Danny Ainge asked Jaylen Brown: How can you say that sports are a mechanism for control?
Jaylen Brown: I was in Boston, and I’m thinking I’m talking to a normal beat writer. It happened to be this big writer for The Guardian. And this dude put me on the cover of The Guardian newspaper saying, ‘Jaylen Brown says sports is a mechanism for control.
’ That’s when I was 19 years old. Then that went viral. That’s when I got invited to Harvard to go speak about it.
So Harvard invited me, based on that article in The Guardian, to come speak about it. That’s why I became the youngest Harvard lecturer. I was talking about how sports is a mechanism for control, because that became controversial.
Like, how could this 19-year-old player say sports is a mechanism for control when sports — the NBA — just helped him recreate generational wealth? He just changed his whole family’s life through sport. How could he criticize it, right?
So I got a lot of pushback, even from my organization. Danny Ainge came and talked to me like, ‘What is this? ’ Of course, you’re 19 years old.