Basketball

PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL IN THE GOLDEN AGE

THE RACIALIZATION OF MODERN BASKETBALL

INTEGRATION AND THE BIRTH OF THE NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

RACIAL GENETICS OF BASKETBALL

THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF BASKETBALL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The perceived dominance of African Americans in basketball has been taken as proof of the natural athleticism of blacks (defined as any people of African origin). However, the history of sport quickly dismisses this notion.

Basketball was invented by the Canadian-born James Naismith in December 1891. Naismith, a physical education teacher at the School for Christian Workers (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts, was charged with inventing a game to entertain the school’s athletes during the winter. The original game used a soccer ball, two peach baskets attached to the railing of gym balcony, two nine-player teams, and thirteen rules. Between 1906 and 1916 a series of rules changes were implemented, including opening the net to allow the ball to fall through after a goal. Players fouled out after committing five fouls, and foul shots were awarded depending on the severity of the infraction. In 1916 dribbling followed by a shot was allowed. (Prior to this players could not move after the ball was passed to them.)

Many of the early basketball games were played in gymnasiums with floor to ceiling netting separating the crowd from the players. This is where the term “cager” originated, though the practice was discontinued in 1929.

In 1892, Senda Berenson Abbot, a Lithuanian-born physical education teacher at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, twenty miles north of Springfield, developed a modified game for women because it was believed that the men’s game was too physically demanding for the “fairer” sex. The court was divided into three equal sections, with players required to stay in an assigned area; players were prohibited from snatching or batting the ball from the hands of another player; and they were prohibited from holding the ball for longer than three seconds and from dribbling the ball more than three times.

The spread of basketball in the United States and abroad was facilitated by the Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCAs), the armed forces, and colleges. Factors that helped it grow in popularity were the simple equipment requirements, indoor play, competitiveness, and easily understood rules. These were also the same attributes that would make it well-suited for the urban African-American neighborhoods that would spring up across America after World War II.

The first intercollegiate league, the New England Inter-collegiate Basketball League, was formed in May 1901. It included teams from Yale and Harvard Universities and Trinity, Holy Cross, Amherst, and Williams Colleges. It is highly unlikely that any African Americans played in this first league. Indeed only eight African Americans are recorded as having played for European American collegiate teams from 1904 to 1919 (see Table 1).

African-American athletes were not allowed to play basketball for predominantly European American institutions in the Jim Crow South until after the 1950s. Colored YMCAs and YWCAs throughout the nation formed the first African-American teams. This effort

was hampered in the South however, due to poor gymnasiums, a lack of equipment, few coaches, and year-round warm weather. YMCA college student associations played a major role in introducing African-Americans’ colleges to basketball.

PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL IN THE GOLDEN AGE

Professional basketball began in 1896 at a YMCA in Trenton, New Jersey, and in 1898 the National Basketball League (NBL) was founded. The NBL consisted of six franchises from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. At the same time, club teams were being formed. The Smart Set Athletic Club, from Brooklyn, New York, was the first African-American club team, and it was soon joined by the St. Christopher Athletic Club and the Marathone Athletic Club. These clubs formed the Olympic Athletic League. Similar clubs were formed in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Wilmington, Delaware, and northern New Jersey. The Buffalo Germans, a team with players of German descent that won 111 straight games between 1908 and 1911, and the Original Celtics (who were started by Irish players from New York’s Hell’s Kitchen), were extraordinarily successful professional teams in the early twentieth century. The Original Celtics pioneered many of the tactics still used in modern basketball, including zone defense and post play. The first successful national professional league was the American Basketball League (ABL), which lasted from 1925 to 1931 and resumed play again from 1933 to 1934. The ABL was formed without any African-American players; teams and league rules disallowed games against African-American teams. For this reason, the Original Celtics refused to join.

The racially segregated character of American society meant that most sports clubs were composed of a single ethnic group, or of groups that were considered socially equivalent (such as poor Irish and Jews). The 1920s through 1930s saw three prominent ethnically based professional teams dominate basketball: the Original Celtics, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association team (the SPHAs), and the New York Renaissance (the Rens), an all-African American team. The Original Celtics compiled an amazing record as a barnstorming team, with more than 700 victories and only 60 losses in the 1920s. (Barnstorming refers to the practice of touring a region playing local club teams). They were eventually forced into the ABL when the league disallowed its members to play nonmembers, thus reducing the number of competitors. In 1926 and 1927 the Original Celtics won the first two league championships. The league owners responded by breaking up the team and dispersing their players throughout the league. In 1928 the New York Rens won the championship, defeating the Original Celtics, who featured the future Hall of Famers Joe Lapchick and Nat Holman. A year later, the Original Celtics again won the title. The contests between the Celtics and the Rens were some of the hottest tickets in town, and at least five race riots were sparked by their games.

The SPHAs won seven ABL titles between 1933 and 1945, and they lost in the championship series twice. The team’s uniform tops featured the Hebrew letters spelling SPHAs and a Jewish star. The back of the team’s road uniforms said “Hebrews”! In 1926 during a break in ABL play, the SPHAs defeated both the Original Celtics and the New York Renaissance in best-of-three game series, showing that, though a minor league team, they were able to compete against the best professional teams of the period.

The early success of Jewish athletes in basketball spawned biologically based racial theories to explain this phenomenon. Paul Gallico, a sports editor for the New York Daily News wrote in his 1938 Farewell to Sports: “The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.” Other writers suggested that Jews had an advantage in basketball because short men have better balance and more foot speed. They also suggested that they had sharper eyes, which was in contradiction to the stereotype that Jewish men were nearsighted.

In 1923, the New York Rens became the first full-salaried African-American professional basketball team. Like the Original Celtics and the SPHAs, the Rens were a barnstorming squad that had to take on all levels of competition to earn a living. The Rens were not allowed to join the ABL or the National Basketball League (NBL), which was formed in 1937. Yet in their nearly three-decade existence, starting in 1922, the Rens compiled a 2,588–529 record. They took their name from Harlem’s

Renaissance Casino, which opened in 1922. Bob Douglas, called the “father of black basketball” organized the team, which practiced and played home games at the casino’s dance hall. The Rens games were part of combined social-athletic events, with dances usually beginning right after the games.

During the Depression era, professional basketball leagues were not financially lucrative enough to allow players to make a living or team owners to make sufficient profits. Thus many teams survived by barnstorming. These teams were often ethnically based, such as the Terrible Swedes, the Harlem Globetrotters (African Americans out of Chicago, not New York), the House of David (Jewish), an even the Hong Wah Q’ues (a Chinese-American team.) During the 1940s many cities hosted basketball tournaments for professional teams, including the World Professional Basketball Tournament, played in Chicago Stadium each year from 1939 to 1948. At this time, professional teams were either owned by individuals or by corporations. On the corporate teams, the players had year-round jobs with the company, though they owed these jobs to the fact that they could play basketball. The records of the World Professional Basketball Tournament show no evidence of “African-American superiority” in basketball (see Table 2).

THE RACIALIZATION OF MODERN BASKETBALL

The history of early basketball does not support any theory of biologically based racial participation in the sport. Beginning in the 1960s, however, there was an increased participation of African Americans in the sport at all levels, including some of the greatest superstars of American sport. This pattern has spawned biologically based racial theories of African-American participation, including ideas of biologically superior athletic ability— particularly leaping ability—as explanations for the predominance of African-American stars. One CBS sports commentator, Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, pronounced that the superior athletic ability of blacks was due to the fact that “blacks had been bred like race horses” during slavery. Another prominent racially based athletic theory is the supposedly greater innate jumping ability of African Americans. (Conversely, European Americans are supposed to suffer from the “white man’s disease,” or the inability to jump.) The supporters of this theory cite the results of slam-dunk competitions, which have been overwhelmingly dominated by athletes of African descent.

As convenient as these theories are, they all suffer from lack of genetic or physiological evidence to support their claims. In fact, the dominance of African Americans in American basketball is more easily explained by social and cultural changes that occurred in the United States between the 1940s and 1970s. In this period, governmental policies allowed persons of European descent to escape the inner cities while African Americans were denied access to the means to live elsewhere. Between 1934 and 1962, Federal Housing Authority (FHA) programs provided $120 billion in loans, but less than 2 percent of these went to nonwhites. The loans made cheap housing available to European Americans outside the cities and created the American suburbs. This occurred just as new waves of African Americans migrated to the northern cities in search of greater economic opportunity and freedom from racial discrimination. New Deal projects, such as government-owned buildings designed to save the poor from the dilapidated tenements, began to concentrate poor African Americans. These buildings were appropriately called “the projects.” The youths living within their confines were encouraged to pursue athletic activities that could be played on the blacktop surfaces of this urban landscape, and basketball was a natural candidate for this environment.

Sports culture, like music and the arts, was influenced by this new form of segregation. In the 1950s, many African-American educators and community leaders were still touting sports as a way to get ahead in a racist society. Holcomb Rucker was an example of someone who held these notions. Rucker was a New York City Department of Public Works employee who developed teen-oriented summer basketball leagues in Harlem. By 1955 his summer tournaments were heavily attended by scouts from major universities. The Rucker tournaments included such future basketball greats as Wilt Chamberlain, Walt Hazzard, Willis Reed, and Julius Erving, who played against equally talented individuals, many of whom later died of drug overdoses or went to prison. The emphasis on sports as a way to overcome racism meant that some of the brightest and most talented African Americans in this era pursued careers in sports.

While a student at Oakland’s McClymonds High, the future Boston Celtic great Bill Russell imagined new ways of playing defense in basketball. He devised the idea that defensive players could leave their feet to block a shot and keep the ball in play so that it could be recovered by a teammate. At playgrounds all over the inner cities of America, basketball skills that had been pioneered by earlier professionals of European descent, such as the jump shot and behind-the-back dribbling, were being improved on by African-American youth. In 1962, John McLendon, a former student of James Naismith and a successful college coach, published Fast Break Basketball: Fine Points and Fundamentals. Thus, during the 1950s and 1960s a distinctive African-American style of basketball developed and became as integral a part of African-American culture as “the blues” and “rhythm and blues” music.

Concomitant with the demographic shifts in the cities, a series of rules changes made basketball a faster and more athletic sport. Prior to these rule changes, basketball had essentially become football played on hardwood floors. On the inner-city playgrounds of America, African-American athletes had already begun to redefine how the game was played. Soon, college basketball could not ignore the lure of these talented individuals. The 1949-1950 NCAA champions, City College of New York (CCNY), were integrated and coached by basketball legend Nat Holman (of the Original Celtics). Conversely, the 1951 NCAA champions, the University of Kentucky, were all European Americans and coached by segregationist Adolph Rupp (a college basketball coaching legend). Despite their athletic greatness, both schools were shown to be involved with point-shaving gambling scandals, but at the time more was made of the CCNY problem due to the participation of African-American athletes.

The late 1950s would see four stellar African Americans open the doors to integrating basketball at the college level. These were Bill Russell at the University of San Francisco, Wilt Chamberlain at the University of Kansas, Elgin Baylor at Seattle University, and Oscar Robertson at the University of Cincinnati. In 1966, Texas Western would be the first team to win a NCAA basketball title

with an all-black starting five. They defeated a heavily favored—and segregated—Kentucky squad.

INTEGRATION AND THE BIRTH OF THE NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

In 1950, Chuck Cooper became the first African-American player drafted by the fledgling National Basketball Association (NBA). By the 1960s, African-American participation at both the college and professional level had drastically increased, so much so that the Boston Celtics had an all–African-American starting line-up in 1964. The percentage of African Americans playing in the collegiate and professional ranks continued to increase in the 1970s.

The increase in African-American dominance of professional basketball during the latter decades of the twentieth century was such that a survey of NBA all-franchise players in 1994, covering the league from its beginnings, showed that out of 124 players, 86 were African Americans, 35 were European Americans, 1 was African, 1 was European, and 1 was an Iranian American. The NBA named its fifty greatest players from its first fifty years in 1996. Of these, thirty-one were African Americans and eighteen were European American. In 2001, the Basketball Hall of Fame included 34 African Americans and 77 European Americans. James Naismith and the Nigerian-born Hakeem Olajuwon were the only non–American-born inductees.

However, this increase in African-American participation coincided with a decline in the popularity of the professional game. By the end of the 1970s, the NBA (which had merged with the American Basketball Association, or ABA, in 1977) was the only one of the three major spectator sports without a national television contract. In 1981, sixteen of the twenty-three teams were losing money, and there was serious talk of folding the small-city franchises and downsizing to a twelve-team league. Earvin Magic Johnson (an African American from East Lansing, Michigan) and Larry Bird (a European American from French Lick, Indiana) helped to change all of that. Their rivalry began in the 1979 NCAA tournament and continued on into the NBA. Magic Johnson was one of the most versatile players the game had ever known, while Larry Bird was one of the game’s greatest pure shooters and competitors. Johnson’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics faced each other in the NBA finals three times in the 1980s, and one of their teams captured the title eight out of ten years in that decade. This stimulated the rebirth of the NBA and set the stage for the emergence of the one of the greatest athletes the world has ever known, Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls.

Jordan is of African-American descent, and he played his college basketball under NCAA legend Dean Smith at North Carolina. Smith’s coaching style did not allow Jordan to showcase his formidable talents, and few expected him to be the superstar he became in the NBA. Jordan’s Bulls won six titles in the 1990s and he became the center of one of the greatest sports merchandising franchises of all time. Before signing Michael Jordan in 1987, annual sales of the athletic-shoe company Nike were only $900 million. Ten years later, based on the impact of their “Air Jordan” line, Nike annual sales were $9.19 billion, an increase of more than 1,000 percent. The popularity of basketball had changed so much in fifty years that Michael Jordan was still earning $33 million per year in endorsements two years after his retirement.

RACIAL GENETICS OF BASKETBALL

In a period of fifty years, professional basketball in America went from 100 percent to 16 percent European American. In the 2000-2001 season, African Americans dominated NBA rosters. European Americans, or “whites,” are persons whose genetic ancestry can be traced to some area in Europe and who have no detectable African ancestry. African Americans, or “blacks,” have genes that originated among Western Africans, Europeans, and American Indians. The average percentage of non-African genes in African Americans has been estimated to vary from as low as 6 percent to as high as 40 percent. Many of the early twenty-first century’s successful black athletes are the children of men who were athletically or socially successful in the last generation and who married European-American wives. Racial theories of basketball performance rely on the idea that there is something genetically “African” that predisposes an individual to be a better basketball player.

To test this assertion, however, it would be best to compare the number of Africans versus the number of Europeans in the NBA. African Americans are, in fact, not appropriate in this regard because a substantial fraction of their genes originated in Europeans and American Indians. In 2000, there were three Western Africans, nine Europeans, and one Australian in the NBA. An examination of the NBA 2002 rosters showed twenty-one Europeans, one East Asian, and nine Africans in the league. In that same season, Yao Ming, formerly of the Shanghai Sharks, made a particularly dramatic entry into the NBA, finishing second in Rookie of the Year voting. Thus, in a direct comparison of individuals who have “purely” African or European genes, there are more of those with European genes than African. This is directly opposite to the racial theory of basketball participation.

THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF BASKETBALL

Basketball was introduced to the Summer Olympic Games in 1936. Since then, the United States has pretty much dominated the competition. The 1972 victory of the Soviet Union has always been attributed to dubious officiating. In 1988, however, the Soviet Union won the gold, Yugoslavia the silver, and the United States settled for the bronze medal. Americans criticized this defeat as due to the essentially “professional” character of the European basketball programs. This criticism led to a changing of International Olympic Committee rules, and by 1992 professional athletes could compete in the Olympic Games. The 1992 Barcelona Olympics featured the U.S. “Dream Team,” consisting of eight players of African-American ancestry and four players of European-American descent. The Dream Team easily won the gold medal, but their victory also helped to spread the popularity of basketball to such an extent that the dominance of the United States, and of African Americans, in basketball may soon be a thing of the past.

Indeed, the 2002 U.S. men’s international basketball team, which was predominantly African American, was eliminated by Yugoslavia in the quarterfinals and lost to Spain in the consolation game of the World Championships. The USA finished seventh, while the only African nation in the competition finished in an abysmal eleventh place. At the men’s competition in the 2004 Olympic Games, Argentina won the gold, Italy the Silver, and the United States the bronze. In the women’s competition, the United States won the Gold, Australia the Silver, and Russia the Bronze. No African nations qualified for the medal rounds at these Olympics. Of the 177 players drafted by the NBA from 2003 to 2005, 28 were

Europeans, 2 were East Asians, 1 was from East Africa, 22 from West Africa, and 4 were from Latin America. Finally, the 2005 NBA championship was won by the San Antonio Spurs, who featured five international players on their twelve-man roster. Two of their three most important players, Tim Duncan and Tony Parker, have some detectable African ancestry. These results indicate that the “black” dominance of professional and international basketball is fading.

Basketball ability, just like any other human behavior, is determined by a complex interplay between individual genetic ability, personality, culture, and society. African Americans, who currently dominate the game, represent a genetically and culturally unique population, one that is not equivalent to any particular Western African population, either in genes or in culture. Success at the modern game of basketball is facilitated by speed, endurance, agility, strength, height, hand-eye coordination, and leaping ability, among other athletic traits. There is no reason to suppose that these traits are found disproportionately among people of African descent in the United States, nor is there any scientific way of separating the genetic, environmental, or cultural effects that determine athletic predisposition. Thus, any claims of African genes providing superior athletic performance are at best speculation, and at worse racist ideology. The difference between the ethnic composition of the participants of American basketball and volleyball illustrates the social construction of sports performance. Both games require similar athletic skills, yet basketball is currently dominated by African-American athletes, while volleyball is dominated by European-American athletes.

When Michael Jordan retired from professional basketball, he was asked once again by reporters why he thought black players dominated the sport. “Okay, I’ll tell you,” he said. As reporters leaned forward, pencils poised, he whispered into the microphone, “We practice.”

SEE ALSO Baseball; Football (U.S.); Genetics and Athletic Performance; Track and Field.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashe, Arthur. 1993. A Hard Road to Glory—Basketball: The African American Athlete in Basketball. New York: Amistad Press.

Basketball Hall of Fame. “The Original Celtics.” Available from http://www.hoophall.com/halloffamers/Celtics%20Original.htm.

Bjarkman, Peter. 1992. The History of the NBA. New York: Crescent Books.

———. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Pro Basketball Team Histories. New York: Caroll and Graf.

Deutsch, Robin Jonathan, and Wayne Patterson. 2001. “Basketball.” In Microsoft^®Encarta^®Online Encyclopedia. Available from http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761571883/Basketball.html.

Entine, Jon. 2001. Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk about It. New York: Public Affairs.

George, Nelson. 1992. Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball. New York: Harper-Collins.

Gutman, Bill. 1993. The History of NCAA Basketball. New York: Crescent Publishers.

International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. “Philadelphia SPHAs.” Available from http://www.jewishsports.net/BioPages/PhiladelphiaSPHAs.htm.

McCallum, John Dennis. 1978. College Basketball, U.S.A., since 1892: The History of the Game since Its Beginnings, Storied Players, Teams, and Coaches. New York: Stein and Day.

National Basketball Association. “The Original Dream Team.” Available from http://www.nba.com/history/dreamT_moments.html.

———. “Remembering the Rens.” Available from http://www.nba.com/history/encyclopedia_rens_001214.html.

Peterson, Robert W. 1990. Cages to Jump Shots: Pro Basketball’s Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sands, Robert R., ed. 1999. Anthropology, Sport, and Culture. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

Wetzel, Dan, and Don Yaeger. 2000. Sole Influence: Basketball, Corporate Greed, and the Corruption of America’s Youth. New York: Warner Books.

Wolff, Alexander. 1991. 100 Years of Hoops: A Fond Look Back at the Sport of Basketball. New York: Crescent Publishers.

Joseph L. Graves Jr.