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Steve Kerr awoke last May 24 with the typical worries of an NBA coach in the midst of the playoffs.

His Warriors held a three-games-to-nothing lead over the Mavericks in the Western Conference finals. A trip back to the Finals was in sight. But Stephen Curry had been pressed into heavy minutes to get there. They’d just lost a key defender to injury. And the Mavericks, powered by the precocious Luka Dončić, were young, feisty and relentless.

The only thing on Kerr’s mind, as he moved through his morning routine, was how to squeeze out one more win. Game 4 was that night, in Dallas.

Then came the phone call. The voice on the other end was trembling, anguished, angry. Kerr had been friends with Mike McBride, an Oakland-based pastor and community activist, for years. He’d never heard him like this.

“He was in tears, and he was just—he just sounded broken,” Kerr recalls.

Scott Strazzante/San Francisco Chronicle/AP

There had been a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, about 350 miles from where the Warriors and Mavericks would play that night. An 18-year-old, armed with a semiautomatic rifle, had entered an elementary school and gunned down several children and teachers.

McBride, the executive director of Live Free USA, had spent years working to curb gun violence. In Kerr, he had found a friend and ally with a potent platform. They’d collaborated frequently on community events around the Bay Area, shared their personal stories and experiences. Kerr had come to know McBride as a strong and passionate leader. Now he sounded gutted.

“It was so heartbreaking to hear him talk about what had happened,” Kerr says. “And I think, like everybody, all I could think of was those poor kids, fourth-grade kids. My God, the terror for them. And then the just, devastation, for the families. It’s just so awful.”

So Kerr made another call, this one to Jessica Gerber—a senior adviser for Brady: United Against Gun Violence—for some advice. What came next was probably the single most powerful moment of Kerr’s four decades in the public spotlight.

“I’m not going to talk about basketball,” Kerr told the assembled media at his pregame press conference that evening. “Any basketball questions don’t matter. Since we left shootaround, 14 children were killed 400 miles from here, and a teacher. In the last 10 days, we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo. We’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California. Now, we have children murdered at school. When are we going to do something! I’m tired; I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there. I’m tired of the moments of silence. Enough!”

For two and a half minutes, Kerr railed and pleaded, his hands shaking, his voice quivering, his eyes watering. He called out the 50 Republican senators who were blocking a vote on background-check legislation. He pounded the table so hard that the microphone with the NBA logo shook. He left without taking questions.

Within minutes, Kerr’s outrage had gone viral across social media and the websites of every major news outlet. The next day, he received phone calls from Vice President Kamala Harris (a Bay Area native and Warriors fan), California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other elected officials, all offering gratitude and support.

Gun violence has long been a personal issue for Kerr, whose father, Malcolm, was assassinated in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1984, when Steve was just an 18-year-old freshman at Arizona. Now 57, Kerr long ago grew comfortable using his platform to champion political causes and social justice. But the Uvalde moment was different—raw, emotional, unplanned, unscripted, bordering on rage. Which is what made it so uniquely impactful.

“Steve Kerr’s speech was so heartfelt and so good that, by itself, it made a difference,” says Sen. Chris Murphy (D, Conn.), a leading advocate for stronger gun laws. “I mean, there were a lot of sports fans that maybe weren’t plugged into the debate on gun violence, who watched that speech and had their minds changed.”

Members of the Warriors met with White House officials to discuss gun laws.

Courtesy of Warriors

Flash forward to Jan. 17, and Kerr is again speaking passionately on gun violence—only now he’s in a suit and tie, seated at a table in the Map Room at the White House. His audience includes three top advisers to President Biden: Keisha Lance Bottoms, Julie Rodriguez and Stefanie Feldman. The 45-minute discussion also includes Warriors players Klay Thompson and Moses Moody, along with James Cadogan of the NBA’s Social Justice Coalition.

The Warriors were visiting the White House that afternoon for the same reason sports teams usually do: to celebrate their recent championship, trade a few quips with the president and vice president and pose for photos. It’s a tradition that goes back decades and it has nearly always followed the same anodyne script.

But these are different times, and these Warriors—from Kerr to Curry to Draymond Green—are a different team, one that unabashedly broadcasts its political views, on everything from gun violence to presidential politics. Indeed, they eschewed the White House visits altogether after their 2017 and ’18 championships, in a direct rebuke of then President Donald Trump.

The Raptors, who won the NBA title in 2019, also preemptively rejected the possibility of a White House visit. The Bucks, who won the title in July ’21, resumed the custom after Biden and Harris were elected the previous year. (The Lakers didn’t visit the White House following their championship in ’20 due to scheduling conflicts and COVID-19 protocols.)

But the Warriors’ recent visit marks an evolutionary shift—the scripted celebration now doubling as a policy summit. The roundtable on gun violence was conceived by White House staff and pitched to the Warriors, who eagerly accepted the invitation.

When it came time for the formal celebration, in the White House’s ornate East Room, both Biden and Harris praised the Warriors for their activism.

“Look at what this team does,” Biden said, “speaking out against racism, standing up for equality … encouraging people to vote, empowering children and their families to eat healthy, learn and play in safe places, rallying the country against gun violence.”

President Biden praised the Warriors not only for their championship run, but for their activism.

Susan Walsh/AP

Biden thanked Kerr specifically and mentioned the loss of his father to gun violence, a gesture Kerr later called “incredibly flattering.”

“I mean, that’s one you write down and keep in the family history,” Kerr said afterward. “It was a pretty special moment.”

The earlier roundtable was part informational meeting, part lobbying opportunity. White House officials detailed the administration’s efforts, including executive actions aimed at curtailing the proliferation of so-called “ghost guns.” Thompson and Moody discussed the community work they’ve done on gun issues. (Thompson in the Bay Area, Moody in his hometown of Little Rock, Ark.) And they all discussed the role that athletes—and coaches—can play in the political arena.

For Kerr, that calling came later in life. Though his father’s death had shaped his worldview in many ways, it wasn’t until around 2016 that he began to speak out on gun violence and gun policy.

“Anytime we, my family and I, would read a story about somebody dying by gun violence, we knew exactly what the family was feeling, how devastating it was,” Kerr says.

The seemingly constant wave of mass shootings, in schools and grocery stores, churches and movie theaters, became almost unbearable.

“We had had all these moments of silence at games, like five of them in one season,” Kerr says. “It was insane. A moment of silence for the Pulse nightclub, a moment of silence for this, for that, one after another. And it’s like, This is all we can do? Is just have a moment of silence? I mean, it’s the right thing to do. But that’s all? Like, how about doing something? And that’s when I really started to become more active.”

By then, Kerr had become a championship coach, providing a broader pulpit and a greater measure of gravitas than he’d perhaps had during his years as a broadcaster, team executive and player.

“And seeing a lack of action by our government was so disgusting and disheartening,” he says. “I think that’s when I really decided to speak up and say something, and maybe that’s the first time I really felt like I had the platform to do so.”

Meanwhile, NBA players were growing increasingly engaged on the political stage, in part catalyzed by the 2016 election of Trump, whose candidacy was vocally opposed by Curry and LeBron James. Then came the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the Black Lives Matter movement in ’20. That summer, after another police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wis., NBA players staged a wildcat strike that shut down the league for three days.

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