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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SPORT AND SOCIETY claim that they no longer do. “Too black” drags another question in its wake: If the NBA was “too black” during its “dark ages,” what was it afterward? Just black enough? And if so, what changed? The Impact of the Civil Rights Movement The racial dynamic of the NBA in the 1970s was, in many ways, the result of various responses to the civil rights movement. Black NBA players in the fifties and sixties were selected by NBA team owners with an eye towards the racial (in)tolerance of white fans. The NBA had an unofficial quota of three or four black players per team for fifteen years (Thomas, 136), and while star-caliber players shone in African American leagues, only “role players”—as opposed to athletic, creative scorers—were chosen to cross over. Bill Russell, though perhaps the greatest player of the 1960s, fit the mold, renowned more for his rebounding, defense, intensity and stoicism than his scoring. Just as black civil rights organizers learned to frame their actions so as to elicit white support (Stabile 135), black players toed the line so as to maintain both their place in the league and the NBA’s financial security (Thomas 135). In the 1970s, there was a qualitative cultural shift in pro basketball that reflected American racial politics, although very few players publicly embraced the heightened political militarism of black activists. After the quota system disappeared as a result of the Boston Celtics’ success—which was and is perceived as the result of their willingness to play blacks—the new generation of players embraced emergent black styles, such as the Afro hairstyle. As Hall of Fame player and coach Phil Jackson put it, there was “a lot of fuss about players’ long hair and gold chains” (Jackson and Rosen 50). More lasting was the dunk shot. Among Bill Russell and his peers, dunking was considered egotistical and taboo, in stark contrast to the flamboyant dunkers of the ABA and later NBA players, who turned two points into a display of aerial creativity and black masculinity (Houck). As these aesthetic changes occurred on the court, political and cultural currents inevitably affected the league’s aficionados in the stands. The “backlash” against civil rights has received a great deal of attention from American historians in recent years, and rightly so. Even outside activist conservative movements, many whites reacted to assertions of black agency and power during the civil rights period—as well as the uprisings of 1968—by setting out to undo the liberal legislation of the Great Society, such as school desegregation, fair hiring and housing laws, and affirmative action. McGirr; Lipsitz). Although there is no official data about the racial composition of the league’s fans, evidence from various sources, such as crowd shots from grainy videos of nationally broadcast games and auto/biographies of players suggest that white fans constituted the majority of the NBA’s paying fan base (Robertson; Kriegel). Although it is possible that conservative whites and white NBA fans were entirely mutually exclusive groups, it is not likely. Thus, perhaps we should not be surprised that the NBA, with three out of every four players African American and increasingly embracing styles that carried political connotations, should lose fan support just as black political projects (such as affirmative action) were losing their mainstream sympathy. 226
MATTHEW SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON Drugs, Violence and Wealth in the Contemporary American Racial Formation My use of “race” follows the model of Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s concept of the “racial formation,” which is “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (55). A given racial formation establishes the meaning of race in a specific historical moment, waged in discursive fields such as popular culture as well as politics and economics. Racial formations are malleable, and although in the United States there has historically been a mutually exclusive binary between “black” and “white,” the modifier “too” in front of “black” shows that there are effectively different standards for “blackness”—physical, cultural and even political. In this light, the NBA’s success over the last three decades has been correlated to Commissioner David Stern’s ability to obscure its players’ cultural and sociohistorical blackness. The league struggled in the late seventies not because too many players had dark skin, but because they were seen as stereotypically “black” as a result of their alleged drug abuse, on-court fisticuffs, and public union struggles. The widespread use of drugs by NBA players is cited by league officials and most critics as the substantive source of the league’s public woes. However, there was little public knowledge of drug use during the “dark ages”—until August 19, 1980, when the Los Angeles Times ran a story entitled “NBA and Cocaine: Nothing to Snort At,” claiming that as many as 75 percent of NBA players were regular users (Cobbs). Newspapers and sporting magazines across the country immediately weighed in, inflating and distorting the accusation—for example, Sports Briefing raised the figure to “80-90 per cent” (September 1, 1980) and others added heroin and marijuana to the list, while the NBA denied accusations of “excessive” drug use (Sports Briefing, August 1, 1980). While the phrases “too black” and “drug-infested” are often seen as unrelated explanations, a number of critics (such as Boyd and Halberstam 118) have made the connection. As David L. Andrews argues, [T]he popular media used the specter of drug abuse within the league as evidence of the pathological depravity of the African American men who dominated, and were thus threatening the very existence of, the NBA, and, again by inference, that of the American nation as a whole. (16) Far from an isolated scandal, this event demands a national-historical lens, for white Americans have constructed blacks as more susceptible to drug abuse for a century, if not longer. This association reached a peak during the highly racialized “war on drugs” in the 1970s and 1980s. Just as the construction of the African American drug fiend led to (among other things) grossly unequal prosecution of drug laws (Lipsitz 10-12) it also played a role in the NBA’s “dark ages.” As Lawrence Grossberg has noted, drugs play a unique role as “affective magnets” in contemporary American culture: “it is not just that one suddenly sees drugs everywhere, as the new universal culprit. More importantly, as soon as drugs are found, nothing else seems to matter” (284). But narcotics were a scapegoat: far more than drug abuse, which was for the most part sub rosa until the Los Angeles Times bombshell, on-court violence plagued the NBA’s “dark ages.” As the two leagues evolved, the ABA succeeded in part by tweaking its rules to encourage free movement and athletic play, while NBA games revolved around stationary “big 227
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