Tennis breaks tournament after protests

First, the Milwaukee Bucks basketball players refused to play their NBA game.

The ladies' WNBA soon followed and then the protests against racism and police abuse poured in.

From baseball to football and on to American football. And to tennis.

The ongoing WTA and ATP tournament in New York will, in solidarity with the protests on Thursday, put down the rackets.

"As a sport, tennis takes a collective stand against inequality based on skin color and social injustices that have flared up again in the United States," the WTA and ATP tours wrote in a joint statement with the American Tennis Association. The game will be played on Friday.

The message comes a few hours after star Naomi Osaka took to Twitter to say that she does not intend to play her semifinal.

“More than I am an athlete, I am a black woman. And as a black woman, I feel that there are much more important things that require immediate attention than seeing me play tennis ", writes world champion Naomi Osaka on Twitter.

Osaka, who competes for Japan, has a Haitian-Japanese background but has lived in the United States since she was a little girl.

The tennis star won her quarterfinal against Anett Kontaveit in the WTA tournament in New York on Wednesday and announced in the evening that there would be no semifinal for her.

"I do not expect anything drastic to happen just because I do not play tennis, but if I can start a conversation in a mainly white sport, I think it is a step in the right direction," she writes and continues:

"I feel bad to see the police's continued genocide of black people. I get exhausted from seeing new hashtags every other day and I am extremely tired of hearing the same conversation over and over again. When does it end? ”

The boycott is a protest against the weekend shooting of 29-year-old black American Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blake was shot by police nearby but survived. Information has claimed that he is paralyzed from the waist down.

The players of the baseball team Milwaukee Brewers also decided to boycott their planned MLB match against Cincinnati on Wednesday.

-Of course, what happened in Kenosha has affected us, it comes so close. We have worn shirts with the message 'Justice. Equality. Now'. And we have made statements. But sometimes action must speak louder than words, and today we were offered a unique opportunity to use our platform to actually turn words into action, says Brewers player Ryan Braun.

Two more MLB matches were canceled shortly thereafter. The football MLS then canceled five of Wednesday's six games and several NFL teams canceled their training sessions to let the players decide for themselves whether they wanted to manifest or not.