I put the pressure on your shooters
Staying strapped.
First off:
Kawhi Leonard is giving away more Clippers-branded backpacks at the game tonight, some 20,000 to those in attendance. He has committed to donating a million (!) bags overall with the help of the Clippers and a corporate sponsor. I mean it when I say that if you know literally a single parent raising a child in the LA area they have one of those backpacks somewhere if not two. I like the idea of giving away backpacks, and I hope the ones fans are receiving tonight are sturdier than the Clippers themselves have been this season. Theyβre all intact going into tonight, at least.
Did some reporting this week on how fucked the Inland Empire is. Riverside was recently ranked in the bottom five cities in the Child Opportunity Index; for this article I talked to Terrance, a longtime I.E. resident who, despite getting secondary and postsecondary degrees since finishing a two-year bid in 2007, struggled to house his family in anything better than rat-infested due to broadly adopted local housing statutes that bar anyone with a criminal record from the premises. (He now devotes his days to weakening these statutes as the state director of a nonprofit.)
Terrance, who now lives in nearby Colton, described a runaway train that carries the already vulnerable local population β one in five Californians has a criminal record; itβs higher than that in the IE β farther from society and deeper into despair. He said he tries to keep his kids inside. It's not like there are many parks or playgrounds nearby.
Kawhi grew up 12 miles away from Riverside in Moreno Valley, nicknamed Murder Valley, or just The Murder. He did not emerge unscathed from his childhood. His dad was shot and killed in front of his car wash in Compton when he was 16. In September, his sister was charged in a robbery and assault that left an 84-year-old woman dead.
I'm suspicious of charity that asks its recipients to wear a brand (they aren't just backpacks, they're Clippers backpacks), or for that matter, to represent a favorite basketball team. Imagine a die-hard Laker fan who's been using a hand-me-down pack her whole childhood suddenly facing that decision β it might sound trivial to an adult, but you know what? These loyalties feel like life-or-death to us, too.
This is the world we live in, though, the "Do you want a free backpack or not?" one. (Much to my chagrin, I'm encountering the same issue at my synagogue, which has slipped into advertising local business sponsorships in the weekly bulletin.) And there are now a million new backpacks floating around this world, some of them making their way to kids who need them, some to the bottom of a closet somewhere, some to Goodwill, and who knows where else. That's basically a good deal. And there's no need to discuss the #KawhiIt hashtag associated with the backpack campaign β a bizarrely transparent knockoff of the Nike motto by the spokesperson for New Balance. (Spokesperson being a term of irony here, Kawhi never opens his mouth in his shoe commercials.)
He is evidently proud of his hometown, fond enough of the place or at least still connected enough to want to return to it in free agency and raise his family near it. I wonder what he makes of it in retrospect, and it would have been nice to have someone credentialed ask him about it. But anyway, here he is helping the Inland Empire battle the odds. I think it's nice. According to a piece about him that ran a few years back in Sports Illustrated, Kawhiβs favorite school subject was math.
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