With antisemitism scandal behind him, Kyrie Irving is thriving — and Jewish Mavericks fans are cheering him on
‘When the ball is tipped up, everything kind of goes quiet,’ one fan said
Kyrie Irving leaves the court after the Dallas Mavericks defeated the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference semifinals. Photo by Sam Hodde/Getty Images
By Louis Keene May 21, 2024
A lot has changed in the 18 months since NBA star Kyrie Irving tweeted out a link to a movie that denied the Holocaust.
Irving served an eight-game suspension, but never complied with the league’s demand that he meet with Jewish community leaders to clear the air. He soon changed teams, moving from the Brooklyn Nets to the Dallas Mavericks. There, he’s helped transform the team from one that missed the playoffs entirely last year to one that will compete in the NBA’s Western Conference Finals, which begin Wednesday.
And Irving, for the first time in recent memory, seems content to let his play do the talking.
Many Jewish basketball fans haven’t forgiven Irving for supporting the antisemitic movie, called Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America, which posits a conspiracy theory that Jews stole their heritage from slaves and made up the Holocaust to cover it up. They remain deeply disappointed by his protracted refusal to disavow the film. (Irving did so only after the league suspended him.)
But many Jewish Mavs fans have decided not to let Irving’s troubling social media feed ruin a barnstorming playoff run.
On the contrary: They are rooting for him to succeed.
“When the ball’s in the air, I hope it goes in,” one such fan, Jordan Shafron, said.
Shafron, who now lives in Philadelphia but still cheers for his hometown team, said he disliked Irving when the eight-time all-star arrived in February 2023, three months removed from the scandal. And he didn’t feel that Irving’s apology, posted a full week after he shared the movie, was sincere. (Irving deleted the apology shortly after the trade became official.)
But Shafron isn’t new to supporting athletes whom, on a personal level, he might not particularly like. He said he had rooted for the San Francisco 49ers during the 2013 Super Bowl because he loved Colin Kaepernick’s style of play — and in spite of his political disagreements with the quarterback. (Kaepernick’s routine of kneeling during pregame national anthems in protest of police brutality made him a culture war lightning rod.)
When Irving dribbles the ball up the court, “a symphony is taking place,” Shafron, 27, said. “So that is where I’m able to separate it. When the ball is tipped up, everything kind of goes quiet.”
Irving’s tenure in Dallas has been noticeably drama-free, according to Kirk Henderson, who has run the fan blog Mavs Moneyball for more than a decade. Part of that, he thinks, is thanks to credentialed Mavericks reporters, who appear disinclined to solicit Irving’s personal views.
For example, Irving has shared several posts about or alluding to the war in Gaza since Oct. 7. On May 6, he shared someone’s post reading, “It’s the oldest colonialist trick in the book calling indigenous people terrorists when they fight back against their murderous oppressors.”
In November, he wore sneakers customized with the words “No more genocide” during practice; he also wore a black-and-white kaffiyeh during his next postgame news conference.
But it doesn’t appear that reporters have asked Irving about any of the above, which Henderson, who is 40 and not Jewish, said he has come to appreciate. Irving’s behavior with the Nets, Henderson said, was “infuriating.” But the more people asked, the worse it got; Irving infamously answered a point-blank question about whether he was antisemitic with, “I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I’m from.”
Nowadays, Henderson said, “I don’t want to know his thoughts.”
Meanwhile, Irving’s antisemitism has become joke fodder in a group chat of Jewish Mavericks fans.
Ben Calmenson, 28, who is one of the members of that group, said he thought Irving is “most likely an antisemite.” But that’s less important to him than Irving’s on-court fit with the team’s other star, Luka Doncic.
“Once he showed that he’s helping us win, honestly, I’ve forgotten about the antisemitism,” Calmenson said.
And while he was upset to see Irving wear the kaffiyeh, saying it was a tacit endorsement of Hamas, Calmenson admitted he had extended the benefit of the doubt to the point guard of his favorite team.
“Because it’s a player on my own team, I was going to say, ‘Hey, maybe he doesn’t fully understand the situation.’ I was making excuses in my head.”
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