Quandre Diggs taking action, calling out owners, part of Seahawks’ Black Lives Matter push
Quandre Diggs has had it with slogans, calls and talk.
He wants action to fix racial inequality and police brutality in America. And he wants NFL team owners to act.
“I want the owners to get on board with us and understand our message,” Diggs said Friday.
“I mean, I’m tired of them and I’m tired of teams kind of putting out PR statements.
“Let’s put some action in the words, you know what I mean? Let’s get it out in these neighborhoods. Let’s try to get these cops and people better training. If these guys are professionals, then they need to do professional work. I just don’t think that’s the thing.
“You get these guys—I’m not saying every cop—but you get a lot of guys that were kind of, you know what I mean, not ‘The Man’ in high school. Then you give him a badge, you give some handcuffs, you give him a gun, and, you know what I mean, they get a little bravery.
“So I think we just need to do better training. I think at the end of the day, to get this world back where it needs to be and even in a better place than it was we’ve got to get better training.
“We’ve all got to use our voices to be better people.”
Seattle’s 27-year-old standout safety is taking unprecedented action to forge change.
“This is the first year I’m actually registered to vote myself,” Diggs said. “I will have to do an absentee ballot.”
Diggs isn’t waiting around to mail his ballot, not with widespread concern across the country that recent funding and productivity reductions in the United States Postal Service ordered by the Trump Administration will jeopardize mail-in balloting for the presidential election Nov. 3.
“I’m actually getting that printed out today,” he said of his absentee ballot, “so I can ship mine and get mine out early.”
Voting, that’s one individual action Seahawks players are discussing to push the Black Lives Matter movement from awareness to changes, to results in this country.
Is boycotting an NFL game another?
Boycotts of NFL games?
Earlier Friday, quarterback Russell Wilson told KIRO-AM radio if the Seahawks had a game this week they would not have played it.
“I think the world is truly seeing the ugliness of society, at times,” Wilson said. “I think what’s truly disappointing is just know that we, as athletes, try to make a difference, and sometimes people don’t want to listen and don’t want to recognize that could have been us. That could be us. I think that’s a real reality.
“So I think for us, as a team, for the Seahawks, we are definitely discussing, what do we do next? How do we make a change? How do we cause movement and how do we make a difference? We are in the midst of all that right now.
“We don’t have weeks, and we don’t have months, we don’t have years to change it. We’ve got to all do it together—and we’ve got to do it now. We need change now. We need people to make a difference now.”
I asked Diggs how possible it is Seahawks players don’t take the field for a game this season? Will they follow the boycott the Milwaukee Bucks did Wednesday to halt the NBA playoffs and start a national wave across all sports scheduled to play this past week?
“I think anything’s possible,” Diggs said, using the same words coach Pete Carroll used to the same question on Wednesday.
“I think Pete has said it: this is a protest year.”
Following a players day off Thursday the Seahawks did take the field for the 13th practice of training camp Friday, as scheduled.
Asked if Seattle’s players considered not practicing Friday, as a handful of NFL teams did not, Diggs said: “That’s something that we will keep in house.”
Wilson, Carroll, cornerback Shaquill Griffin, defensive coordinator Ken Norton Jr. and Diggs have described how intensely the Seahawks players and coaches have been talking about these issues—even before a white police officer in Wisconsin shot black man Jacob Blake in the back seven times in front of his family last weekend. The Seahawks are discussing how to be unified, and what action to take at games beginning with the opener in two weeks, to show their unity and resolve in seeking actionable change.
“Anything that we come together collectively as a team? Then we’ll figure that out,” Diggs said. “But until then, that will be kept in-house.
“That’s not something we will go around telling people. That’s beside the point. The point is to shed light on what is going on around the world. And that’s our main thing. It’s not trying to get attention for ourselves, or try to bring attention to ourselves to make us look popular or something like that. ...
“It’s to shed light for the people who are being in the crossfire of these policemen.”
Make owners listen
This week was an uh-oh moment for NFL owners.
The league has spent millions to get COVID-19 protocols and daily virus testing in place. Each team has planes chartered and at the ready every day to take nasal-swab samples from players, coaches and staff taken each morning at team facilities to testing laboratories the NFL has contracted on the east and west coasts. Pilots fly those planes full of samples down to the labs for immediate testing. Teams get the results within about 12-18 hours of testing. Then Pilots fly those planes back to team cities to await the next day’s tests samples.
They’ve done this each day for an entire month, with a surprisingly low positive rate across the league of less than 1%. They are going to do daily testing into next month, too. It’s to ensure the league can safely, prudently start its season on time in two weeks.
More to the point, it’s to ensure teams collect the television money for games to offset the estimated $5 billion or more clubs will lose in in-stadium revenue because the coronavirus pandemic is prohibiting fans from attending games in two-thirds of NFL cities right now.
To do all that, and then the players not take the field for the games?
That would sure as money is green get the attention of NFL owners.
The Seahawks and NFL players are seeking to get only our nation’s leaders to act but owners to, as well. Some team owners contribute significantly to political campaigns.
In 2018, months before his death, Seahawks owner Paul Allen gave $100,000 in an effort to help Republicans keep a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Before that, Allen donated to Democratic campaigns, too.
His sister, Jody Allen, is now the chair of Seahawks.
“Of course you want them to act,” Diggs said of team owners.
Then he made a point that sheds more like on why NFL players have been angered by team owners, mostly white billionaires, and their indifference about the Black Lives Matter movement. This player anger dates to the tone deafness owners and the league showed when Colin Kaepernick was kneeling during national anthems four years ago.
“I like the NBA is more of a partnership. The players and (commissioner) Adam Silver and those guys are more partners than anything,” Diggs said. “And I think with us, we’re not partners with commissioner (Roger) Goodell or anybody in those front offices, you know?
“They look at us as, it’s a working relationship. It is what it is. We are the players. They are the owners. And that’s what it is.
“So, until we can get on those type of basis with the owners and with Roger Goodell and things like that, then I don’t know how much is going to change.
“But we are going to continue to push for that.”
Push hard, he promises.
‘More than entertainers’
Diggs summarized the feelings he and his teammates have shared in meetings and talks this week, and in the months since Black man George Floyd died after a white police officer in Minneapolis pressed his knee into the back of Floyd’s neck into street pavement for several minutes. That was in May.
“At some point at athletes, as entertainers, it’s our job to let people know we are more than entertainers. We are more than athletes. We have families outside of this,” Diggs, a native of Houston, said.
“My whole family is Black. So at the end of the day I’m scared for them, every day, you know what I mean? I call my mom every day. No matter if I’m a multimillionaire athlete or not, she worries about me each and every day.”
Diggs says he has supreme respect for the Bucks and the NBA players for shutting down their playoffs, for Major League Baseball players, WNBA players, NHL and MLS players for not playing games this past week in the name of Black Lives Matter.
“As a league, as an NFL, we’ve got to come together and figure out what our message is going to be, and just continue to keep the voices going and keep the movement going—and don’t let our voices not be heard. ...
“For sure it’s frustrating,” he said. “We had the George Floyd situation three months ago. You would think, with all the attention that it got and all the attention that it continues to get—and also the Breonna Taylor situation (a Black woman killed in her home by police in Louisville)—you would think that people and cops would have the decency to understand that, ‘Hey, the light’s shining on me a little brighter. Maybe I’ll just stay undercover a little bit,’ or, ‘Maybe I’ll just do my job a better way.’
“You would think that people would get the message.
“But I guess that’s not how it’s working in the world. ...You can say all you want about a couple bad apples. But, like Chris Rock said, it’s a couple bad apples. But if we had a couple bad pilots then they’d be running into freakin’ mountains each week.
“That’s kind of what I’m getting at. And that’s kind of what we’re all sick of.”
This story was originally published August 28, 2020 at 5:56 PM.
