Why Shouldn’t They Put ‘Pro’ in Protest?

More than two dozen taxpaying residents of this country took a day off Tuesday to join a protest of a government action they considered unacceptable.

They were passionate and peaceful.

Yet they were also major league baseball players.

So how dare they?

A taxpaying resident of the Los Angeles community spent two hours Saturday walking in front of the Federal Building in Westwood to protest the same government action.

He was calm and conscientious.

Yet he was also a Laker on the eve of the team’s first playoff game.

So how dare he?

It’s happening again. Residents of a sports world that we complain is increasingly insulated from the real world decide to step outside and breathe in our dust and trudge through our mud.

Yet the minute we see them, we break into a sweat. Instead of embracing them, we are enraged by them.

What are they doing here? They don’t belong here! Don’t they have a game to play?

It doesn’t matter that the issue this time is the government’s handling of the sort of person for whom the sports world was built, a 6-year-old boy.

It doesn’t matter that the entire nation has been touched by the government’s forceful taking of little Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez from his relatives’ Miami home Saturday to reunite him with his father.

The sports nation is different, we think. It’s their nation, not our nation.

We criticize John Rocker for not being politically sensitive, yet we rip athletes who are.

It was OK for residents of Little Havana to take Tuesday off in protest, but nine members of the Florida Marlins with Cuban backgrounds?

Get back to the dugout.

Then when they were joined by two members of the San Francisco Giants, two members of the New York Mets, one member of the New York Yankees, all either Cuban-born or of Cuban descent?

Stuff some tobacco in it.

We don’t mind if the fast-food clerk skips out, but Tampa Bay’s Jose Canseco?

The nerve.

And what on earth was Glen Rice doing walking on a hot sidewalk with his wife Christina Fernandez Rice on Saturday--a day before taking the Staples Center floor with the Lakers?

Shouldn’t he be working on his jump shot?

Rice was asked this.

He was asked, what were you doing bumping around with 300 to 400 regular folks, risking exhaustion and maybe even an odd injury, at the start of the most important two months of your professional life?

“I was being a human being,” Rice said.

On Tuesday, they all were, from Marlin executive Tony Perez to Giant pitcher Livan Hernandez to anyone else who quietly slipped off their cleats and went back to the hotel.

For that, they should be applauded, not ostracized.

I do not agree with their cause. A motherless child belongs with his father, even if his father is from the moon, and even if you have to grab the child in the middle of the night to take him there.

But the point here is to celebrate a different sort of reunion, that between professional athletes and the communities they represent.

By taking a day off, they made that relationship work.

“My husband is more than a basketball player, he’s the head of a household,” said Rice’s wife, Christina. “He doesn’t just live on the court, he lives in the world.”

Her parents came to the United States from Havana. The Rices’ permanent residence is just north of Miami.

So when Glen awoke Saturday morning to televised reports of the taking of Elian Gonzalez, he nudged Christina awake.

“I thought, oh, we’ve got to do something,” she said.

She made some calls and got the word.

“The Federal Building, 4 o’clock, the Cuban-American community was going to be there,” she recalled. “I told Glen I was going. He said, ‘Well, then, I’m going with you.’ ”

So that 6-foot-8 man you saw towering above a marching and chanting crowd in Westwood early Saturday evening? Yep. It was the same guy who scored 18 points in the Lakers’ 117-107 victory over the Sacramento Kings the next afternoon in the first game of their first-round playoff series.

“I call him the Afro-Cuban,” Christina said.

While Rice didn’t actually hold a sign or chant, he led the group in kisses and hugs and handshakes.

“People were in shock to see him,” Christina said. “He was really an inspiration being there. It was very important.”

Rice said the inspiration worked both ways.

“I wasn’t the most famous person out there,” he said. “Everybody out there was famous in their own way.”

That’s what happens when somebody like him hangs around people like us. He gets more than a sweaty collar and scuffed shoes. He gets perspective.

“I think it’s important that people stand up for what they believe in . . . instead of everybody just dodging around with their foot on the line,” Phil Jackson said.

Not surprisingly, the Laker coach who once campaigned for Bill Bradley supported one of his stars playing politics.

“I was glad to see Glen express himself,” he said.

Baseball executives, at least publicly, felt the same way about their protesting players.

Steve Phillips, general manager of the Mets, said it best when talking about excusing shortstop Rey Ordonez and coach Cookie Rojas.

“Baseball should not be a political forum,” he told reporters. “But they felt the need to support the community in which they live and I support their decision.”

So should all of us.

We put athletes on a pedestal, not a platform. They can still step down. We should not be afraid to let them.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.