'This is Bigger Than Basketball'

Enes Kanter Freedom on China, the NBA, and free speech

- By Noor Greene

Enes Kanter Freedom knows firsthand how important it is that citizens be allowed to criticize their governments.

Born in Zurich, the basketball player spent most of his young life in Turkey-a place to which he can no longer safely return. Freedom, who now lives in the U.S. and has played for a decade in the NBA, made a name for himself as an outspoken critic of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government. His family has been targeted for retribution, and Freedom can no longer safely contact them.

But he hasn't slowed his roll, choosing to criticize the basketball world's close ties with the Chinese Communist Party, which carries out some of today's most heinous atrocities: interning Uyghur ethnic minorities in prison camps, stripping Hong Kongers of their most fundamental civil liberties, surveilling political dissidents, and censoring speech. But China is filled with basketball fans who give the NBA a lot of money and full of factories, possibly even those using forced Uyghur labor, where athletic companies like Nike produce their shoes.

When Freedom was growing up in Van and Ankara, it was a tough sell getting his family to support his basketball dreams. "I want you to be a good student before being a good basketball player," his dad told him. His dad, a scientist, and his mom, a nurse, were all about education. "They wanted me to go to school, then focus on nothing else, just studying all day until I made my first check. After that, they're like, 'OK.

You're playing basketball from now on." He moved to the U.S. in 2009 to attend a California prep school for one year before signing with the University of Kentucky, where he studied for a short time before the Utah Jazz drafted him in 2011.