Steve Kerr: From Personal Pain to Purpose
BIO: Steve Kerr is an eight-time NBA Champion winning three titles as the head coach of the Golden State Warriors and five as a player, three with the Chicago Bulls and two with the San Antonio Spurs. Before his coaching career, Steve served as the General Manager of the Phoenix Suns and a color commentator for the NBA on TNT. Steve uses his voice to speak out against gun violence and social injustice.
WHEN DID YOU FIRST RECOGNIZE THE POWER OF YOUR VOICE?
I didn't truly recognize the power of my voice until after I became an NBA coach. When I was a player, I did some community work and tried to help out where I could, but I never spoke out about issues that were important to me. Part of it was just the era. Athletes didn't speak out as much back then. Maybe we were reluctant to do so, and part of it was I wasn't sure how to use my voice.
When I became a coach, I realized, especially over the last decade or so, the power of social media and the amount of media that is involved in covering the NBA. In 2016, we were going through the playoffs, and there were three different moments of silence before games for the victims of mass shootings. The third one was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. I'm heartbroken for the victims and their family members, because I've been through the same thing. I thought, this is insane. We're just going to keep having moments of silence, and it's still going to happen. We have to do something about it. That's when I decided to use my voice. I'm going to speak up, and I'm going to see what happens.
After that season, I did a podcast that was all about basketball and our season. When the host asked me at the end if I wanted to add anything I said, ‘Yeah, I do. I want to say that we are insane in this country that we are allowing people to be murdered every single day, and we never do anything about it. You know, our government never does anything about it.’ I caught a lot of flack. I also got a lot of support. The response was overwhelming. That's when I knew. People are listening. I have a voice, and I should use it for causes that I think are just.
HOW DO YOU USE THE POWER OF YOUR VOICE?
There are two causes I've taken on. One is gun safety and gun violence. I lost my dad to gun violence when I was 18. He was 52. It's become such a terrible issue in our country. Literally, over 100 people every single day die in the United States from a gunshot wound, so I've decided to lend my voice to various efforts to curb gun violence.
I've done a lot of fundraising and speaking engagements for groups like the Brady Center, the Giffords campaign, Sandy Hook Promise and March for Our Lives. Anybody from any of those groups who asks me to help, I immediately say ‘yes’, because it's something very close to my heart. I know the pain of losing a family member to gun violence, and I don't want other people to feel that. There are a lot of people who are leading the way, especially the young people with March for Our Lives. They're the future. They're going to be very successful in helping to cut down some of the gun violence in this country.
The other issue is racial injustice. Having grown up playing basketball, and now coaching basketball, I've had so many African American teammates, colleagues and friends. As I've gotten older, and hopefully wiser, I've become more aware of the injustice that the African American community has faced for 400 years in America.
When Doc Rivers spoke out after the George Floyd murder with tears in his eyes, that was one of the most powerful things I've ever heard. I think his exact words were, ‘As African Americans, we keep loving this country, but this country doesn't love us back.’ It brought me to tears seeing how emotional Doc was, knowing how much this country has meant to him and knowing a lot about his background. Doc is the son of a Chicago policeman and has had amazing success in his life. Seeing the pain of someone I know well, it just really opened my eyes to how deep these wounds are in the African American community.
I've used my voice as often as I can to call for social justice and to encourage people to not only march or to speak up, but to educate themselves. As a white American, I’m given a privilege that maybe someone like Colin Kaepernick is not given. I can speak up, and while there might be plenty of people who disagree with me or insult me or say something inflammatory or even threaten me, I didn't lose my job. I wasn't blackballed from the NBA. That’s one of the reasons that I felt strongly about speaking up on social injustice and racial injustice. I recognized that I am allowed to make this protest, but when someone like Colin Kaepernick peacefully protests by taking a knee in the name of social justice, he loses his job and gets blackballed out of the NFL. That motivates me to use this privilege for good.
It's really important, especially for white Americans to give social justice issues a lot more thought, because it's very difficult to put yourself in someone else's shoes. What these last few years have done for a lot of us white Americans is force us to really think about what's happened in this country, and what continues to happen, and how we can make strides and improvements to our society and the lives of the African American communities that we live with.
WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR OTHER ATHLETES LOOKING TO USE THE POWER OF THEIR VOICES TO MAKE AN IMPACT?
Athletes have to navigate the path of speaking up, especially these days. It's so easy to hit a landmine and say something that is going to be used against you. My advice is to speak on things that you're passionate about. Don't delve into something that you don't know a whole lot about.
Before you speak up, do some soul searching and think about what's most important to you and your own values and your own humanity, who you are authentically as a human being. Then, if you're going to speak up, make sure you're educating yourself on the issue, because it's really easy to get caught saying something that can backfire. The more we can educate ourselves before we speak up, the better.
WHAT DOES ATHLETES’ VOICES MEAN TO YOU?
What Athletes’ Voices means to me is we are going to support one another through sports. We are recognizing the power that we hold in our voices and in our actions. We're going to support one another because we recognize that this is not an easy path to navigate.
I'm a huge sports fan. I follow and watch sports every day, and I follow people's stories. It strikes me that when you hear these stories, you realize we're all the same. We're human. We're flawed. We're vulnerable. We try to improve. We try to gain strength. We try to make an impact in our society. But you see that everybody's got a different journey, so those commonalities all come out in different ways.
Watching Simone Biles be unafraid to embrace this conversation at the Olympics about mental health, nobody would have been able to do that just a few years ago. The same for Naomi Osaka at Wimbledon. She opened up and shared her fight with mental health, dealing with the media, and dealing with stress in her life. She completely opened up and embraced that conversation. Think how powerful that is for so many people who have maybe felt shame in admitting any sort of mental health issue.
It's incredibly powerful that we have these athletes in every sport feeling more and more comfortable speaking up. It's going to impact millions of people in a positive way by creating better connections between people as there is a sense of belonging with the rest of the community around you. It's beautiful to watch.
The more we can educate each other, the more we can assist each other, the more comfortable every athlete and every coach who’s involved will feel about speaking out. The more people who are involved, the greater chance we have of actually creating change in society. I feel like what Athletes’ Voices is doing is really helping create leaders in our field who can then go out and feel very confident and comfortable in leading the charge for social change.
