Orlando Magic CEO Alex Martins met with the media this morning (7/8/20) to discuss a wide range of topics. He gave a nice opening statement in regards to the current environment, which included encouraging everyone to wear a mask. A lot of questions were answered from protocols inside of Disney, to this being considered one of the hardest championships to win and more. My focus was to take away how the Magic organization plan to tackle the Social Injustice movement. Here are my takeaway notes and personal summary of how I interpreted Alex’s comments on the subject.
The Magic and at the beginning stages of making long term commitments to making “Substance Change” within the community. He did not have specifics laid out yet but I did not take that as no movement but in fact the opposite. Alex repeated multiple times that they are taking a ground-up approach within the organization. They had a very encouraging meeting that lead to over 100 employees volunteering to be apart of the change going forward. From those who volunteered, they established a 15 person task force that will also include sub-groups with the other volunteers. They are having the first official meeting with the newly established task force sometime next week to start to develop “substantial change” and how they plan to focus their time and resources. They also plan to partner with the NBA and the plans that happen league-wide. Martins made it clear that this is just the very start and to expect “a lot more to come”. Alex also mentioned he did not expect the outpouring of fans wanting the Vote shirts Magic players had on. He is going to work on making them available to the public.
My personal thoughts are this. Martins seemed very sincere when this subject was brought up. His tone of voice became very serious and he laid out his thoughts and words very clearly. This is not a subject they are taking lightly even though we as fans have not heard many specific details yet. I think it is a good thing they are allowing this to be lead internally from the group up so that they have a wide influence of people having input on direction and focus. What they have done now is just the start.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned as we continue to give you coverage on the Orlando Magic here at The Close Up Magic.
