At the end of the twentieth century, Americans, their economy, and their culture seemed to dominate many parts of the globe. A basketball player who lived in Chicago, Michael Jordan, was arguably the most recognized and revered of those Americans to billions of people worldwide. In China, schoolchildren ranked him with Zhou Enlai as the two greatest figures in twentieth-century history.1 The children knew Zhou because he helped create their Communist Revolution. They knew Jordan because he miraculously floated through the air as both an athlete and as a pitchman for American-produced advertisements for Nike shoes, which the children avidly followed on television. His coach in Chicago, Phil Jackson, believed that Jordan “had somehow been transformed in the public mind from a great athlete to a sports deity”—especially when an amazed Jackson saw people kneeling before the statue of Jordan that stands in front of the United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls.2
Jordan’s phenomenal athletic prowess was unquestioned. Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight (known for his two national championships as well as his blunt style), told sports columnist Mike Lupica: “Michael Jordan is the best that will ever play this game.” Sociologist Harry Edwards, an African American who blisteringly attacked professional sports and the roles assigned black players, declared: “If I were charged with introducing an alien life form to the epitome of human potential, creativity, perseverance, and spirit, I would introduce that alien life form to Michael Jordan.”3
To Edwards and many others, Jordan personified not only the imaginative, individual skills that Americans dream of displaying in a society that adores graceful and successful individualism, but the all-out competitive spirit and discipline that Americans like to think drove their nation to the peak of world power. Coach Jackson phrased it directly: “Michael is a little bit of a shark. He’s competitive to the extent that he’d like to beat you for your last cent and send you home without your clothes.”4
Such skills quickly translated into money and power in the world of the late twentieth century. But Jordan was not just an athlete, he was an African-American athlete who earned $30 million a year for playing with the Bulls and twice that amount from his endorsements and personal businesses. Within his own lifetime, African-American athletes had been victimized and exploited—not made multimillionaires. They were also often condemned for choosing merely to dunk basketballs or catch footballs, rather than acting as role models for future doctors, lawyers, or business leaders. That Jordan became a hero for the many races in American society was thus somewhat surprising. That he could transform this role into becoming the most successful advertising figure in the world was historic. His success in good part can be traced back to his family and North Carolina background.
Since its founding in 1891, basketball has been dominated by players—African-American and white, male and female—who came from the playgrounds, YMCAs, YWCAs, and athletic clubs of America’s cities. Michael Jordan, however, did not grow up in a large urban area. He was born on February 17, 1963, to parents living temporarily in Brooklyn, New York. James Jordan, a sharecropper’s son, was attending a Brooklyn training school so he could pursue his ambition of becoming a supervisor at the General Electric plant outside the small town of Wallace, North Carolina. Deloris Jordan was meanwhile moving steadily up the corporate ladder at United Carolina Bank in Wallace.
Michael grew up in a close-knit middle-class family that revolved around the children’s enthusiasms for baseball, football, track, and, to a lesser extent, basketball. He lived in a small town far removed from the violence then shaking much of the South as the nation painfully moved from enforced segregation, which had been in place since the 1890s, to enforced integration of the races. James and Deloris preached, “You just didn’t judge people’s color.” And if ignorant, racist folks hurled insults, you just determined to “move on” rather than let it slow your climb up the middle-class ladder.5
In 1970, the Jordans did indeed move up to better jobs in the larger city of Wilmington, North Carolina. Again, they missed the worst of the civil-rights violence. Michael seldom encountered racial taunts, although he once ground a Popsicle into the hair of a girl who called him “nigger.”6 But Laney High School had been integrated before he arrived, and Jordan became a sports star—but only by his senior year. As a sophomore he was cut from the varsity basketball team. “I went to my room and I closed the door and I cried,” he later told sportswriter Bob Greene. “For a while I couldn’t stop. Even though there was no one else home at the time, I kept the door shut. It was important to me that no one hear me or see me.” Nor could he get dates with girls because, as he recalled, he had an odd haircut and drew laughs for his habit of playing basketball with his tongue hanging out.7
Within months after being cut, Michael’s world changed. In his junior year, he suddenly grew to 6’3”. He arose at sunup to push his new body through special drills. This development came too late, however, to attract attention from many top colleges. His biographer, Jim Naughton, noted that Jordan was not even rated among the three hundred leading high-school prospects at the start of his senior year. He did enter a summer basketball camp in Pittsburgh where he played well against some of the nation’s best young players and was named Most Valuable Player. His talent drew the attention of Roy Williams, an assistant to the legendary coach at the University of North Carolina, Dean Smith. (Williams later became famous in his own right as coach at the University of Kansas.) Michael had never cared for the state university, but his mother did—especially after Dean Smith visited and talked about the importance of education rather than the glories of basketball. Anyway, there were few other offers, and his sister Roslyn (who graduated after only three years of high school) was also going to Chapel Hill.
For twenty years, Dean Smith’s system had been renowned for reaching, but never winning, national championship games. Smith produced superb professional players, employed tough discipline, insisted on nightly study halls, and held the belief that unproven freshmen should devote themselves more to books than to playing time. Jordan’s defense and passing skills were weak, but his quickness and imagination on offense, as well as his fire and work ethic, forced Smith to start him alongside two All-Americans (and later pro stars), James Worthy and Sam Perkins. By midseason of his freshman year (1981–1982), North Carolina was ranked number one in the country. Jordan was a leading scorer.
At the end of his freshman season, he suddenly became a national figure. Jordan ignored a painful throat infection to lead his team to the Atlantic Coast Conference championship. Worthy, Perkins, and Jordan then took the Tar Heels through the NCAA Championship tournament until they met Georgetown and the Hoyas’ 7’1” All-American, Patrick Ewing, in New Orleans before some 61,000 fans and a huge national television audience.
With 32 seconds to play, Georgetown led 62–61. Dean Smith was again on the verge of missing a national championship. Smith called a time-out and told the players to get the ball to Jordan for a final shot. Smith was trusting a freshman to make the decisive points. Jordan took a pass on the right side of the floor and shot. The ball swished through the net sixteen feet away. Smith had his championship. Worthy led the scoring with 28 points, but Jordan was the hero. North Carolina’s assistant coach Eddie Fogler observed: “That kid doesn’t even realize it yet, but he’s part of history now. People will remember that shot 25 years from now.”8
The nineteen-year-old thus became famous for grace, and success, under immense pressure. “I’ve seen other great athletes,” Dean Smith later declared, “but Michael also has the intelligence, the court savvy … he was a hero so many times at the end of games—it was uncanny.”9 Jordan’s professional coach, Phil Jackson, noted that in the many last-second situations from which Michael emerged the hero, “More often than not, he’ll replay the last-second shot he took to win the 1982 NCAA championship.… [he] says to himself, ‘Okay, I’ve been here before.’”10
After the triumph in New Orleans, Jordan’s college career became anticlimactic, if successful. During his sophomore year, North Carolina failed to reach the NCAA finals, although sports journalists named Jordan College Player of the Year. In the summer of 1983, he led the U.S. Pan-American team to a gold medal in Venezuela, a trip that led him to choose cultural geography as his undergraduate major. In his junior year, the Tarheels again fell short of the NCAA finals. But Jordan had become, in the words of Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick, “the finest all-around amateur player in the world.”11
In the spring of 1984, Jordan announced he would delay his senior year to turn professional. He had little left to prove in college. Deloris Jordan wanted her son to remain at Chapel Hill until he obtained a degree. James Jordan and, surprisingly, Dean Smith, sided with Michael. In the National Basketball Association’s draft in June 1984, college’s best all-around player was not the first pick. Or the second. With the first choice, the lowly Houston Rockets selected Hakeem Olajuwon. (A great center, Olajuwon led Houston to NBA championships in 1994 and 1995, the two years Jordan temporarily retired from the game.) Portland, with the second pick, took 7’1” Sam Bowie of Kentucky. Plagued with injuries, Bowie never became an NBA star.
Chicago, long a losing team, then selected Jordan. Bulls’ General Manager Rod Thorn bluntly declared that he wanted a center, not a guard such as Jordan. “We wish he were 7 feet, but he isn’t,” Thorn griped. “There wasn’t a center available. What can you do?” Chicago Tribune columnist Bernie Lincicome suggested that Thorn might count his blessings. Lincicome wrote sarcastically that Thorn and the Bulls “had tried to avoid Jordan” and instead “got stuck with … maybe the greatest natural basketball talent, inch for inch, in this young decade.” Lincicome noted that Jordan was also an attractive person with a sense of humor—which was fortunate because he “will need a few laughs to ease the shock of moving from a winning team at North Carolina to a loser in Chicago.”12
Suspicion spread that the Bulls feigned unhappiness so they would not have to pay Jordan as much as he was worth. If so, he quickly destroyed that illusion when he signed a five-year contract for $800,000 annually. Thus Jordan and the Bulls began one of the most successful and profitable journeys in modern sports.
That happy journey could hardly be anticipated, however, in 1984. Jordan joined a deeply troubled professional league. Basketball was at a crossroads in the United States. Few people abroad seemed to care about the NBA at all, certainly not when it competed with soccer, hockey, or home teams in Europe for attention. Jordan and a new era of technology changed all that.
Most major sports have obscure beginnings, but basketball’s can be pinpointed in time and told in detail. Those are not its only unique qualities. No game became so popular and commercialized more rapidly.
James Naismith certainly did not set out to make his game ring cash registers. The Canadian-born teacher merely hoped to keep his job at Springfield College in Massachusetts after his superior, Dr. Luther Gulick, ordered him to do something to keep young men out of trouble between football and baseball seasons. The boys in the class were almost out of control; two of the school’s instructors had flatly refused to face them. Because it was Massachusetts, any new winter game would best be played indoors. Because Springfield College was a training school for the worldwide missionary activities of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), Naismith’s answer would have to deal with the “mind, and soul” (as Gulick put it), as well as the body and especially adrenaline of each student.
Naismith first tried variations of football and lacrosse indoors, but these quickly got out of hand. Desperate, he began writing rules for a new game. There was to be no striking or running with the ball (as in lacrosse). The ball was instead to be passed. Nine players were on each side because Naismith’s class had eighteen students. (Five on each side became the rule in 1897.) The goal was placed high above the players so they would not as easily fight each other as they would around a ground-level goal. The goals, peach baskets from a nearby orchard, were placed ten feet high (where they have forever remained), because this happened to be the height of the gymnasium’s balcony to which Naismith could most easily attach the baskets.
How new was his sport can be debated. Historians have discovered that for two thousand years the Mayas and Aztecs played a game in which a large ball was to be passed through a ring at the two ends of the court. The losing team’s leader was sometimes sacrificed to the gods. In Naismith’s home country, the Abnaki of eastern Canada tried to keep an air-filled ball aloft. But no evidence has been found that Naismith knew about these earlier sports.13
Named by one of Naismith’s first players as Basket Ball (it finally became one word in 1921), the sport’s popularity rapidly spread. Within the first week after Naismith introduced the game, audiences collected to watch the play. The shouts attracted female teachers who quickly taught the game to young women. Within three months after basketball appeared, a women’s tournament was held. In 1893, the first women’s intercollegiate game took place at Smith College in Massachusetts. When the Smith women learned the game, the only male allowed to watch was the college president, one of supposed sufficient dignity and age as to avoid unwholesome thoughts while watching graceful female athletes.
A Smith College star, Maude Sherman, married Naismith. But she and her teammates had not played by her husband’s rules. Believing that women were “unaccustomed to exercise, and for the most part adverse to it,” the organizers tried to protect players by having nine women on each team and requiring that three stay in one of three sections into which the playing floor was divided.14 A two-section, six-player women’s game would not appear until 1938. By 1896, California women drew hundreds of female fans to games, including a match in which Stanford defeated Berkeley 2–1 (each basket counted one point).
During the 1890s, the YMCA took over the game and spread basketball up and down both coasts. As early as 1892, Brooklyn contracted basketball fever. In Philadelphia it threatened to take over all the city’s gymnasiums. Audiences turned violent, especially when referees made unpopular rulings. As historian Keith Myerscough phrased it, YMCA officials began to recoil from Naismith’s “Frankenstein-type monster that was now creating havoc in certain quarters.” The Frankenstein only grew larger.15
And entrepreneurial. In 1896, a group of Trenton, New Jersey, players discovered they could make money from charging admission. Each player received fifteen dollars per game, a princely sum during the economic depression of the mid-1890s. When they defeated a Brooklyn team 16–1, “The Trentons” began an American tradition by entitling themselves “World Champions.” Within two years, an entire professional league appeared—six teams in New Jersey and Pennsylvania—which lasted until 1903. Basketball, it seemed, could produce profits as well as save souls. This was too much for Naismith’s old YMCA boss, Luther Gulick. “When men commence to make money out of sport, it degenerates,” Gulick lamented. “It has resulted in men of lower character going into the game.” The YMCA would not allow “The Trentons” to play in a Y gymnasium.16
It no longer made much difference, however, what the YMCA did. Basketball was not only profiting play-for-pay teams, but producers of equipment. Albert Spalding, for example, had grown wealthy by the 1890s making baseball gloves, balls, and bats. He planned to be the John D. Rockefeller of sports: as Rockefeller ruthlessly integrated the global oil business from drilling to sales, Spalding integrated the sporting-goods business from his own manufacturing plants to sales in over twenty thousand retail accounts. Spalding even went Rockefeller one better: he published and distributed tens of thousands of guidebooks that instructed players and audiences about rules, while providing information about teams. Not surprisingly, the rules often called for Spalding equipment. As Naismith’s soccer-type ball gave way to an inflated basketball (slightly larger than the modern version), Spalding efficiently produced and sold the new ball, now standard for the game.17
Basketball was also becoming international. Two years after the 1891 game at Springfield College, a YMCA instructor introduced the sport in France. It had already been played by British women that year and by British men the year before. In 1894, YMCA missionaries supervised the first contests in China and India, and Persia soon joined the list. Canada produced both the sport’s founder and many players on the early Springfield College teams.
The game, however, would not become an international phenomenon until Michael Jordan appeared on the scene. In its early years, it was largely American, with some popularity in Canada and Western Europe. More precisely, it was an American city game. The first dribbling of the ball (instead of merely passing), apparently occurred on a Philadelphia playground in the late 1890s. The wave of immigrants entering the United States between 1890 and 1914 discovered the sport in city settlement houses, YMCAs, and even places of worship. It seemed nearly perfect for new arrivals. The game could be played on small city lots; the players needed nothing more than a ball and some kind of hoop. Jewish youngsters came to dominate New York City tournaments. After all, as The American Hebrew observed, the sport required “quick thinking, lightning-like rapidity of movement and endurance; it does not call for brutality and brute strength.” And for the immigrants, it was unquestionably an American game. As Ted Vincent neatly summarized, “Basketball was the game of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal urban coalition [in the 1930s] of Jews, Catholics, and Blacks.”18
The first professional team to make a lasting mark on the sport was the New York Celtics (called the Original Celtics), formed in 1921. The Celtics, along with two teams made up of African-Americans—the Harlem Rens and the Harlem Globetrotters—became the most successful clubs in both profitability and in the way they reshaped the game, making it more fluid, graceful, and exciting to watch. These three teams dominated professional basketball during most of the first half of the twentieth century.
They were helped by new rules that changed the sport. Violence resulting from players chasing balls into the audience stopped when a high fence of chicken wire was placed around the floor. Players thus became known as “cagers,” and fights with fans diminished. The wire was removed in most gyms by the time the Celtics and Rens appeared. But no rules could turn basketball into the non-contact sport Naismith wished for. One of the great Celtic players, Nat Holman, recalled that “We wore hip pads, knee guards, and an aluminum cup.” Cut faces or “a loosened tooth were common injuries,” he remembered. Players did not like to jump, one of them recalled, because “They’d just knock you into a wall.”19
Yet with this crowd-pleasing bloodletting also came rules that encouraged crowd-pleasing imagination, speed, and subtlety. For years, baskets were simply attached to long poles. By World War I, however, they were on square “backboards” that allowed players to bank shots from fascinating angles. Until the 1930s, after each basket the referee stopped play and went to center court to toss the ball in the air for opposing players to tap into play. This break aimed at lowering the violence. By the eve of World War II, however, the center jump disappeared. Instead, the team that scored gave the ball over to the other team. Players, especially from the West Coast, began shooting daringly and quickly with one hand instead of launching the usual carefully planned, time-consuming, two-handed set shot.
By the late 1930s these changes helped make basketball the rage. Time magazine in 1940 believed that its seventy thousand teams made basketball America’s largest sport. Women’s basketball also grew popular again after some puritanical types, including First Lady Lou Henry Hoover, led a crusade in the 1920s to make the sport more “ladylike” and less exciting. The Amateur Athletic Union, which sponsored many women’s sports, responded by running beauty contests at the women’s national championships. The players themselves competed in the contests. Many angrily protested this kind of ticket-selling, as they did when professional teams, such as the Golden Cyclones—led by one of the greatest all-around athletes of the century, Mildred “Babe” Didrikson—played in shorts and jerseys. But, as historian Allen Guttmann noted, “The uniforms boosted attendance from under 200 to some 5000 a night.”20
Unfortunately for the men, such uniforms did little to increase attendance at their professional games. The American Basketball League, with teams in middle-sized Eastern and Midwestern cities, lasted from 1926 until the Depression year of 1931. Those few in media who followed the pros preferred the stars playing with the Rens, Globetrotters, and Celtics.
Finally, in the flush postwar year of 1946, modern professional basketball was born, after a long hard labor. The ten-year-old National Basketball League (NBL) was challenged by a new league, the Basketball Association of America (BAA). The BAA had three strengths: its teams were sponsored by arena owners who had money as well as attractive places in which to play; these owners lived in large city markets where media attention and attendance were at a maximum; and the owners used their cash to lure away NBL stars—including one later selected as the greatest player of the 1900 to 1950 years, George Mikan. At 6’10”, Mikan was the first well-coordinated giant who could both dominate a game and pull in fans who would pay to watch his graceful hookshot. By 1949, the NBL surrendered. The two leagues merged into the National Basketball Association (NBA) that has embodied the professional sport throughout the rest of the century.
In the 1950s it was clear that smaller cities such as Syracuse and Rochester, New York, could produce good teams, but not enough fans and media to pay for stars. Thus the 6’10” All-American of the University of San Francisco, Bill Russell, announced he would not play in a small city such as Rochester, which had draft rights to him. The Boston Celtics worked out an intricate deal to obtain Russell. He led Boston to eleven championships in thirteen years. By 1963, the Rochester and Syracuse franchises had moved to larger metropolitan areas. The NBA thus was located in, and ultimately saved by, the biggest media markets.
In 1952, the Dumont Television Network first aired a pro game. Two years later, the NBA dramatically sped up the game by introducing the twenty-four-second clock. Now the team having the ball could no longer slow the pace or stall while ahead; it had to shoot within twenty-four seconds. The speedy game, with its restricted space that a camera could easily cover (as opposed, say, to baseball, where television could at any moment show only a part of the action), already lent itself well to television. The NBA Commissioner, businessman Maurice Podoloff, saw to it that teams supplied free player photos to the media. He strongly discouraged team owners from releasing bad news (such as low gate receipts). Podoloff and the NBA were beginning to understand the importance of marketing and public relations, and how to manipulate both.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the NBA reached new heights of popularity and profit. Fans avidly followed individual matchups, especially the intense rivalry between two African-Americans, Boston’s Bill Russell and Philadelphia’s 7’1” Wilt Chamberlain who, except when guarded by Russell, was the game’s greatest scorer. In 1975 a rival league tried to tap into the game’s popularity. The American Basketball Association, however, lacked the financial backing, big-city media markets, and television contracts now required for survival. By the time Michael Jordan turned professional, the ABA had been forced to merge with the NBA.
But as Jordan left Chapel Hill, the NBA itself was stumbling. Revelations of extensive drug use by players, increased violence on the court, and the retirement of Russell and Chamberlain began to raise the question of whether professional basketball could survive. The ABA, however, had given the NBA a life-saving present: Julius “Dr. J” Erving, whose leaping, floating, and slam dunks astonished fans. Erving’s elegance, both on and off the court, helped cleanse the game and prepared the sports world for Michael Jordan. And back of Erving stood the ghosts of at least a half-century of great African-American players who had overcome immense obstacles to prepare the world for Erving, Jordan, and others.
The most popular and profitable American sports have usually cut across class, ethnic, and ultimately racial lines. Basketball was devised in a small city college, spread rapidly to the great urban areas where new immigrants huddled together, and became the game of choice in rural Kansas and Indiana, where bent hoops on the sides of barns or garages served as goals. The game, especially the professional game, developed its ever-changing orginality and greatest popularity, however, in the dirt (or, if especially fortunate, the asphalt playgrounds) of cities. Historian Steven Riess estimated that through the late 1980s, almost 90 percent of all professional basketball players came out of urban areas. Nearly one-third emerged from New York City alone.21
Three-quarters of the leading players Riess studied were German, Jewish, or Irish. Thus basketball could become a fast track out of immigrant neighborhoods, Hell’s Kitchen, and lower-class row houses. But that track also included college. Nearly 75 percent of professional players attended an institution of higher learning. A full 95 percent of the players examined later worked in white-collar jobs, such as law and business executive positions. Their education, not basketball, made them comfortable and sometimes wealthy. But basketball did help realize one version of the so-called American Dream.
When Michael Jordan joined the Chicago Bulls, half of the NBA’s players hailed from the twenty largest cities, usually inner-city neighborhoods where African-American families had replaced the Jewish, German, and Irish. Blacks had played on many of the earliest YMCA teams during the 1891 to 1941 years, then set up their own athletic clubs, such as the Smart Set Club of Brooklyn. These clubs were racially segregated, like schools and just about every other public facility. Philadelphia was different. Its schools were integrated, its basketball highly competitive. In other places, however, segregation forced black teams to play in broken-down gyms with shoddy equipment.
None of which prevented African-Americans from playing top-level basketball. By 1909 their skills led to the formation of the first important black professional team, the Monticello Delaney Rifles of Pittsburgh. Its creator, Cumberland Posey, came from an upper-class African-American family and had an incisive business sense. His teams generated controversy (and gate receipts) by physically intimidating amateur opponents. He saw to it that the Rifles were well covered by black-owned newspapers. When his Loendi Big Five team played an all-Jewish club team, the press and paying fans turned out by the thousands.
Posey’s success set the stage for the Harlem Renaissance (or Rens) from New York City, the Harlem Globetrotters (who were, in fact, out of Chicago), and other squads of African-American players. The Rens played amid the Harlem Renaissance—that period of innovations, especially in music, literature, and art, that did much to transform American culture during the 1920s. The name of the team actually came from the Harlem Renaissance Ballroom on 135th Street, where players shared the room with the great bands of Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford. These players made as much as a thousand dollars a month, a significant amount when fine apartments rented for less than a hundred dollars per month. But they had to barnstorm most of the year, often play two or three games a day, and eat in segregated restaurants while searching out segregated restrooms. One player recalled the team “slept in jails because they wouldn’t put us up in hotels …; we’d spray all the bedbugs before we went out to play and they’d be dead when we got back.”
The Rens and the Original Celtics were perhaps the nation’s two best basketball teams. But when the play-for-pay American Basketball League appeared in 1926, neither joined. The Rens were excluded because of racism. The Celtics were shackled because the ABL’s whites-only rule prevented them from playing highly profitable games against the Rens. After the National Basketball League appeared in 1937, it too refused to invite either the Rens or the Globetrotters. When the Rens played their last game in 1949, they had won 2,318 games and lost only 381, even though many had ended in fights with white fans who could not stomach losing to African-Americans. John Wooden, the UCLA legend who as coach won more college championships than anyone else, recalled the Rens as “The greatest team I ever saw.”22
The Globetrotters meanwhile set a new style with flashy dribbling and behind-the-back passing. Many whites, as historian Jim Naughton records, “looked down their noses at the Globies, and considered them nothing more than a minstrel show.”—until the team took two of three games from the great George Mikan and his NBA champion Minneapolis Lakers in 1948. Under the leadership of their imaginative business manager, Abe Saper-stein, the Trotters were both profitable and good. The media trumpeted that the 52,000 attending a 1968 college game in Houston was an all-time attendance record, but the Globetrotters played in outdoor stadiums before 75,000 in Berlin and 50,000 in Brazil. The Globetrotters could legitimately claim to be the best-known basketball team, perhaps the best-known sports team, on earth by the 1940s and 1950s.23
The historic turn came in 1946–1949. The new Basketball Association of America, fighting to keep up with its wealthier rival, the NBA, signed its first African-Americans to contracts. In baseball, Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby broke the color barrier. The NBA finally surrendered. Its New York, Boston, and Washington teams signed African-American stars in 1949–1950. When the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks lured away a couple of Globetrotters, it marked the beginning of troubled times for the famous team. This infusion of talent, combined with the new television contracts, made pro basketball quite successful in the 1950s and 1960s, at least in the large-city media areas.
In 1972 the way opened for women. Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Act forbade “Sex-discriminatory programs … by all educational institutions that receive federal money.” Furious opposition arose from some male athletic directors and alumni. They claimed that women’s sports would never pay their own way. (In truth, even among men’s college sports, only football and basketball usually paid their own way.) But women, after all, had been playing basketball since its founding, and they now demanded equal conditions and equipment. With the aid of lawsuits filed against foot-dragging colleges, the number of women’s hoop teams leaped from 242 in 1974 to over 1,500 in 1980. In 1978, the Women’s Basketball League was formed.24
Both female and male African-American athletes now could play for pay. But as Michael Jordan entered the NBA, racism continued to pervade the sport. Oscar Robertson, the game’s first big guard (at 6’5”) had dominated every level of play. His teams had won the Indiana high school championship; at the University of Cincinnati he became the first college player to lead the nation in scoring three consecutive years; and then, with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Robertson led Milwaukee to the 1971 NBA championship. But despite these achievements, and a squeaky-clean public life, Robertson, as an African-American, was not offered a single product endorsement until he had been a professional four years—and that offer was only to endorse a basketball. An unwritten, but acknowledged, rule among advertisers had it that black players’ endorsements did not sell products.25
When the upstart American Basketball Association failed and was partly absorbed into its NBA rival, word spread that its collapse was due to 75 percent of its players being African-American. After the Dallas club released four of its ten black players, a team official declared, “Whites in Dallas are simply not interested in paying to see an all-black team and the black population alone cannot support us.”26 By the mid-to-late 1980s, the three NBA stars who received the highest salaries were African-Americans: Earvin “Magic” Johnson ($2.5 million), Moses Malone ($2.1 million), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ($2 million). But two statisticians who analyzed overall salaries concluded that “when we control for performance, league seniority, and market-related variables, blacks are paid less than whites [in the NBA] by about 20 percent, or about $80,000 per year.” This amount “is similar in percentage terms to the pay gap between blacks and whites in the general labor force.”27
By the 1970s and early 1980s, African-American players not only suffered discrimination in product endorsements and salary. They also suffered from the eruption of a national debate, a debate that heatedly argued the question of why they had become so dominant in college and professional basketball. By the 1980s, they accounted for about 80 percent of starting players on pro teams. On the other hand, it was widely noted that even as late as 1987–1988, only four black head coaches and two African-American general managers worked among the twenty-three NBA teams. In the 1960s, the whispered reason for such a difference was that African-Americans had the bodies for athletic skills, but not the brains for management.
The whispering became a blast in 1968 when Charles Maher published a series of articles on the question in the Los Angeles Times. Many of the people Maher interviewed agreed with John Wooden, who had won eleven national championships at UCLA with black stars. “I think [the African-American athlete] has just a little more ambition to excel in sports,” Wooden declared, “because there aren’t enough other avenues open to him.” The explanation then, lay not in different bone structure, but in the different opportunities American society opened to whites as opposed to blacks. Three years later, Martin Kane came to different conclusions in a widely noted Sports Illustrated article. Kane concluded that racial differences, not socioeconomic opportunities, explained the dominance of the African-American athlete.28
Even during quiet times, such a debate would have sparked heated arguments. But this debate appeared during some of the country’s most transforming and violent years since the Civil War. Race riots burned and killed in North and South between 1964 and the early 1970s. In this supercharged atmosphere, experts angrily attacked Kane. Harry Edwards, the noted African-American sociologist, condemned Kane’s methodology and evidence, while arguing that more differences always existed within any racial group that between such groups. The idea that slavery had weeded out the physically weak and led to dominant athletes a century or more later was not only false on the evidence, Edwards charged, but allowed whites to reinforce the old stereotype that while they might be physically inferior, they were intellectually superior to blacks. A few leading African-American athletes, however, seemed to disagree with Edwards. A 1977 Time magazine story quoted such black stars as football player O. J. Simpson of the Buffalo Bills saying, “We are built a little differently—built for speed.” Joe Morgan of baseball’s Cincinnati Reds (and later a leading television sportscaster) agreed with Simpson.
The controversy and, too often, racism that swirled around the debate was only part of the NBA’s problems by 1983. Stories of drug use among players became frontpage news. In 1976, the player’s union and NBA owners had agreed to a new collective bargaining arrangement that first led to a rapid escalation in salaries, then—as the owners tried to save money—to bitter labor disputes. Fans were growing tired, moreover, of the style of play, especially a lack of discipline and defense, as well as the violence. Thus television also lost interest in the NBA. The 1980 championship game showcased Magic Johnson of Los Angeles against Julius Erving of Philadelphia, but CBS television only ran the game on tape delay around midnight after the local news.
At least ten of the NBA teams were either for sale or faced bankruptcy. Only six enjoyed profits. “It’s just difficult,” one team official reasoned, “to get a lot of people to watch huge, intelligent, millionaire black people on television.” Newsweek simply concluded that the NBA “has become the sorriest mess in sports.”29
Then a new era began. The just-appointed commissioner of the NBA was a young lawyer, David Stern. He helped work out a 1983 agreement between players and management that capped salaries and thus gave the poorer teams (usually in the smallest television markets) a chance to compete for players and thus a chance to survive. Stern also initiated a tough drug policy. It helped first offenders receive assistance and get off drugs, but threw repeat offenders out of the league.
And in 1984 Jordan joined the Bulls, a losing, lackluster team that had done little for the NBA in one of the nation’s most glamorous television markets. His appearance climaxed a long process that began with James Naismith’s imagination, the Harlem Rens’ steely discipline and athleticism, Julius Erving’s grace, and the post-1979 black-white competition that had erupted between the intensely joyous Magic Johnson of Los Angeles and the joyously intense Larry Bird of Boston. This long history now began, under David Stern’s guidance, to move toward the limitless possibilities offered by the world’s love of sports—and by a new global technology that U.S. transnational corporations and certain athletes could profit from mightily.