Young black men on drugs! Start battles! Search to get paid! It was the collective NBA boogeyman of the 1970s and early 1980s, a transitional period in professional basketball and society. As a predominantly black league that embraced a flashy style of play and reflected the achievements of the civil rights movement and Black Power, the NBA entered a new era of visibility. The stars are expected to be compensated and taken seriously as human beings. Unsurprisingly, the backlash was significant – from management unwilling to relinquish absolute control, and from a mostly white fan base outraged by the fact that these new players were raking in huge piles of money (which, by today’s standards), seems to be a handout by standards).
This is the world of Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood and the generation that saved the NBA’s soul, Theresa Runstedtler’s smart, compelling and frankly overdue overview of a pivotal moment in sports history. This is primarily a story about work and race and America, told through the prism of a league approaching but not yet reaching its current level of mass-produced, carefully packaged popularity. It’s a story of anti-drug hysteria set in the Ms decade of rampant cocaine use and a product struggling with proximity to the street. And it is a study of institutionalized racism in a culture that is changing so fast that the old white guard is struggling to keep up.
“It’s the same time that the Bronx was on fire and the downtown areas that weren’t mentioned were recovering from all the rioting that happened in the mid-1960s,” says Runstedtler of her home office in Baltimore. “There’s a fear that young black men are being given too much freedom — that it’s likely to lead to some form of violence … or criminal activity.”
Runstedtler, a professor and historian of race and sports at American University, took a circuitous but illustrative route to her latest topic. Originally from Ontario, she was a member of the Toronto Raptors Dance Pak in the 1990s. The Raptors, a new expansion team, began with a youthful startup approach under Black’s co-founder, general manager and former NBA star Isiah Thomas.
“We didn’t look like the typical NBA dance team,” Runstedtler writes. “We were more sporty urban than sexy glamour. There was no obsession with weight. In a nod to African-American hip-hop culture, we wore jumpsuits, bandanas and sequined sweaters and danced to the latest rap and R&B hits.”
But then the team was sold to the more business-oriented company Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. The dance team has changed: “leaner, whiter, blonder.” Hip hop was replaced by Motown. As Runstedtler writes, “It became clear that we were performing for the wealthy white season ticket holders on the floor rather than the nose-bleeding regular (often non-white) fans. In a way, it took over two decades to create this book – a way for me to understand what I became a part of in the late 1990s.
After studying history and African-American studies at Yale, Runstedtler began thinking about and researching the NBA’s “Dark Ages.” The storylines are varied.
There is a lawsuit from superstar Oscar Robertson against the NBA’s option (or reserve) clause, which binds a player to a team for life, at the discretion of the team. There’s the arrival of the upstart, the dazzling ABA, which briefly gave players more choices—a freedom the NBA feared so much it forced a merger in 1976.
There’s also Abdul-Jabbar, the cerebral UCLA and Lakers piglet who has baffled the media by refusing to play his game with feigned politeness and canned responses. There’s the hysteria over gamblers’ use of cocaine, a drug popular with many people on disposable incomes in the 1970s and 1980s, which horrified and enraged the league and media as wealthy blacks celebrated. (An insinuation driven Article in the Los Angeles Times helped fuel the panic).
Runstedtler makes it clear she knows the NBA wasn’t angelic in the ’70s. “I’m not saying in the book that no one was on coke, I’m saying we should think of it as a race story, a moral panic that became this big story about black basketball players in the years before what ended up being a crack cocaine crisis.” , she says. “Everybody just falls into the barrage and says, ‘Yeah, we have to punish these guys. We have to control them. We have to keep an eye on them with the police.’” This is the same kind of rhetoric used in the increasingly increasingly draconian War on Drugs.
The honesty that guides “Black Ball” is the persistence that our perception of race influences our view of the game and that you simply cannot separate sports from the time they are played – and the audience for which they are played. played Today’s NBA has mastered the art of having both, taking advantage of the league’s cool and black style without ruffling too many feathers. (This is largely the subject of another good basketball book, Pete Croatto’s From Hang Time to Prime Time).
Black Ball is a topical book at a time when top athletes are more open than ever to social issues and it is becoming clear that sport and society are inextricably linked. Without the progress recorded here, it’s hard to imagine the NFL, say, committing $250 million to fight systemic racism (after Colin Kaepernick was basically attacked for his silent side protests against police brutality).
It’s also important to note that NBA players were told for decades to “shut up and dribble,” or something like that. Runstedtler represents a school of sports journalism and science that recognizes that the most important action takes place off the field.
Chris Vognar is a freelance writer based in Houston.
Source: LA Times