: I don’t think we’ve ever met.

BJ: Not till like five minutes ago.

DG: I wish I spent years at NPR trying to get sports on the air at Morning Edition. I feel like we should have called you many, many times.

BJ: Well, that raises the question as to why you didn’t.

DG: It’s a good question. It’s actually one that we’re trying to answer with our new show, Sports in America, because I think there are a lot of people like me in the public radio space who love sports and we feel like we’re not allowed to talk about it. But now we are talking about it and we’re getting on public radio stations around America to talk sports. And so I’m glad we’re connected.

BJ: I appreciate it, I’m glad to be here.

DG: I wanted to start before we get to the World Cup. I’m wondering if you’d indulge me and help me work through a weird dream I had that involves sports a few days ago. I had this dream that the U S men’s and women’s hockey teams won gold in the Winter Olympics. And it was all this incredible fanfare. It was just this magical moment and my, I like my dream went to the locker room. And somehow the director of the FBI showed up and was pounding beer in the locker room, which I mean, couldn’t be true, like slamming beer. And then he like mid drinking brings out his cell phone and he connected to Donald Trump, like just literally connected to Trump online. And then Trump gets on there and he starts talking to the men’s hockey team to congratulate them. And he tells this like disgusting joke. He says, like, “I want you to come to the State of the Union. I want to you to to come the White House. But I kind of have to invite the women, too.” The women’s team who had won the gold medal. This feels too crazy to be real.

BJ: I think the funniest part is that you thought that was a joke. I think that is literally what he meant. It’s just like, “Hey, OK, just letting you guys know, I have to invite women.” This was not something that he had thought about. I would not even bet money that he knew that there was a women’s team until sometime maybe the day before. We’re like, “Yo, we won gold.” He’s like, “I thought the game wasn’t until tomorrow. Oh, yeah, OK. They won gold.” Like I’m not positive he knew the difference. I don’t know, I have been a bit surprised by the surprise of the reaction. Now I would argue that all things Kash Patel and the idea that that man is the head of the FBI. Like I’ve never seen it set up where somebody could take like a picture of every FBI director from Hoover on down and just show them, and the next thing you know, it’s that guy, right? Like which should just raise a question. Something has changed somewhere between here and here. I wonder what’s going on? Like that is the one thing that is not like the other, and he lives this crazy life. Like I was in Vegas, I guess it was last month for work. And I’m at a table because I mean, that’s why they put it in Vegas. And he was explaining to me, and maybe I misunderstood him, but he was like, yeah, Kash Patel is here, and he’s in the high limit room or something. And I went over there and he wasn’t there, right? So maybe he meant that he had been there some other time. But apparently he just lives life on tour and just goes and kicks at all these places. So the idea that he’s in Milan for the Olympics, I think that that decision was made like he’s got a Google alert on every cool event that they could possibly be. And so then from there, if they were just speaking generally, and they were like, “Hey, the FBI director said he wants to come back here.” I personally raise a different way, I would find that to be spooky and ask more questions, them? Hell yeah, let them come on! Right. Okay, cool. So then he gets in there. And then you realize very quickly that this is his room. Like these are the guys that he wants to hang out with and they are not nearly as mortified by the idea that that dude with that look on his face is the head of the FBI. That doesn’t strike them at all. And he’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to call Trump.” They’re like, hell yeah, let’s call Trump and so calling Trump doesn’t seem crazy on its own face because it’s the president and this is kind of the sort of thing where the president pops up or you know, President Reagan’s on the phone to talk to you in the locker room or something like that. Like back in the era where there would just be a phone in the locker room that rang and people picked it up and then you passed it to whoever, like that used to be a thing. So none of that really is crazy. Like all those people being in the same place makes sense. It’s just that it’s at the Olympics that feels like a little bit weird, but in sum total, that’s a collection of people that I don’t think would love anything more than to hang out with each other in an occasion like that one.

DG: I mean, except for Kash Patel looking like he was showed up at his son’s fraternity and like for a party. But, but yeah, no, you’re right. It’s not that weird to have the Olympic winning, you know, gold medal hockey team getting a call from the president. I guess I want to ask you like this. I couldn’t tell if it was Trump just being honest, like you said, and saying the thing, or if he comes into sporting moments like this and calculates a way to be involved and take over the narrative. That’s where my mind goes, like which of it…

BJ: He seems though to very particularly pick his spots in places where he believes that it is his room, right? Like a NASCAR race. That’s his room. He’s gonna show up there. He’s made some misjudgments I guess that was an NFL game that he showed up to to do I forget who the oath was for to swear some people in and got booed mercilessly, but he looks at that like oh that’s his room. SEC football games, like he’s going to turn up at LSU, Alabama. He feels like that’s his room. He’s not pulling up to the All-Star game for the NBA. That’s not his room, he, at least from what I can tell, I don’t think it’s, this is even that particular to sports as much as he’s just trying to show up anywhere where people are happy to see him or where he believes that people are going to be happy to him. And those are the types of sporting events that he goes to. I don’t know what inclinations he has or has not received about the way hockey players feel about him. But I get the feeling that whenever the hockey players are invited to come to the White House, there’s no discussion about whether or not they’re gonna go. They’re gonna to go. If they had invited Team Canada, Team Canada probably would have went, right?

DG: But people like Jake Guentzel, former Pittsburgh Penguin, who I deeply respect, he decided not to go to the State of the Union.

BJ: Right. But as I say, but we’re talking about an individual here, as opposed to with these other sports where it’s like, yeah, the Golden State Warriors are not coming.

DG: Right.

BJ: Like he knows hockey’s his room.

DG: Yeah.

BJ: You know, and he loves to show up in his room.

DG: Golden State Warriors will not be at the White House. But I wanna kind of get to the position that these athletes were in in that locker room because I have replayed this, I’ve talked to my wife about it over and over again. Like he makes this comment, he makes it sound like oh, he’s being forced to bring the women’s team. The women’s teams, by the way, that has been more successful than the men’s team, they just won Olympic gold and I mean that’s a whole separate thing. He makes this joke and there’s laughter in the room. One thing my wife said to me was like, you as a dude, do not know how that lands, if you’re a woman, I, and I just want to like say that out loud. But I’ve gone through this, these different versions of this where it’s like, I would have loved for one or several of those guys to have like stood up in some heroic way and said, “Mr. President, that’s not funny.”

BJ: But like you thought that was going to happen in that room?

DG: No, that’s what I’m saying. But it, but it wasn’t going to happen in that room for the reasons you’re talking about. Also these guys had just played like three hours of three plus hours of hockey. Like it, what, what, what? There’s been outrage over this. Like people have been saying those guys that they’re, they’re sexist. They should have stood up to the president. Like it…

BJ: They probably are. That’s on the board, like, men, sexist, on the board, always on the board. I also think that there is… I always use this phrase about there are two Americas, right? And two Americas can mean anything. Like when I bring it up, people typically think I’m talking about race. I’m normally not. I like to leave it a little bit ambiguous. But there are all kinds of splits that come up. And a big split, this is two Americas, but it’s like the two Americas XY chromosome edition. There’s two kinds of people and they’re those of us who went to school with girls and those of us who went to school with nothing but boys and those who went to school with nothing but boys. I worked for a while with somebody who’s got an operation full of those dudes and they all, they never graduate beyond the sophmoric sense of humor that they had when they were teenagers. Like people, nothing makes dudes act more mature faster than the fact that you try not to embarrass yourself around some girls who happen to be there. And you think in your life about the people you know who retain the most ridiculous sense of humor as men and ask yourself very kindly, did this dude go to school with all boys? And I mean, this is a hypothesis I have not scientifically tested, but I think it checks out. And hockey in particular is a world of dudes who spent all their time around a bunch of dudes. It’s primarily Canadians and the system of that is you harvest these boys very young and you send them off in the middle of damn nowhere to Saskatchewan or Manitoba or somewhere else and you move in with these families and all you do is just hang out with these boys playing hockey all the time. My understanding is there’s a new show on streaming right now that kind of taps into these themes in a slightly different direction.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

DG: Which had us in such a moment of inclusivity in hockey!

BJ: Yeah, well well that’s the thing, hockey…

DG: It wasn’t, it made it feel that way…

BJ: No, no, no. Hockey more inclusive than you think in a way that they don’t want to talk about. But that’s who that room is right there. There’s nothing like I remember once a buddy of mine was doing a radio interview with a hockey player. And I forget what he was talking about exactly. But he said something about, “Well, yeah, then maybe your wives could come on the trip.” And the dude just matter of factly like nobody else could hear him was like, “Oh no, we don’t want that.” And he wasn’t joking, like he was dead ass serious in the way that happens when you spend way too much time around nothing but dudes. So I understand, I understand the desire to give these guys a benefit of the doubt because people want to like them especially in that particular situation. But no, I just think that was the room. I just think they were both like, ha ha ha, you’re right. Like, I don’t know if hockey is like basketball, where the men who play basketball have a serious and profound respect for female basketball players. They do not look at them as doing a job that is different than the ones that they do. They are the ones who will turn up and watch their games and can have actual expert conversations with you about women’s basketball. I don’t get the feeling that hockey is trafficking the same way about those things. I could be totally wrong. Like, I’m offering a great deal of hypotheses, because it’s not like I’d be hanging out with these cats. But the world that I live in, a lot of this stuff all comes together. I feel like I’m making sense right now. Maybe somebody out here don’t think so, but I think I’m make a lot sense.

DG: You’re making a lot of sense. I think it’s it’s actually challenging a lot of my notions around this. Like I had this fantasy that it’s too much to put on those guys to have assumed that one of them should have like stood up to the president.

BJ: Okay, so I would agree with that, right? If the expectation is that one of these dudes is going to be like, hey, everybody stop laughing. Mr. President, that is beneath our standards, right.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

DG: And I do think that’s what some people want it, like some people wish…

BJ: I don’t blame them for wanting it.

DG: Right.

BJ: Expecting it is stupid, wanting it is human right? Like I get that you wish that the world was a better place than it actually was it’s not gonna happen. Now, what I think you would like even if you weren’t getting that was everybody that for a moment realized that other people are going to be able to see you and then immediately be like “Oh, hey, I don’t think I’m going to participate in that joke.” Like look, in those moments where somebody says something that’s wildly inappropriate there, I think it’s split between two things. It’s wildly inappropriate and you can’t believe that they said that. Then there’s also the other one, wildly inappropriate and you also think it was kind of funny. Both of those, the move you typically make if somebody, if you know people are watching is the, you hold it up and then you stop. Those cats, no, that was just something somebody would say in that world. And they just rode along with it. I think what I find interesting about the whole scene and it’s kind of a thing about the Olympics where for me at least, I don’t get particularly jingoistic about the Olympics. I enjoy watching it. I find it to be interesting. But you know, it’s not… I don t care about hockey like that on a regular basis. So I’m not going to care about hockey just because the United States Olympic team has happened to win, right? Like I don’t t, that doesn’t work that way with me. However, hockey at the Olympics is a very interesting dynamic for American sports fans, generally speaking. And what it is is it is a sport that as a nation we are familiar with, even though we are not necessarily the biggest fans, but we all understand kind of what hockey is. It’s not like curling where every four years somebody got to explain to you what it, right?

DG: I was kind of getting into curling for the first time, trying to, I still don’t understand it at all.

BJ: It was so funny because I was in Canada for the first part of the Olympics and it’s wild to be at a place where like those are the Olympics. Like I call them the Whiter Olympics because that’s exactly what they are and that’s what they intend to be. Whole goddamn run-up. I forget we’re on public radio, but it’s a whole…

DG: We’re not here. You’re good.

BJ: No, no, no.

DG: We are, but we’re not.

BJ: But this is a thing to keep in mind about the Olympics, the Winter Olympics. And we don’t talk about this, I don’t think nearly enough. It is entirely a northern hemisphere sport thing, right. It is Olympics for a somewhat particular subset of people that also leads to fun stuff. Like, there’s a winter Olympics team from Zimbabwe, and it’s basically the pure descendants of Cecil Rhodes who figured out, hey, man, we ain’t got a lot of competition down here to try to make the ski team or whatever it is. But look, the whiter Olympics comes around and hockey is there. We all know what hockey is, but America is not a favorite. Hockey is the only of the team sports that we care about in this country that was not invented in this country and that is not by and large dominated by this country. So this is the first time America’s won the gold medal in hockey in 46 years but nobody’s been complaining about the fact that it’s been 46 years since we won this. If America does well in a hockey competition everybody’s kind of cool with it. If not they go on about their business.

And so it’s a game against Canada. You know, They’re not so cool with us right now, but by and large, we’re cool with them. They’re good neighbors. They don’t make a lot of noise up there. You know, they talk a little bit funny, but it’s whatever, right? And so it goes, you get like a legitimately, exceptionally fun match or game. They call them games. You get this the year before, you had the four nations thing with the NHL and it was really competitive and it’s like high stakes hockey is really fun to watch. Overtime hockey with three on three is really fun to watch, right? You get to put all these things together and then America wins and everybody gets to go like yay America, yay America but the people who really enjoy the yay America part are the ones who don’t look around and realize it’s the whiter Olympics for a reason. The only people saying yeah America’s a bunch of white people right and so you get this room of everybody happy and everybody being brought together and none them are saying the quiet part out loud just like damn man it’s really just us but it kind of feels good to us right now and hey I understand that there’s lots of stuff I want to do with no white people around I get it. But I know it when I do it I’m being honest about the fact. And so this gets to be something that gets people so charged up. There’s no football to talk about. So the sports coverage can go there. Regular season NBA basketball is not something that we really talk about right now. I don’t know what it takes for that to break through. And so it becomes this happy moment for everybody to be happy. And then you are reminded what happens when you get a room that’s got a few too many dudes in it. And then it goes off the rails and then Trump shows up. And it’s the reminder to the more liberal leaning people who want to participate in the Hacksaw, Jim Duggan, USA stuff, right? You feel a little bit left out because the people that’s normally there, you know who it is. They got the bald eagle sticker on their car and everything else. You ain’t trying to hang out with them. But right now, you ain’t even got to think about it. We just out here being USA, USA. There is no left. There is not right. There’s just red, white and blue. And then Trump pops up and you’re like, damn, you just had to go off and say something, didn’t you?

Yeah, that’s that’s how it goes. It’s so. I have laughed at the kind of liberal recoil at what is probably, for that particular subset of people, a median set of opinions, right? Like those gentlemen in that room are not outliers. The president did not get there through sheer force, right, and you just broke your heart a little bit. Like there are all kinds of people, and I see this happen on the left, where when they have their moment to be like it in every man moment. They really revel in it and they love it because everybody wants to love that. Everybody wants to love home, right? Everybody wants the love to crib and, you know, white people do not want to feel ostracized from the median white person, no matter what, even if white people don’t think about themselves as like this collective that coalesces together. And I think this is perfectly reasonable, by the way, right. You see what happens with Black people. As soon as somebody thinks that they are trampling in Uncle Tom territory. “Hey, hey, hey. Wait a minute now.” Nobody wants to be disliked by their own, and our society denotes our own in this particular way. And I think that is largely what happened with the hockey situation. And then you just had to be reminded. Nah, that’s their room. That’s how their room gets down.

DG: Coming up, we’ll have more from our conversation with Bomani Jones.

Welcome back to Sports in America. Let’s get right back to our conversation recorded live with Bomani Jones.

I think the, one of the reasons that you can’t get away from the intersection of sports and politics is because sports reflect a lot of who we are in so many ways and many of the things you’re talking about, I think about this moment, it’s like we had been in this phase with the popularity of Heated Rivalry and this warm feeling of, Oh, maybe there’s a day when the NHL, you know, is more inclusive. And then suddenly this happens. And I think the hopeful, aspirational part of me is thinking back to like, “Oh, there have been these moments where I’ve, you know, laughed nervously at something where I wish I would have stood up and stood up to someone. I learned a lesson from that. And are these guys in that locker room going to all go home and come home from the Olympics and think about that moment and maybe learn a lesson?” What you’re saying to me is like, we just have to confront the fact that if you are someone who thinks that this was going to be some warm, beautiful learning moment, you don’t understand sort of the realities of our country and our society.

BJ: Yeah. No, no, no. no. They weren’t gonna be that right. They won’t go learn while they was drinking. You know, like that’s typically not how it goes. But I think there’s an important distinction to make because I think that you put two things together that aren’t the same. And that is where Heated Rivalry comes into this. My hypothesis has always been on the idea of it’s not gay people in professional sports. It is gay men in men’s sports. The WNBA, for example, We are very aware of the broad continuum of sexuality. I’m terrible with these terms, but you know what I mean? We know what’s going on over there It’s just what it is, right?

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

BJ: No, I mean, but they’re not it’s not like it’s not a closet situation. Like I remember when Britney Griner left Baylor and she came out and my question was out of what? Oh, OK? OK. So now we can all talk about it. Got it. But you weren’t fooling me, right? There are plenty of gay men who play football, basketball, and what Heated Rivalry is showing people is that there are plenty gay men, who play hockey, or at the very least, men who have sex with other men. However, you want to classify that or whatever it is. We’re the ones that are surprised about this from the outside. Those dudes who get naked around each other, they know. They know who’s gay. They know whose not. I could give you a story of an NFL Hall of Famer who brings his boyfriend around. Like it’s well known. They’re the ones who don’t say anything about it. They’re are the ones who understand and traffic with each other in spite of that fact. The inclusiveness that the leagues are worried about I do not believe is among the players. Even though I mean there are obviously some players who think some radical things about this right? No, they’re worried about us.

They’re worried about the general population they’re worried about the people that might boo or might call these guys names or anything like that. But I am of the belief that in actual day-to-day application those guys are much better equipped and ready to handle the idea of gay men in their locker rooms and everything else than those of us on the outside because they’ve been doing it right like I remember I went to graduate school would just do and he was gay and he would periodically if he felt comfortable with somebody that he would tell them that he was gay and it was just amazing because I mean we had a beef for completely different reasons. But I always said that if he came and told me that he was gay I was going to confess to him that I was Black because it was that abundantly clear and obvious you know like. When you’re around people that much, as you are in a graduate program, when you’re there every day, man, you’re not, there’s not a lot of mystery left to be there. It’s us that can’t, that find this to be like a counterintuitive idea that it would be a gay hockey player. We’re the ones that don’t get that. The hockey players see it all the time. Now might those people be okay with it in a locker room and then go vote for something that is completely antithetical to what they do on a daily basis? That’s on the board. But in terms of the actual inclusivity They’re doing it and they’re keeping it quiet and they being cool about it. We’re the ones that probably need to grow up a little bit.

DG: I want to ask you what lessons or observations should we take from this hockey locker room moment as we get ready for the World Cup, when I have an inkling that President Trump is going to try and be involved. I mean, the U.S. is hosting it. You’ve got a young, hungry U.S. team that, you know, no one thinks they’re going to win, but I mean, there are a lot of expectations on them that if they don’t make it out of group or something, I mean that the soccer itself is important and they have to perform, but in this political moment in our country, in this world, like those guys on that team watching what happened to the, the hockey players who represented the United States won gold and then kind of had the moment spoiled by politics. Like what are you thinking about if you’re on that team?

BJ: Well, I think they got a, it’s a different set of things. One, if I had to guess, they will make it out of the group. Historically, the whole nation tends to get out.

DG: That’s what I’m saying if they don’t things are dark.

BJ: Yeah, so that’s a very interesting thing. We are just happy with whatever we get from hockey. We have expectations about this soccer team that are completely unfounded based on the historical result.

DG: (Laughs)

BJ: But you know, it’s cool if we get good at hockey. People in this country think we should be better at soccer and want to be better soccer. So I think the question becomes, like, if they get out of the round, is there a call from Trump for that? Yeah, probably not right

DG: You don’t think so?

BJ: Nah, nah, I mean…

DG: You think he’s gonna be calling after every match they…

BJ: No, no, no. I don’t think that’s enough winning for Trump, right? Like they get all the way to places that none of us think they’re going to get. Maybe that’s a little bit different. I don’t think that’ where they’re gonna get called into the politics thing. Leading up to the Olympics in Milan, Italy called game, recognized game, and was like, hey man, leave ICE at the crib, right. Like in a country like Italy, what ICE is feels very, very familiar to them, and they wanted no parts of that. Right? And, you know, the U.S. Was explaining, you know, they typically send all these people for law enforcement, all these trips or whatever. But Italy was very clear that they didn’t want no parts of ICE in their country. Right. I mean, and it’s funny because it’s not like ICE has any authority over there. Like, I don’t know what they were going to do. But they were like, no, we don’t want to know ICE over here. The United States does not have the luxury of saying that ICE can’t pull up. And what everybody’s concern going into these is about ICE, which is not exactly discerning in their snatching people off the street movement. There is no telling what might happen. There’s no telling what the level of scale of protest or everything else is going to be. And the soccer team is comprised of different demographics than the hockey team is comprised of. That to me is where the politics are going to come up because the current state of affairs in the United States is going be on display for the entire world. Like this is a country right now that other countries tell their people, I don’t know if it’s safe for you to travel there. Largely because you might get mixed up with whatever whatever ICE has got going on. It’s going to be 48 countries between here, Mexico, which has its own fun set of things going right now, and then Canada. The politics I think are going to come up when the media that covers soccer, which is a bit more liberal than the media that covers hockey, when they start getting in these dudes faces and asking them questions about the current state of affairs. I don’t know nearly as much about the guys that are on the soccer team, like who is inclined to say what about what thing or whatever it is. But that to me is where the politics of it all is gonna come up. And it’s also gonna come up with these cash from other countries who are gonna come over here and have something to say about what they see before them.

DG: Should we in the media be asking players on the U.S. team on other teams who are coming about politics?

BJ: Yeah, they’re adults. If they don’t want to answer, they don’t have to. And the decision not to answer, I don’t fully judge like everybody’s got a lot going on, right. And your decision on what you do and do not wish to speak on without knowing the people often is not I don’t think appropriate for me to offer that measure of judgment. But if what you’re working on or the story that you’re doing involves talking about politics or you want to get an understanding of what people think and feel as of now, right? People will write books about this in 50 years and those are the details that wind up in those books is like, “Hey, we talked to these guys. What, what were the players thinking at this point in time? I’ve got all these, all these these documents that I’ve harvested, right. And all these interviews that I’m going through and I know how the country felt, I know, how the politicians felt. I know the people running this felt, but I don’t have the voice of the players, their voices are important.” And so yeah, nobody, nobody there is like poor, broke and struggling in doing that. Well, I guess, you know, let me be careful about that because different countries, the world is, you knows, a different situation, but they’re in a position to decide whether they do or do not want to answer a question. They can do that.

DG: Is sports diplomacy, when we hear that term, is that a real thing? Like, does the World Cup have an opportunity to sort of help us, not just forget, but confront some of the tensions in our world by reminding us that there is a sport that so many people around the world can get behind and have spent their lives thinking about being a fan of trying to play. Is that a really thing?

BJ: Well, I would argue that confronting the tensions requires exploring the root of said tensions and sports does not put us in a position to confront the tensions, it just perhaps puts us in the position to recognize that those tensions are silly. But in terms of confronting it, like we did something, I did a show for HBO, we did something on like the idea of sports washing and I actually to a degree reject the idea sports washing. I reject it… I accept it in the sense that I think for these countries, the ability to pull off events, it demonstrates a certain stability to your economy. And so I think it’s very good for encouraging foreign direct investment. But ain’t no comedy show gonna change what I think is going on in Saudi Arabia, right? But what it can do for rich people is to say that it is acceptable, because what they want in Saudi Arabian is they got all that money and they don’t get to have none of the fun rich people have, right? Like they want to be the kind of rich people everybody else is, right? They want to have cool [EXPLETIVE] in their neighborhood because that’s what happens when you’re rich. You get the good, you know, you get the good stuff to come to you. That’s what they want, but it’s not changing anybody’s mind. China’s hosted the Olympics, you know, twice in the last 20 years. It hasn’t changed anybody’s mind. Having the World Cup, the World Cup is not going to change anybody’s mind. I don’t think about like what we think the state of the United States is in fact, he’s going to provide people an opportunity to come be mad about it and be heard. And so I had to think in terms of the idea of sports and diplomacy, it’s a very similar sort of thing. People play these games all the time. They’re always confronted with, you know, people from different worlds or everything coming together in order to do this. They have the opportunity every day to recognize how stupid all this other stuff is. And every day we vote stupid. We just keep going back to stupid. We know better and we still do it.

DG: You grew up in Atlanta and Houston?

BJ: I grew up in Houston. Yeah, I was born in Atlanta. I grew up in Houston.

DG: Can I hear a little bit about your mom? She’s kind of a legendary activist, right?

BJ: Yeah, you know, so what’s so funny about this is because the stuff with my mom is more documented, like I’m at that point now where I’m kind of like Denzel Washington’s son where I gotta be like, “Don’t forget about my daddy too.” But my mother’s name, well, her name now was Barbara Jones. She was born Barbara Posey. She is from Oklahoma City. And in her teenage years, there was a sit-in movement that started in Oklahoma City and my mother was the, I think the leader is the term to use. I’m not really sure. I’ve honestly had to glean a lot of this in my adulthood because she never really talked that much about it. But the long or the short is my mother and her friends integrated Oklahoma City more or less. They, the store is called Katz. It’s in the era of the department store having a lunch counter that you came in to eat at. And so my mother, it was a group of children. I think she was 15 when this happens and they went into Katz on the first day, no one would serve them. On the second day, no one was served them and people, you know, throwing soda at them and all this other stuff. And on the third day, they finally broke down and served them. And that meant that for Katz, all of their stores would then be integrated. And then that basically led to the integration of the city. And what is important to note about this is the most famous sit-ins and normally charged up as being the first from Greensboro in 1960\. And I believe the year what I’m describing to you is 1958\. She graduates from high school in 1960 and goes to the University of Oklahoma. I don’t remember which number Black student she was at Oklahoma, but I think we’re still on one hand. And they took the party to Norman and did the same thing there and began to integrate that town also.

What is interesting about that to me is my father went to, okay, so my father graduated high in 1954\. He goes off four years to France. He comes back and somewhere in 1960, he’s a student at Southern University, and they had a sit-in movement there in Baton Rouge that wound up with him being put out of school. I think it was at a bus depot, was what they were looking to integrate there at the time. The two of them meet at the University of Illinois in 1963, they got married in 64, but they meet in 1963\. And I always imagine there’s no way my father, my father’s a real one, right? I think that is the best way that I could put it. My mother is very composed and deliberate, but my father was a much more of a rabble rouser. And I can only imagine how he viewed himself, you know, even getting arrested in these protests and getting kicked out of school and everything else. And he’s also older than her by about six and a half years. And I could imagine he met her and he’s getting ready to rattle off all his bona fides about revolution. And she’s like, yeah, I was doing that when I was 15 big dog. What you think about that? And so last year, 2025, I hate that I missed it because she misunderstood what a big deal it was, but they built a monument of Oklahoma City to the sit-iners. So now there is a, every sit-inner has their own statue basically of them, you know, sitting at the lunch counter. She was there. Interestingly enough, Donda West, mother of Kanye also participates. So if you listen to Kanye talking about it, the 10 to the age of six, she was arrested in the sit ins. Those are the sit inns. They decided these are the literal sit ins. And yeah, Sam Presti, the general manager of the Thunder also had a big role in that, but they put that there. And so what’s wild to me about my parents as I run through all of that for you is, I’ve had to read that more than they have told me. I don’t even do the full math on it. OU gave her an honorary degree in 2024\. So we went there. It’s very interesting to see your mother on one page and the next page is Toby Keith, but that was what it was. Slightly different people, with slightly different interests, but that’s what it was, but yeah, no, that is. That is from which I have come.

DG: Awesome. I could talk to you for hours longer, but I know we got to stop. Bomani, thank you.

BJ: No, thank You.

DG: Really appreciate it.

BJ: No problem.

DG: This was fun and thank you all.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC]

DG: Next time on Sports in America, well the wait is over and opening day is here. Every oppo taco, home run robbery, walk off eruption makes it feel like for at least a few hours baseball restores our faith in humanity. But the world outside the stadium is anything but calm.

HOWARD BRYANT: The politics have been involved in the sports and the sports have been involved in politics since day one.

DG: There was a similar dynamic in Jackie Robinson’s time. The country was gripped by fear and political suspicion, and Robinson himself was pulled into the fight, compelled to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

HB: It really didn’t have a whole lot to do with communism. The same questions we’re asking now about health care and wealth inequality in the 99% versus the 1%. It’s the same fight. It’s the same battle.

DG: We’re going to sit down with award-winning baseball writer Howard Bryant to look at the moment America asked its biggest sports hero to prove his loyalty and why that story feels so familiar today. That’s next time on Sports in America.

[THEME MUSIC]

DG: This is Sports in America. I’m your host, David Greene.

Our executive producers are Joan Isabella and Tom Grahsler. Our senior producer is Michael Olcott. Our producer is Michaela Winberg, and our associate producer is Bibiana Correa.

Our engineer is Mike Villers. Our talent booker is Britt Kahn. Our tile artwork was created by Bea Walling.

Sports in America is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia and is distributed by PRX. Some of our interviews were originally created by Religion of Sports, with special thanks to Adam Schlossman. You can find Sports in America on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, the iHeartRadio app, you know, wherever you get your podcasts.

We also want to hear from you. How about you drop us a line? You can write us at sportsInamerica@whyy.org. That’s sportsInamerica@whyy.org. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next time for more Sports in America.

Host: David Greene
Executive Producers: Joan Isabella, Tom Grahsler
Senior Producer: Michael Olcott
Producer: Michaela Winberg
Associate Producer: Bibiana Correa
Talent Booker: Britt Kahn
Engineer: Mike Villers, Adam Staniczeski
Tile Art: Bea Walling
Sports in America is a production of WHYY, distributed by PRX, and part of the NPR podcast network.