96 TIME December 21/December 28, 2020
every one to get on board,” says 11-time WNBA all-star
Sue Bird, who also won a fourth career league title
this season and who came up with the idea of wear-
ing VOTE WARNOCK T-shirts. Hamilton, who won a
record-tying seventh F1 championship this season,
points to James as a ballast. “When I saw across the
pond that another top athlete was also fi ghting for
similar causes,” Hamilton tells TIME, “I knew, O.K.,
I’m not alone here.”
ON THE EVENING of Aug. 26, hours after the Bucks
refused to take the court , NBA players and coaches
gathered in a ballroom of Disney World’s Coronado
Springs Resort to fi gure out next steps. COVID-19
had shut down the NBA season in March, and the
league had restarted in late July in an Orlando bubble
that included daily testing and other safety measures.
The room was on edge. Players were still processing
the horror of what had happened in Kenosha.
James was frustrated. No one, in his mind, was
making a compelling case for returning to the fl oor.
With the rest of the Lakers, he walked out of the
meeting before it ended. Michele Roberts, executive
director of the National Basketball Players Associa-
tion, thought he might also leave the bubble—and
take the rest of the league with him. “If he had said,
‘What we are doing is too important, and screw the
championship,’ I think that would have had a lot of
guys saying, ‘Wow, you know, he’s about to give up
another f-cking ring, so maybe I should check my-
self and wonder whether this basketball stuff is really
that important,’ ” she says. “I don’t think we would
have played.”
James says he was “very close” to leaving; that
night he told his wife and family there was a strong
possibility he was headed home. “We were still with
our brothers in solidarity, meaning the Milwaukee
Bucks,” he says. “It was something that hit home in
their backyard. We all understood that. But if we’re
going to move forward, what is our plan? At that very
moment, I didn’t believe that we, as a collective group
of players, had a plan at all. We had taken the stand
to sit out. But how are we going to make a diff erence
going forward?”
A conversation between James, players’ union
president Chris Paul, a few other key players and
Barack Obama helped provide clarity. The former
President’s advice: Use your leverage. The next day,
James addressed the NBA owners, their faces beamed
in on a screen. “He knows how to apply pressure,”
says Lakers owner Jeanie Buss, who on Dec. 3 signed
her star player to a two-year, $85 million contract ex-
tension. James asked the assembled billionaires to
join the players in helping more people vote. “ LeBron
was a calming voice but one that I didn’t view as op-
positional,” says NBA commissioner Adam Silver. “I
viewed it as ‘All right, everyone, we have certain ce-
lebrity and reach that we bring to the table; team
owners obviously have enormous resources and their
own network of associations. Working together, we
can accomplish even more.’ ”
“There was no other player in that room who could
have done that,” says Armond Hill, a veteran NBA
assistant coach who helped spark voter-registration
eff orts among the players, one marker of rising
political awareness. More than 95% of players wound
up registering for the 2020 election, while just 22%
voted in 2016, according to the NBA union.
“I just wanted to reassure that they were giving
us their word,” says James, “and I was going to give
them our word that we would continue to play on
with the season, as long as we had action going on
off the fl oor at the same time.”
Owners pledged to work with local election offi -
cials to convert arenas into polling places, establish
a social-justice coalition with players and coaches,
and provide some playoff advertising space to pro-
mote civic engagement. After Obama appeared as
a virtual fan during the broadcast of Game 1 of the
NBA Finals on Sept. 30 and thanked a group of fi rst-
time poll workers , More Than a Vote’s registrations
more than doubled—from 12,439 to 26,398—over
the next fi ve days.
Nadia Lee, a recent law-school grad living in the
Atlanta area, signed on after a tweet from James. She
also recruited about 10 friends to staff precincts.
From 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Nov. 3, she helped people
fi ll out provisional ballots at a school in Georgia’s
DeKalb County. “I did not know I could be a poll
worker,” says Lee, “until LeBron told me.”
“In the Black community, we always hear the no-
tion of ‘We want to see change,’” says James. “But we
rarely actually go out and try to help and call for ac-
tion, actually do it. So I can say that my Black people
and my Black communities, they actually went out
and said not only did they want change, they actu-
ally went out and did it.”
Christopher Towler, founder of the Black Voter
Project, believes that James’ work predominantly af-
fected Black voters and had a real eff ect on turnout.
“He infl uenced the outcome of the election,” says
Towler, an assistant professor of political science at
California State University, Sacramento. “The jury
is still out on if he tipped it.”JAMES’ WORK with More Than a Vote marks another
milestone in his personal evolution. “You want to
keep athletics and politics separate,” James said back
in June 2008. He did support Obama that year, but
it was in 2012, when James posted a picture of him-
self and his Miami Heat teammates in hooded sweat-
shirts in honor of Trayvon Martin, that he began to
more publicly fuse the two. In 2014, James wore an
I CAN’T BREATHE warm-up shirt before a game in
Brooklyn after a New York City grand jury declined
to indict an offi cer who had applied a choke hold to2020 Athlete of the Year