THE NEW YORK TIMES SPORTSTUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2019 0 N + B11Baseball 4:00 p.m. A.L.D.S., Houston at Tampa Bay FS1
Basketball / N.B.A. 6:00 a.m. Houston vs. Toronto NBA TV
Preseason 8:00 p.m. Dallas at Oklahoma City ESPN
10:30 p.m. Denver at Portland ESPN
Gymnastics 8:30 a.m. F.I.G. World Championships NBCSN
Hockey / N.H.L. 7:00 p.m. Edmonton at Islanders MSG+
8:00 p.m. San Jose at Nashville NBCSN
Tennis 6:30 a.m. Shanghai Masters, men’s early rounds TENNIS
11:00 p.m. Shanghai Masters, men’s early rounds;
Tianjin Open, women’s early rounds TENNISTV Highlights
HOME
AWAYWED
10/9SUN
10/13SAT
10/12TUE
10/8FRI
10/11MON
10/14THU
10/10This Week in Shenzhen, China
KNICKS
(PRESEASON)WASHINGTON
7:30 p.m.
MSG
NETS
(PRESEASON)LAKERS**
7:30 a.m.
NBA TVLAKERS**
7:30 a.m.
ESPN2DEVILSPHILADELPHIA
7:30 p.m.
NBCSNEDMONTON
7 p.m.
MSG+BOSTON
7 p.m.
MSGFLORIDA
1 p.m.
MSGISLANDERSEDMONTON
7 p.m.
MSG+CAROLINA
7:30 p.m.
MSG+FLORIDA
7 p.m.
MSG+ST. LOUIS
1 p.m.
MSG+RANGERSEDMONTON
1 p.m.
MSG, MSG+YANKEES
(A.L.C.S.)T.B.D.PHILADELPHIA
RED BULLS 3 P.M. OCT. 20 FS1NEW ENGLAND
GIANTS 8:20 P.M. THURSDAY FOX/NFLDALLAS
JETS 4:25 P.M. SUNDAY CBST.B.D.
N.Y.C.F.C. 7 P.M. OCT. 23 FS1CALENDAR
PRO BASKETBALL COLLEGE FOOTBALL
“That should cross people’s
minds,” Bailey Kowalski, a recent
Michigan State graduate who
has accused three basketball
players of sexually assaulting
her as a freshman, said in a
phone interview. “People need to
feel uncomfortable. You shouldn’t
be able to watch these teams
play against each other and not
have it come up at least once.”
Kowalski, who spoke publicly
for the first time in April about
the incident, is suing Michigan
State, whose Title IX investiga-
tion of her case found the three
players not guilty of assaulting
her. Two players said they had
consensual sex with Kowalski,
and she misidentified the third
player.
Kowalski, who is now studying
for a master’s degree in veteri-
nary biomedical science at a
small university, spoke out be-
cause she did not see Michigan
State, whose president and ath-letic director were swept out
during the Nassar case, doing
enough to help sexual assault
victims. When she arrived at
Michigan State, she had no idea
what a Title IX complaint was.
“My first day here,” Kowalski
said of her graduate school,
“they told me where the office
is.”
Last Tuesday, the football
staffer who filed the wrongful
termination suit against Michi-
gan State, Curtis Blackwell,
issued another charge against
the university: that a report it
commissioned into how it han-
dled a sexual assault case involv-
ing three football players was a
whitewash.
Also last Tuesday, Ohio State
adjusted the scope of the Strauss
case. It reported 1,429 instances
of groping and 47 cases of rape in
the last two years related to
Strauss, who died by suicide in
2005.
Among the few victims who
have spoken out publicly is Trent
Petrie, who played volleyball for
two seasons at Ohio State andCOLUMBUS, Ohio — The
bond between the Ohio State
football team and this city ex-
tends beyond the 104,797 fans
who packed the Horseshoe over
the weekend, dressing dutifully
in black to match
the Buckeyes’
made-for-market-
ing alternate jer-
seys.
The connection
extends to the
bars, restaurants and shops in
the Short North neighborhood,
where passers-by greet one
another with “Happy Game Day,”
and to the sea of tailgaters who
range more than a mile from
Ohio Stadium.
So when fireworks boom with
each touchdown and the band
plays the alma mater afterward,
players swaying arm in arm with
their families on the field, it is
easy to forget that this richly
communal experience is kept
humming by the more than
$200 million in revenue that the
athletic department generates
each year.
It also makes it convenient to
overlook the less-than-whole-
some element of Ohio State’s
34-10 victory over Michigan
State: that the sexual abuse
scandals involving Lawrence G.
Nassar, as a team doctor for
U.S.A. Gymnastics and Michigan
State, and Richard Strauss, as a
team doctor at Ohio State, con-
tinue to look like the tip of cultur-
al icebergs at these two universi-
ties.
The accusations of covering up
and looking the other way, of
protecting entrenched interests,
continue to slow drip into the
news cycle.
A former Michigan State foot-
ball staff member last month
accused the head coach, Mark
Dantonio, in a wrongful termina-
tion lawsuit, of disregarding a
player’s criminal history and
then distancing himself from the
recruiting decision when the
player was charged with sexual
assault.
And last year, Ohio State sus-
pended its hugely successful
coach, Urban Meyer, for three
games after he scrubbed his
phone of text messages that
might have further implicated
him for not taking action against
a longtime assistant whose wife
had accused him repeatedly of
domestic violence. Meyer re-
signed as coach after the season,
though he stayed on in Ohio
State’s athletic department.
ESPN, in an examination this
year of Title IX sexual assault
complaints against athletes of
nearly three dozen Power 5
schools for which it had data
from 2012 to 2018, had familiar
universities atop the leader-
board: Ohio State 36, Michigan
State 35.remained there to get his doctor-
ate. Petrie, a sports psychology
professor at the University of
North Texas, said that while he
appreciated the current presi-
dent Michael V. Drake’s apology
for the university’s inaction
during Strauss’s nearly 20 years
of abuse, there needed to be an
accounting of what happened to
ensure it did not happen again.
Ohio State announced in July
that its sexual civility and em-
powerment unit — which was
shut down last summer in the
wake of its own abuses — failed
to report 57 potential felonies to
the police during its three-year
existence.
“I don’t want to see Ohio State
fail,” Petrie said.
Petrie said he felt obligated to
speak out because he preaches
the importance of ending the
culture of silent suffering in
sports, and he noted how the
basketball player Kevin Love
spurred discussion about coping
with mental illness and Serena
Williams did the same for post-
pregnancy depression.
But others do not feel as com-
fortable.
While some of the smallest
victims, the gymnasts whose
testimonies put Nassar in prison
for life, have put their names to
their stories, none of the biggest
have done so yet — in part be-
cause of the spotlight that Buck-
eyes football players live in,
during and after their careers.
“It’s something you’re always
going to have the rest of your life
— there aren’t too many athletes
who say they could step out into
the Shoe,” said a former Ohio
State lineman, one of more than
two dozen football players who
have joined a series of lawsuits
as a John Doe. “Are you, at that
point, going to risk what you’re
doing by rocking the boat?”
The player, who attends games
in Columbus occasionally, said
his experience probably explains
why he is not more involved in
the football program. He has
never met any of the current
coaches or staff.
“That’s definitely in the back
of your mind,” he said. “Whether
that’s the sole reason, I couldn’t
tell you, honestly, but it has
something to do with it. It is
something that will always be
there.”
It is hard to imagine that very
many people who filled the sta-
dium on Saturday night for the
Ohio State-Michigan State game
had any such thoughts. So much
of what they saw in front of them
felt familiar and comforting. Ohio
State is now 6-0 and tied for third
with Georgia in the Associated
Press Top 25 poll.
Even Michigan State walked
away with some consolation:
that despite a flurry of mistakes,
its hardened defense had left
Buckeyes quarterback Justin
Fields bruised enough that he
was relishing a bye week.
Miles and miles away, Kowal-
ski watched the game as she
studied. She has begun to regain
her love of sports, and for the
first time in a while, she said, her
school spirit had been rekindled.
“I’m not just putting on a brave
face,” she said.
That both universities were
having to account for enabling
predators over decades, and
fostering a culture that victims
say put protecting perpetrators
ahead of them, should not have
kept anyone from watching the
game, she said.
But neither should they have
done so with blinders on.
“You don’t have to say any-
thing, you don’t have to talk
about it,” she said. “But it should
cross people’s minds. It should
be uncomfortable — because it
is.”Ohio State hosted Michigan State, another university facing many sexual abuse claims.JAMIE SABAU/GETTY IMAGESFestivities in the Shadow of Scandals
BILLY
WITZ
ON COLLEGE
FOOTBALLBailey Kowalski said,
“People need to feel
uncomfortable.”BRITTANY GREESON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMEShad essentially taken Houston
Rockets products off the platform.
The official Weibo account of the
People’s Daily, the Communist
Party’s official newspaper, quoted
an Alibaba spokesman as saying
that Morey’s Twitter speech had
severely hurt the feelings of the
Chinese people.
Tsai’s foray into professional
American basketball was un-
usual. The vast majority of profes-
sional sports franchises in the
United States are owned by white
men, not people of color. Also, the
acquisition was a rare example of
an American sports team being
acquired with mostly foreign
money — although in this case,
the franchise’s previous owner
was a Russian billionaire. But Tsai
seemed like an ideal fit for the
N.B.A., especially to tap into the
rabid basketball fan base in China.
In October 2017, Tsai paid a little
more than $1 billion to acquire 49
percent of the Brooklyn Nets from
Mikhail D. Prokhorov; the team
had achieved mostly middling re-
sults on the court since he offered
to buy the franchise in 2009. That
deal came on the heels of several
Chinese entrants into the sports
market, such as a $650 million ac-
quisition of the Ironman competi-
tion in 2015 by the Chinese con-
glomerate Dalian Wanda.
Tsai played lacrosse at Yale, and
just months before the announce-
ment of the Nets acquisition he
purchased the San Diego fran-
chise of the National Lacrosse
League. At Yale Law School, Tsai
occasionally played pickup bas-
ketball with a future Supreme
Court justice, Brett M. Kava-
naugh. Both of Tsai’s children also
play basketball.
Earlier this year, Tsai pur-
chased a W.N.B.A. team, the New
York Liberty, from the Madison
Square Garden ownership group.
In April, the Liberty drafted Han
Xu, a 6-foot-9 center, a Chinese na-
tional with enough of a following
in her home country to draw com-
parisons to Yao Ming’s journey to
the United States.
Tsai clearly saw the Nets as an
opportunity to use basketball to
bridge what he saw as a divide be-
tween China and the United
States.
In May, before an exhibition
game between the Liberty and the
Chinese national team, Tsai told
reporters: “I’m steeped in this dis-
cussion and find myself having to
explain China to Americans a lot.
This game, by bringing the na-
tional women’s team from China,
is a platform for the two cultures
to see how each other compete.
You learn a little more about each
other’s cultures. This is absolutely
important. If there were more op-
portunities for me to support
these kinds of changes, I’d do
more of that.”
This summer, the N.B.A. an-
nounced that Tsai had acquired
the entire stake of the Nets, val-
ued at roughly $2.35 billion, a
league record. The league — as
well Tsai — has a great deal riding
on his investment in the Nets. The
team made several expensive
free-agent acquisitions this off-
season, including Kyrie Irving
and Kevin Durant. The Nets’
brass hopes the team will draw
more fans after having some of
the worst attendance numbers in
the league last season.
And if all goes well for the
N.B.A., and this controversy even-
tually blows over, many of those
eyeballs will come from outside
the United States.The owners of major American
sports franchises generally do not
dive headlong into geopolitical
firestorms.
But not many owners have the
background of Joe Tsai, a Taiwan-
ese-born billionaire who recently
became the primary owner of the
Brooklyn Nets. This weekend,
Tsai surprised many when he
weighed in after the N.B.A. re-
sponded to a Twitter post by a
league executive supporting
Hong Kong’s anti-government
protesters, just as a furor over the
tweet reached a fever pitch.
Tsai replied on Sunday night —
roughly 48 hours after Daryl
Morey, the general manager of the
Houston Rockets, had tweeted,
“Fight for freedom, stand with
Hong Kong,” a comment that sent
a shudder through N.B.A. head-
quarters, as well as the league’s
partners at the highest echelons
of Chinese basketball.
Morey’s boss, the Rockets
owner Tilman Fertitta, rebuked
him on Twitter, and Morey deleted
the post. The N.B.A. issued a
statement saying that it was “re-
grettable” that Morey’s tweet had
offended people, but that “the val-
ues of the league support individ-
uals’ educating themselves and
sharing their views on matters im-
portant to them.”
Then, as denunciations of the
N.B.A. rolled in from the Chinese
mainland, American politicians
from both parties rallied behind
Morey, condemning the league for
not standing more firmly behind
the executive.
Tsai — known in China as the
man behind Jack Ma, the founder
of the Chinese e-commerce giant
Alibaba Group — posted a lengthy
open letter on Facebook, referring
to the pro-democracy protesters
in Hong Kong as a “separatist
movement,” an echo of language
from Beijing.
Tsai also criticized Morey, call-
ing his Twitter post “damaging to
the relationship with our fans in
China.”
For months, Tsai has not been
outspoken as protests against the
central government in Beijing
roiled Hong Kong. Demonstrators
have accused the ruling Commu-
nist Party of trying to curtail civil
liberties in the semiautonomous
territory. “Fight for Freedom” and
“Stand with Hong Kong” are often
chanted at the protests.
As a team owner, Tsai, who de-
clined to comment for this article,
has emphasized helping the
N.B.A. make inroads in China,
where basketball has become the
most popular sport. While the let-
ter may have helped his efforts, it
also crystallized the league’s deci-
sion to bow to economic pressure
from its partners in China over
support in the United States for
Morey and the Hong Kong pro-
testers.
“All the Americans on Twitter
are criticizing NBA for not sup-
porting freedom of speech,” Kai
Qu, a tech blogger, wrote on the
online platform WeChat. “On
Weibo,” he wrote, referring to Chi-
na’s equivalent of Twitter, “the
Chinese are all criticizing NBA for
not openly condemning and pun-
ishing. It’s a great cultural clash.
Anybody who was caught in be-
tween will have no way to get out
of it.”
Before this weekend, Tsai, 55,
was not known as a political fig-
ure. Only as a businessman.
In China’s tech industry, Ma is
considered the creative force, and
Tsai the one who turned ideas into
action. Ahead of Alibaba’s initial
public offering in New York in
2014, Tsai worked long hours with
bankers and investors to help pull
off the biggest-ever public offer-
ing.
The offering made Tsai one of
the world’s wealthiest people.
Forbes ranks him as the 147th
richest person with a net worth of
$9.5 billion. The son of a lawyer,
Tsai came to the United States at
the age of 13 to attend the Law-
renceville School, a private board-
ing school in New Jersey. He at-
tended college at Yale and earned
his law degree there, too.
While working at the Swedish
investment company Investor ABin 1999, he went to check out an in-
ternet start-up called Alibaba in
Hangzhou, in eastern China. In-
vestor AB passed on the opportu-
nity to invest, but Tsai decided to
quit his job to join the start-up.
Ma, who worked out of his
apartment with about 20 young
associates, was surprised. Tsai
was making around $700,000 a
year, and Ma said he could afford
to pay him only about $7,000. Tsai
would help bring in key investors,
such as Goldman Sachs and Soft-
Bank, and pave the way for Al-
ibaba to become a conglomerate
that transformed how the Chinese
shop.
Tsai was in charge of Alibaba’s
overall investment and growth
strategy until earlier this year. He
still holds the title of executive
vice chairman. He and Ma, who
retired as executive chairman last
month, are the only lifetime mem-
bers of the Alibaba Partnership, a
group of a few dozen employees
with tremendous power over the
company’s board and leadership,
as well as its bonus pool.
Those who know Tsai describe
him as smart and low key, some-
one who intentionally stayed in
the shadow of the eloquent and
high-profile Ma because he be-
lieved that a company needed
only one spokesman.
In recent years, Tsai gradually
drifted out of Ma’s shadow. He has
appeared at tech conferences and
given talks at Lawrenceville and
Yale, but has rarely spoken about
politics.
By Monday afternoon, Al-
ibaba’s Taobao, a sales website,Nets Owner Steps Into China Fray
By SOPAN DEB
and LI YUANJoe Tsai, a Taiwanese-born ty-
coon, recently bought the Nets.HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMESCriticizing a G.M. for
supporting protests
in Hong Kong.
country.”
So the N.B.A. has arrived at a
woke juncture. Silver on Monday
suggested that in time this
brouhaha would pass. Tsai, the
Nets’ owner and a man who has
become wonderfully wealthy
thanks to his acumen and his
closeness to the Chinese govern-
ment, hinted that redemption
might come slowly for those who
flap their lips too much.
“The N.B.A. is a fan-first
league,” Tsai wrote. “When hun-
dreds of millions of fans are
furious over an issue, the league,
and anyone associated with the
N.B.A., will have to pay atten-
tion.”
The sight this weekend was of
N.B.A. owners nodding eagerly.
Woke finances after all take one
but so far.that the league is on an inevita-
ble march to the top of the sports
mountain. The conductor should
toss the brakes on that train. The
N.F.L. stands as the undisputed
champ of the American sports,
and Major League Baseball
remains in comfortable, if sleepy,
second place.
The N.B.A. has those brilliant
demographics, but further rapid
growth in the United States is not
assured. The league’s genius
instead was to extend its tenta-
cles around the world, the first
American sports league to lay
plausible claim to becoming a
global business. Its stars hail
from many continents, and its
television contracts extend from
Europe to Tencent in China,
which this year signed a five-
year, $1.5 billion deal.
The N.B.A.’s challenge, its
headache, comes encoded in this
dynamic. Social justice market-
ing is grand for the hoop audi-
ence in the United States but
looks far less attractive to an
authoritarian power in Beijing.
“This is the vulnerability for
the N.B.A.,” said Matheson, the
sports economist. “Social justice
and free speech does not sell well
in China.”
That international businesses
go supine when human rights
collide with marketing opportu-
nities is desultory but hardly
surprising. Last year, Mercedes-
Benz cast itself to the ground and
apologized to the Chinese gov-
ernment for having the temerity
to quote the Dalai Lama in a
corporate Instagram post. (It
showed one of its luxury cars by
the ocean alongside this bit of
Dalai wisdom: “Look at situa-
tions from all angles, and you
will become more open.”)
“We know,” Mercedes wrote to
China in contrition, “that this has
hurt the feelings of people of thisOn China,
N.B.A. Picks
Money,
Not Morals
The N.B.A. has long coveted access to Chinese consumers.
Above, a new N.B.A. store that opened in April in Beijing.LI HUISI/CHINA NEWS SERVICE, VIA GETTY IMAGESFrom First Sports PageEmail: [email protected]
CAPITOL HILL
OPPORTUNITIES
The Offices of U.S. Senators and Re-
presentatives have openings in their
DC and DISTRICT offices: Speechwri-
ter; Staff; Constituent Liaison, Press
Sec.; Interns, Counsels; and more. Visit:
JOBS.NYTIMES.COM/Job/105631477Help Wanted 2600