Kyrie Irving’s basketball mastery has astounded contemporaries and adversaries alike throughout his illustrious NBA career. But his high profile and controversial pronouncements have also made him subject to greater scrutiny and criticism from the media, and it has seemingly intensified in the past year or so.
Those distracting factors have often obscured Irving’s altruism as his latest act of philanthropy was very slow to leak out to the national media. The Brooklyn Nets superstar guard is using his KAI Family Foundation to pay the tuition for nine Lincoln University students for the 2021 school year.
Lincoln is one of the historically black colleges and universities located near rural Oxford, Pennsylvania, about 70 miles west of Philadelphia.
Here’s the video of Kyrie Irving telling the nine students at the HBCU Lincoln University that he was paying for their tuition via the KAI Family Foundation: pic.twitter.com/Ca3qssJvXA
— Alex Schiffer (@Alex__Schiffer) December 31, 2020
This was the latest act of generosity and advocacy from Irving in 2020. In March, Irving gave $323,000 and 250,000 meals to people negatively impacted by the pandemic. A few months later, Irving donated $1.5 million to WNBA players who chose to sit out the 2020 season.
Irving has also made headlines for initially refusing to speak to the press, for which he was fined $25,000. Earlier in the year, when the NBA was contemplating the establishment of a protective “bubble” in Orlando, Florida, to finish the season, Irving loudly suggested the players start up their own league because he felt the talent was being treated more like commodities instead of human beings.
Irving, who won a championship in Cleveland with LeBron James in 2016, also created brushfires when he told Kevin Durant in 2020 that he has finally teamed up with another person who has the skills to close out a game. King James admitted that he was a “little hurt” by the insinuation from Irving that he didn’t possess the ability to hit pressure shots in the final minutes.
