Dec. 8
Players across league wear “I Can’t Breathe” shirts
When Derrick Rose took the floor for the Chicago Bulls’ game against the Golden State Warriors on Dec. 6, 2014, he eschewed his traditional warm-up shirt for a black T-shirt with three words written in bold, white letters:
“I Can’t Breathe”
Those were the last words of Eric Garner, who died in July 2014 after a New York City police officer placed him in a choke hold. One week before Rose’s on-court statement, a grand jury had declined to bring charges against the officer.
“When I put it on and walked out there, I knew that it was gonna be something, because all my teammates, they were just shook,” Rose wrote in his 2019 autobiography. “It wasn’t about me, but you could tell they were thinking something different. Would people be upset? Because I wasn’t someone who talked much, wasn’t someone always speaking up, I think that made it louder. But that’s what I mean. Stuff like that. Something simple. Something I cared about. And it’s helping others. That’s how I wanted to express it.”
In that moment, the soft-spoken Rose sparked a movement. In the days that followed, LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Damian Lillard and Kobe Bryant were among the players who donned “I Can’t Breathe” shirts.
Six years later, those words resonated again after the killing of George Floyd, who said “I can’t breathe” as a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for approximately eight minutes.
“I’m from that same kind of neighborhood where that man got killed,” Rose wrote of Garner in 2019. “That looks like every storefront in my neighborhood. I easily could have seen that, been there. And what could I have done with the police? Like, ‘Whoa, whoa, you got him in a chokehold! You about to kill him.’” — ERIC WOODYARD
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