NBA Finals Most Valuable Player (MVP) Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Olympic champion gymnast Simone Biles on Wednesday won as best male and female athletes at the ESPYS.
Gilgeous-Alexander led the Oklahoma City Thunder to the NBA championship last month while piling up hardware as league MVP and scoring champion.
“It’s a dream come true and for dreams to come true it takes a village,” he said, thanking his wife, parents, brother and others. “Those names probably don’t mean much, but to me they mean everything.”
Photo: AP
Biles, an 11-time Olympic medalist, claimed the night’s first award, best championship performance for her efforts at the Paris Games. She won three golds and a silver while helping the US to win their first team title since 2016.
“That was very unexpected, especially in a category of all men,” Biles said after kissing her husband, Chicago Bears safety Jonathan Owens.
She beat out Stephen Curry of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, Freddie Freeman of the MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers and golfer Rory McIlroy.
Photo: AFP
Biles’ Olympic teammate Suni Lee won the best comeback award for overcoming two rare kidney diseases. She brought one of her doctors to the show.
NBA Hall of Fame member Oscar Robertson accepted the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage from point guard Russell Westbrook of the Denver Nuggets.
Robertson was president of the NBA Players’ Association at the time of a landmark antitrust lawsuit against the NBA in 1970. It led to an extensive reform of the league’s strict free agency and draft rules, and eventually to higher salaries for all players.
The 86-year-old Robertson is a 12-time All Star known as The Big O during his career.
“I knew there was work to do. There was a desperate need for players to have more career security, improved working conditions and other accommodations,” he said. “In life, it’s important to be persistent or as I have been called stubborn. Stubborn about what you believe in.”
Comedian Shane Gillis’ hosted the show that honors the past year’s top athletes and sports moments.
Early on, he called out famous faces in the Dolby Theatre crowd, including retired WNBA star Diana Taurasi.
Gillis said: “Give it up for her” after calling her “Deanna.”
The camera showed an unsmiling Taurasi shaking her head.
Gillis added: “My bad on that.”
Gillis moved on to WNBA superstar Caitlin Clark, who was not in the audience.
“When Caitlin Clark retires from the WNBA, she’s going to work at a Waffle House so she can continue doing what she loves most: fist fighting Black women,” he joked.
Gillis’ performance drew mixed reviews on social media, with some calling him “hilarious” and others “cringey.”
Before closing his opening monologue out, a smiling Gillis said: “I see a lot of you don’t like me and that’s OK. That’s it for me. That went about exactly how we all thought it was going to go. I don’t know why this happened.”
Taurasi and retired US national women’s soccer team star Alex Morgan shared the Icon Award in recognition of their careers and major impact on sports.
The women touched their trophies together in a toast.
“Our mission has always been very similar,” Morgan said. “We fought to leave our game in a better place than where we found it just as a generation before us did. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Former athletes David Walters and Erin Regan accepted the Pat Tillman Award for Service, given to those who have served in a way that honors the legacy of the former NFL player and US Army Ranger.
Walters, 37, earned a gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and was a seven-time world championship medalist. He is now a Los Angeles city firefighter.
Regan, 45, was a Wake Forest soccer player who spent one season in the pros before retiring to join the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
Walters and Regan fought the deadly and destructive wildfires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena in January.
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