Earlier today, basketball legend Michael Jordan announced that he was donating $1 million each to the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s newly established Institute for Community-Police Relations and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
It follows shootings, racial tensions and protests in the United States in recent months but Jordan's announcement came as somewhat of a surprise given that the 53-year-old regularly refused to become involved in commenting about events off the court.
Something has clearly changed and to get more insight on the former Chicago Bulls great, Off The Ball were joined by basketball writer Sam Smith of Bulls.com, author of The Jordan Rule.
For many, Jordan's off-court worldview has often been construed in the quote "Republicans buy sneakers too".
"Well, that's probably my fault as it were," said Smith.
"That was in one of my books and it's really unfair to Jordan because really I later explained in the latest book I wrote, it was more in Jordan's style a quip, sort of a response to circumstances. But if you put everything into the larger perspective which nobody likes to do, Jordan in effect is being measure current times versus history. It's be like in the United States, if we said that George Washington was a racist because he had slaves - and he did have slaves. But in that time in the 18th century, a lot of people had slaves. It was fairly common. It wasn't appealing and we're certainly appalled by it now in the 21st century. But if you go back to that era in the 1980s when Jordan played, there were no politically active players. Zero. So to judge Jordan and pick him out among all of them, he wasn't politically active and none of them were."
From Smith's recollections of his own first hand view of Jordan, the NBA legend was "colourblind as far as race goes."
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