Now, if you haven't caught up on this, there is unnecessary upset today because it's emerged that the entire Breakers team will not wear that little rainbow Pride flag on their jerseys during Pride Round next year because some of the players don't want to.
And it's for religious and cultural reasons, apparently. So because some of the players don't want to, the whole team won't.
Now, as you can imagine, this has absolutely blown up and it has led to accusations of homophobia, accusations of bigotry, accusations of cowardice. And look, I don't know, maybe all those accusations are right, but this didn't have to happen.
They didn't have to have this drama if they hadn't tried to get all of the players to wear a symbol that you can guarantee some players wouldn't want to wear, because statistically that had to be a possibility when you had 150 players rostered on for any particular season.
Now, I don't think that this kind of rainbow-washing helps anyone. There is no need for a random sports league to run any kind of a week, whether it be Pride Week or Indigenous Week, or Women's Menstrual Rights Week. I don't know what kind of week, you just don't need it.
Maybe it sells a few tickets - probably not a lot - but it can backfire and it has backfired in this case. So now instead of looking inclusive to the rainbow community, the NBL looks the complete opposite and has accusations of homophobia coming at it.
Now, you would have thought that everyone under the sun would have learned from the massive rugby league debacle three years ago when those seven Manly players refused to wear the Pride jersey.
And yet, the basketball league decided to start up its own Pride Week the very next year, having learned nothing.
Now, I say this all of the time, and I will say this again - sports needs to stay out of politics. There is no real upside in it and there's way too much downside, and this is a case in point.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.
2 comments:
And the trans-activists are livid.
Politics, ideology and/or race identity should never be forced upon anyone, individually or within a team. These are for each to their own and when they are prescribed as societal necessity when collectively society holds them at arms length is a breach of each individual rights as a sentient being.
I say well done to the Breakers, their management and their owners, long may it continue and hopefully it is contagious to all parts of sport et al.
Heather is right: none of this would be happening if sport stopped trying to run social-engineering theme weeks.
But the Breakers saga is more than a reminder that politics poisons sport. It’s a case study in how a simple, reasonable stance by normal people gets weaponised into a moral failing.
Start with the actual facts — which most commentators studiously avoided:
• The Pride insignia is voluntary under NBL rules.
• The Breakers held a collective discussion and chose, as a group, not to wear the logo.
• Some players had religious and cultural concerns, and the team didn’t want them singled out.
• The team explicitly affirmed they welcome gay players and fans and will participate fully in Pride Round events.
• Another NBL team, Cairns Taipans, has made the same choice before.
• Seven Manly NRL players took the same stance and the world kept spinning.
This is not bigotry.
This is a team exercising the autonomy the league itself wrote into the rules.
Enter the phobia factory.
From that modest position — “we’re not wearing the patch, but we support the round” — we get the usual modern accusations: homophobia, bigotry, cowardice. And if the players had cited cultural reasons alone, we would likely have seen racism or Islamophobia thrown in too. It’s plug-and-play moral condemnation.
Then the Herald poured accelerant on it.
They handed University of Otago professor of sport management Sally Shaw a megaphone to declare the Breakers require “education” — as though the players were wayward children who need a conscience-installation from the university sector. Laughably, a DEI boot camp so to speak.
Shaw is not a neutral observer here; she has spent years as a diversity-in-sport activist-academic and is routinely used by media as the authoritative voice on “homophobia in sport,” so her framing is ideological, not analytical. Shaw identifies as gay, which would be irrelevant except she used the platform to present her worldview as the only correct one, dripping with the kind of moral superiority that now passes for scholarship. The Herald published her lecture without challenge or context, and without any acknowledgement that the Breakers had already made an informed decision.
In one tidy move, editorial judgement collapsed into activism, and the players’ agency was downgraded to ignorance.
Then came the overseas activists.
Outsports website took it even further, simply inventing motives the Breakers never expressed:
“Some players reject gay people.”
“Embracing homophobia.”
“Keeping the gay away.”
None of this appears in the Breakers’ statement. It is pure fabrication — a hostile reading constructed because the facts didn’t suit the predetermined narrative.
This is how the pipeline works:
1. Player autonomy → framed as confusion (Sally Shaw).
2. Media amplification → framed as a social failing (Herald).
3. International activist media → framed as outright prejudice (Outsports).
Three stages, one conclusion:
Anything short of full, enthusiastic participation in symbolic politics is now treated as a moral crime.
The irony writes itself.
The Breakers didn’t refuse to play with gay teammates or opponents.
They didn’t denounce anyone.
They didn’t boycott Pride Round events.
They simply chose not to wear a symbol — in a league where wearing it is voluntary.
But in today’s climate, voluntary participation only runs one way:
You may choose to support the cause —
you may not choose not to.
The Breakers stepped outside the approved lane.
The whole woke machinery launched into action.
—PB
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