NBA All-Star Game in Charlotte would be a little over a month away but ...
As long as HB2 is on the books, NC is not going to get the NBA All-Star Game, NCAA tournament basketball games and ACC championship football games. And we shouldn’t. Call the people for which you vote. Tell them that your N.C. does not discriminate, and ask them rescind HB2. You do that, and I’ll alert the NBA, ACC and NCAA.
HB2 denies rights that Charlotte established for the LBGT community.
The NBA All-Star Game, which Charlotte would have hosted, is Feb. 19. That’s less than six weeks away. You can claim that nobody cares. Whenever I write about the NBA, somebody does.
These people don’t have access to TV ratings and perhaps not to television sets. The all-star game is an event, and the league works hard to ensure that people who can’t get into the Spectrum Center for Sunday’s festivities still have opportunities to feel part of it.
All-Star weekend is a celebration of basketball. It takes place in one city in the world, and next month that city would have been Charlotte. The NBA moved the game to New Orleans.
The state can’t win the HB2 fight, not long term. The young don’t discriminate with the ease people of my generation do. The law comes from a different time.
No matter how hard our lawmakers try, it’s never going to be 1950 again.
Tom Sorensen is a retired Charlotte Observer columnist. Sign up for his newsletter, and follow him on Twitter: @tomsorensen
More from this issue of the Tom Talks newsletter:
[CLEMSON: Could Danny Ford have adjusted his offense to a talent like Deshaun Watson?]
[GENIUS: Duke’s one-game suspension of Grayson Allen was perfect – for Mike Krzyzewski]
[NFL PLAYOFFS: Would the Panthers have done better than wild-card rout victims?]
[SORENSEN CLASSIC: Remembering the 1991 NBA All-Star Game in Charlotte]
This story was originally published January 11, 2017 at 11:23 AM.