Enes Kanter Freedom, a former NBA player who accused LeBron James of being a dictator, has written a book entitled ‘In the Name of Freedom: A Political Dissident’s Struggle for Human Rights in the NBA and Around the World’.
Hoopshype has published an excerpt from Kanter’s book, which can be purchased from October 7.
The former Fenerbahce, Utah Jazz, Oklahoma City Thunder, New York Knicks, Portland Trail Blazers and Boston Celtics player has always been critical of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule and from Turkey they have gone so far as to point to him as a member of a terrorist organization calling for his extradition and subsequent arrest.
The Turkish government is obsessed with me. I speak out against Erdogan and I don’t feel safe. I’m getting death threats, hundreds
“The Turkish government is obsessed with me. I speak out against Erdogan and I don’t feel safe. I’m getting death threats, hundreds. But I won’t stop being outspoken and I want everyone to know what’s going on in Turkey,” said Kanter, who hasn’t played in the NBA since 2022 and is currently 33 years old, in 2019.
Why is Enes Kanter the Undertaker of the NBA?
In 2009, when he was shining at the University of Kentucky, Enes Kanter admitted that “after my basketball career, I want to be a professional wrestler in WWE” and confessed to being a big fan of ‘The Undertaker’: “I started watching The Undertaker four or five years ago and right now I play like him on the court. His nickname is amazing.”
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“My friends were burning American flags and breaking crosses. “Guys, what are you doing?”
In his book, Enes Kanter Freedom writes that “my career as a human rights activist, and the sacrifices that come with it, did not begin with my time in the NBA. It all started with a promise I made to my mother, Gulsum, when I was nine years old.”
He describes Erdogan’s Islamist regime as something akin to a dictatorship.
Enes Kanter Freedom was born in Switzerland in 1992 and raised in Van, a city in the far east of Turkey, an hour’s drive from the border with Iran.
“My first direct experience of how hateful people can be was when I was nine years old. One day I ran down the stairs of our building to play with my friends. We were the typical city kids, always playing in the street and alleys of our neighborhood. When I met my group in the alley, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My friends were burning American flags and breaking crosses. ‘Guys, what are you doing?’ I shouted. One of my friends looked up with a lighter in his hand. ‘What’s so special about that? This is what we see on TV. Americans are evil and Jews are demons.’ Then my friend gave me the lighter and an American flag. ‘Come on, man! Burn it!’ The choice was clear: burn the flag or lose my best friend and expose myself to years of bullying. I threw down the flag and the lighter and ran away, with the taunts of my friends ringing in my ears,” he writes in his book ‘In the Name of Freedom’.
My mother looked me straight in the eye. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. But don’t hate anyone before you meet them.”
The well-known and controversial activist recalls that his mother “looked me straight in the eye. I’m not going to tell you what to do. But don’t hate anyone before you know them”. He continued: “Believe in something and always stand up for it with your head held high. Even if it means sacrificing everything you have”.
“That day, I made a promise to my mother: ‘I promise you: I will not hate anyone before I meet them.’ This promise defines my relationship with others and motivates me to speak out against injustice to this day,” he said.
“In addition to the hatred, public schools in Turkey were terrible for another reason: we students were beaten”
Enes Kanter Freedom recalls that “my childhood coincided with the rise of Erdogan, and over time his campaign and supporters became increasingly aggressive, incorporating Islamist and anti-American political messages into their propaganda.”
“In addition to the hatred, public schools in Turkey were terrible for another reason: students were beaten if they misbehaved. In every classroom there was a stick that teachers used to hit you on the hand whenever they felt like it. Although I was one of the best students academically and well behaved, one day one of the teachers beat me brutally several times. My parents couldn’t believe the bruises they saw on my hands when I got home,” he said.
Enes Kanter Freedom: “When I was 10 years old my father told me: ‘If you can beat me, I’ll let you play basketball'”
Enes Kanter Freedom reveals in his book “although I was tall, basketball was not my first love; soccer was. Like everywhere else in the world except the United States, Turkey is a big soccer country, and I got hooked at a very young age. The problem for me was that because I was always taller than the other kids, I was always forced to play goalkeeper, and I hated it. Plus, I was too slow to be any good. So I decided to take advantage of my height and started playing basketball around the age of 9 or 10.”
I beat my father fair and square. He kept his promise and said, “I respect your dedication and hard work. I’ll let you do it.”
“One day, when I was 10 years old, my father said to me, ‘If you can beat me one-on-one, I’ll let you play.’ For the next two months, I practiced tirelessly, preparing for the day I would challenge my father. Then, one Saturday, we walked to my school’s basketball hoop and started playing. I beat him fair and square. He kept his promise and said to me: ‘I respect your dedication and hard work. I’ll let you do it. But you have to promise me one thing: no matter what happens, you have to be a good student before you are a good player. School comes first.’ It seemed fair to me,” he recalls of his basketball beginnings.
“With my physical education teacher Fatih Karali as my coach, my game began to flourish. He taught me the fundamentals and was the first person to tell me that one day I could play in the NBA. His confidence translated into mine. I applied a lot of what he taught me at every step of my career, and we are still friends,” he said.
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