ESPN’s Ryan Clark Calls Out ‘Shut Up and Dribble’ Critics for Silence on Nick Bosa’s MAGA Hat: ‘Only Seems to Go to Athletes That Look Like Us’
ESPN analyst Ryan Clark believes the relative lack of criticism given to 49ers star Nick Bosa for wearing a MAGA hat is evidence of a double standard in sports media.
After the Niners’ win over the Cowboys on Sunday Night Football, Bosa crashed the post-game interview by walking up and pointing to the MAGA hat he was wearing. After the game, he declined to elaborate on his decision to do so.
The moment went viral and proved to be predictably divisive. While many on the right praised the demonstration, it was met with backlash from the left. Interestingly, much of the praise came from the ones who were critical of left-leaning political stances taken by athletes like Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James. Fox News’s Laura Ingraham famously told James to “shut up and dribble.”
On a recent episode of Clark’s Pivot podcast, he wondered why that same criticism hasn’t been levied against Bosa. He said:
I also think it’s sort of ironic this happens in San Francisco, where Colin Kaepernick legitimately lost his career, not because he said America is a bad place, because he said “I want to make America a better place for people like us,” not because he said that he wants brown and black people to be superior to others, but just equal. He wanted their lives and our lives to matter as much as everyone else’s life.
The MAGA movement has been very clear that all lives don’t matter the same, that all people aren’t sort of deserving of the same treatment, of the same compassion, of the same level of life and liberty; and so I do think that the ‘shut up and dribble’ thing that always is told to the LeBron James’s is when he speaks up against police brutality, to the Colin Kaepernick’s when he speaks up against police brutality, to all these athletes who were involved in movements in 2020 — it only seems to go to the athletes that look like us, to the people that are speaking for the marginalized and the minorities as opposed to the majorities, because when [Donald Trump] called Colin Kaepernick and other people who kneeled, “Sons of bitches,” nobody told him to keep politics out of sports.
So it seems very clear to me Nick Bosa understands that when you wear that hat, you take a side. You take a side of division in a sport that’s supposed to bring us together. I’m just waiting for all the people who comment under political and sports things to shut up and dribble or to shut up and play football to tell him to shut up and rush but they ain’t going to say it cuz they feel the exact same way he does.
