Pro sports has become woke sports. And that's a problem, not just for athletics, but for all of us.

Sport has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It is more powerful than

governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.

Nelson Mandela spoke those words. The Nobel Peace Prize recipient understood the power of sports

to bring disparate people together. There is no better example of this than the famous victory

of South Africa's mixed race team in the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

Mandela's presentation of the Winter Strophy to team captain Francois Pinar stands as an iconic

symbol of unity in post-apartheid South Africa. Sports have served as a powerful racial

unifier in America as well. This is not new. It goes back decades. In 1936, the great black

sprinter and long jumper Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics.

In 1938, the great black boxer Joe Lewis scored a first round knockout over German heavyweight

Max Melling. The Owens and Lewis victories punctured Hitler's Aryan superiority myth,

unified black and white Americans in pride and celebration, and established Owens and Lewis

as America's first black national heroes. Jesse Owens and Joe Lewis laid the foundation

for Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager, Branch Ricky's partnership with Black Baseball legend,

Jackie Robinson, to integrate Major League Baseball in the late 1940s. That in turn inspired

Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s. Barack Obama

credited Robinson for his political rise. There's the direct line between Jackie Robinson and me

standing here, said America's first black president. Obama saw what Mandela saw, how sports transcends

all barriers. When you see this group of folks of different shades coming from different communities

and then playing as one team and celebrating each other and being joyous in that, that tells us

something about America. Sports, in other words, is the ultimate equalizer. In competition,

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