Major League Baseball has seen several of its players come under fire in recent weeks, when Josh Hader, Sean Newcomb, and Trea Turner's old racist and anti-gay tweets resurfaced to the scrutiny of fans in social media.
Yet the NBA is not exempt from this phenomenon of investigative cyber-reporting, as Milwaukee Bucks rookie Donte DiVincenzo faced that same criticism even before he was a first-round prospect.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was ahead of the curve here, asking now-second-year point guard Dennis Smith Jr. to go over his Twitter history and do some much-needed tweet scrubbing before penning a deal with the organization in 2017, according to Rick Maese of The Washington Post.
“One of the first things after we drafted Dennis, and I’m talking to him on the phone, I’m like, ‘Dude, I went through your Twitter account. It’s time to get on there and delete,’” said Cuban during a Summer League broadcast last year. “And so he went through it. And to his credit, they were gone. He had a lot of stupid stuff on there.”
DiVincenzo had anti-gay tweets which dated back to his time as a high schooler in Delaware. Even if they were from more than four years ago, when he was only 16 years old, the media (and the fans) will hold a player accountable for his views, no matter whether he was signed to a team or not.
While Cuban managed to dodge the bullet of dealing with it through the North Carolina native, the larger question is how athletes (and people overall) are growing up with the mindset that those ideas are acceptable in today's progressive society.
Taking to Twitter to express them further reenforces their level of comfort among friends and family to daresay those things, and have those views — even as kids. At some point, the stupidity pass expires, and now that it has, it's not a matter of going back and deleting old tweets, but scrubbing the mindset that tweeted them in the first place.
Instead of chastising players for their previous views, force them to be accountable and prove to the community that the likes of Smith and DiVincenzo (among other professional athletes of other leagues) that they no longer have that mindset, and are building toward a less bigoted world.
After all, actions have always spoken louder than words.
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