Here is how the economics of professional-athlete speech work, in the NFL’s version of it. The player is, among other things, a surface. His jersey and helmet are surfaces the league controls, and the remaining patches — the eye black, the wrist tape — are policed by a uniform code that treats unauthorized writing the way a bank treats unauthorized overdrafts: not as a crime, but as a charge. Write the wrong words on the wrong part of yourself and you do not lose your job or your platform. You get an invoice. Houston Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair got one in September: $11,941, per ESPN, because the name written across his eye black during his Week 1 game against the Buffalo Bills was Hind Rajab.
Hind Rajab was a Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. That is the sentence the fine was about, and it is worth letting it sit there. Al Jazeera, which reported Irving’s comments on Thursday, describes Al-Shaair as repeatedly honouring slain Palestinian children this way. Nor was it even his first invoice on the subject: as NBC Sports noted, he was fined back in January for wearing stop the genocide on his eye black. At this point the man has something close to a direct-debit arrangement with the league’s disciplinary department.
Enter Kyrie Irving, the Dallas Mavericks guard and, as he put it himself after his team’s 128-110 opening-night loss to the Houston Rockets on Wednesday, a friend: “Azeez is a friend of mine.” When the September fine landed, Irving announced on social media, via ESPN: “I’ll take care of his fine.” And then he took care of his fine. On Wednesday, asked why, he explained that “you have to stand up,” in ESPN’s telling, while The Athletic quotes him putting it in one line: “Our strength is in our solidarity.” He called the gesture itself what Al Jazeera’s headline records as a “selfless act.”
Now step back and look at the transaction the NFL has designed here, because as a deterrent it has a small flaw. The fine is not a prohibition. It is a price. And if a thing has a price, someone else can pay it. Al-Shaair writes a name on his face on Sunday; the league sends a bill on Tuesday; Irving — for whom $11,941 is, let us say, a rounding error relative to a superstar point guard’s compensation — pays it and, crucially, says so. The result of the uniform code, enforced exactly as written, is that the unauthorized message got a second news cycle, in a press conference in Houston, covered internationally, months after the original Sunday. The league has essentially created a market in which speech it disapproves of can be bought in bulk by sympathetic billionaires-ish, and then it looks surprised when someone takes delivery.
There is something almost elegant about how badly the incentive structure works from the NFL’s side. A suspension would be a genuine deterrent and a genuine scandal. A fine is meant to be the quiet option: painful enough to discourage repetition, small enough to avoid a fight about free expression. What no one appears to have modelled is the third party with a wallet and a newsletter-sized soapbox. Irving is not on the Texans’ payroll; the NFL cannot fine him for paying a fine. The league can only keep invoicing the linebacker, and the linebacker, having already been fined twice for honouring the same cause, does not seem inclined to switch to league-approved messages.
Anyway. Somewhere in the NFL’s offices there is presumably a spreadsheet of uniform violations, and somewhere on one row of it there is a girl’s name, and next to it a dollar amount, and next to that, presumably, a column marked paid. The money was never really the point. The name was. And the name kept getting said, which is one way to measure whether the fine worked.