The Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Next, to how that same struggle took place on America’s basketball courts. In her new book, “Black Ball”, professor of African American history, Theresa Runstedtler, details how black basketball players were pivotal into the transformation of the game. And she tells Michel Martin how, of course, that in turn, transformed the wider society.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Professor Theresa Runstedtler, thank you so much for talking with us.

THERESA RUNSTEDTLER, AUTHOR, “BLACK BALL”: Thanks for inviting me to come on.

MARTIN: So, I’m super excited to talk about your book, “Black Ball”. You’re a professor of African American studies, but one of your research interest — a number of your research interests do involve, like, the way you know, sports — the role that sports plays in our culture. The way they, kind of, affect each other. This book is a history of professional basketball from the ’50s through the ’70s. Why this title? Why “Black Ball”?

RUNSTEDTLER: Well, I was trying to take the double meaning a “Black Ball”, literally meaning black ball in the terms of the transformation of basketball over the course of the ’70s. From what was seen as a traditionally white game into a game dominated by black players and black aesthetics, black style. But then also, too, thinking about blacklisting. The blackballing of players and the exclusion of them from the league and also the ways in which the team owners, who were all white at that time, really made sure that they kept control over their labor force.

MARTIN: I think that — there are so many things in this book that I think people who are just kind of fans of the game might be shocked by. Like the fact that there was this transition period where the game was, originally, a predominantly white — like most professional sports leagues in this country were predominately white and then it switched. But also, the fact that, you know, people are so used to seeing these players as, kind of, mini corporations now that I think it would — it’s surprising to many people to find out the degree to which — that that is a relatively recent, you know, phenomenon. The fact that they have the kind of agency. The fact that they have outspokenness that they have. So, talk a little bit about how that came about. And if you would — and I particularly want you to tell me about like Spencer Haywood, for example, what role he played in that?

RUNSTEDTLER: Yes, Spencer Haywood was, you know, really kind of a mover and shaker in this new generation of black players coming in the ’60s and early ’70s. So, he was the first ever hardship draft into the American Basketball Association. So, the NBA, for a long time, had been the only game in town in terms of professional basketball. The American Basketball Association became established in 1967. And in order to compete with the NBA they created something called the hardship clause where they said that, we can draft underclassmen out of college even if they haven’t used up all of their college eligibility, because at the time the NBA had this draconian four-year-old which prevented players from the college ranks or even the high school ranks to go into the draft in the NBA. And so, Spencer Haywood took advantage of the situation of two weeks competing against each other and he managed to get a contract with the Denver Rockets of the ABA. Now, he supposedly had a million-dollar contract. But then he started talking with some of the old heads of — you know, OGs of the game and they said, listen, your contract is probably not worth what they said it was worth in the media. So, he ended up going to an agent at that time to have him look over his contract. And the agent verified the fact that the contract was actually fraudulent in a lot of ways. It promised things that just would not pan out. It also involved a lot of deferred and therefore on guaranteed money. So, rather than staying in that position, he tried to renegotiate the contract. And what’s important to understand in the context of the 1970s is that you didn’t have a lot of leverage as, particularly, a black basketball player going into talks with a white team owner. You did not have a lot of leeway to say, look, I know I am in the midst of my contract but I want to renegotiate it. So, he really bucked the trend that way. He ended up suing, or countersuing, the Denver Rockets and then turned to the Seattle Supersonics of the NBA. The NBA, however, did not say, come on in. Come on in play. They actually prevented him from playing. And so, he turned around and sued the NBA. He ended up, you know, winning and he was able to play in the NBA. And if we didn’t have that pivotal place and his, you know, chutzpah to basically challenge the entire white basketball establishment folks like LeBron James wouldn’t, you know, be where they are today. They wouldn’t be able to enter the league on their own terms.

MARTIN: That’s fascinating because, you know, even agents are famous now. Like, you know, LeBron’s agent, like, Rich Paul, he’s like a celebrity in his own right. First of all, talk about, sort of, the style. The esthetic. I mean, one of the things that the ABA did was kind of give players more freedom to play the way they might have played growing up, right? The, sort of, street ball style. We’re going to talk a little bit about that and how was that perceived?

RUNSTEDTLER: Black players used the availability of position in this new league to actually come to dominate the game. And in some respects, the ABA, if you think of Dr. J, Julius Erving, bringing that playground style to the courts. We’re talking about the aerial play. We’re talking about the individual athletic feats. We’re talking about trash talking which we’ve been talking about a lot lately with LSU in the women’s game recently. But all of that was brought to the game in the context of black players really flooding the professional ranks at that time but they did that in spite of the powers that be.

MARTIN: You talk about the fact that the ’70s were sometimes referred to as the, “Dark days.” You know, and we can obviously unpack, like, all the levels of that. But could you just talk a little bit about why it’s referred to that way and why you really object to that. And why, at the very least, you think it needs to be reconsidered?

RUNSTEDTLER: Yes, I mean the 1970s are often this forgotten period of NBA history. We go right from the ’60s with Bill Russell and the Celtics and jump right to Larry Bird and Magic Johnson in the ’80s. But the ’70s were really key, even though we think of them as the dark ages and age when players were getting into trouble. When they were becoming more entitled. When they were getting lazy. When they were using drugs. When they were fighting on the court. But for me, when I started to see all of these narratives about the league’s decline, I could not help but see that as a metaphor for literally the darkening of the league. So as more black players were coming in, changing the style of the game on the court, contesting the power of the owners in the courts, that in fact there was this kind of backlash against their efforts to change the game. And so they got painted as quote unquote “trouble,” as troublesome players. Yeah, absolutely.

MARTIN: But one of the points that you make in the book is that, that you know, that other athletes who engage in this conduct aren’t necessarily described in that way. It’s not seen as a reflection on the whole sport, and it’s not seen as kind of a reflection of the culture. On the other hand, let me just push you a bit on this, you know, Len Bias, for example, kind of a top, highly sought after recruit. He did die from a cocaine overdose. Right, okay. It was very traumatic. And obviously, you know, do you not think it was reasonable to kind of trace that back and see, gee, how did this happen? Could we not prevent this from happening again? What do you think about that?

RUNSTEDTLER: Yeah, well, I mean, it’s interesting that you go to Len Bias cuz this project, the book that I wrote actually came out of trying to trace the pre-history of Len Bias’s story. Yeah. So Len Bias, you know, drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1986, dies of a cocaine overdose. All of a sudden his image became almost weaponized by president Ronald Reagan and the Republicans who were trying to push through omnibus legislation in the war on drugs. So you have the 1986 Anti-Drug Act, which brings in all of these punitive measures that help to ramp up you know, mass incarceration in the United States. So I was wondering why is it that, you know, he as a basketball player, beyond just his individual tragedy, as somebody who took drugs, why did he become the symbol that drove all of this legislation? So one of the things that I found in going back through the 1970s was the various efforts to really paint the drug problem in sports as an African-American problem. And, and the fact that these guys were so hyper-visible only led to, you know, more and more discourse about the fact that these guys were making too much money. They were living the fast life, they were out of control. And it became a kind of microcosm of larger things happening in U.S. society.

MARTIN: You know, the other thing that you talk about in the book is that the professional sports media played such an important role during these decades. You say it’s practically a character in your book. So could you just talk a little bit about that and, and also why do you think that is?

RUNSTEDTLER: Well, I mean, what’s so interesting is this critique of the white media was actually coming from the players themselves and then also coming from black independent media. Because there were outlets at that time, for example, Black Sports Magazine, which was a black run, black owned sports magazine targeted at black fans. And they also noted the fact that white sports journalists tended to uncritically repeat the press releases of the team owners and, and the league without actually digging into, well, are they really making, or are they really going out of business? For example, are player salaries actually making, you know, these teams go out of business? Is it really true that 40 to 75%, as, you know,, the LA Times piece in 1980 said, is it really true that 40 to 75% are on cocaine? And there was no sort of unpacking of that. And yet you find all of that unpacking, deconstruction, critique happening amongst the players themselves and also in Black media.

MARTIN: Do you ever think there’s been a reckoning in the field of sports reporting about the role that they may have played in shaping perceptions of these athletes?

RUNSTEDTLER: I feel like a lot of those same narratives keep cropping up now in terms of, if you look at, you know, the ways that they describe, for example you know, this newer generation of black quarterbacks, if you look at how you know, the racial discourse around Iowa versus LSU and the women’s NCAA final as this kind of racial contest between, you know Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. You see those narratives still, you know, being replayed and repurposed for a new era. And one of the things that I think I tried to do in the book was to say, “Hey, if we systematically analyzed what folks were saying in the context of that time, one can see a pattern here.

MARTIN: So what about now? People remember in the wake of the death of George Floyd and also in the wake of Colin Kaepernick, you know, the former quarterbacks, became a huge story in his, I think, you know, some people might consider fairly anodyne, you know, protest tactics, you know, kneeling during the National anthem, and it became this enormous story. So it was this huge issue, you know, in the NFL, you know, players were kind of put on the spot like, are you with us? And it just seemed, it just seemed like it was a very different era for the NBA. Do you agree? I mean it just doesn’t seem to have been as sort of seismic in the NBA.

RUNSTEDTLER: Yeah, so I think that the NBA because of those earlier struggles in the seventies is really a league where the players have a large degree of both individual and collective power. The NBPA is one of the powerful unions in professional sport. Now, mind you, the rosters are much smaller than those of the NFL. So there is a difference, you know, from sport to sport in that case. But I think because the players have been so active and have always talked about their own labor struggles as being connected to wider struggles for African American rights and labor rights, that they have this already long-standing tradition since the 1970s, arguably even earlier than that of, of calling out various forms of racism. And so, if anything, I think that they’ve pushed the NBA to become a much more progressive league because they realize that they have to acknowledge the power of the players in a way that the NFL seems to be able to still control the narrative in a powerful way.

MARTIN: Do you think that there’s a way in which the struggles of the NBA has affected the culture at large? You, you make a compelling case for how, for example, you say, you know, without Spencer Haywood, there might, there would be no LeBron, you know, without, you know, Dr. J, without Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Of course. Do you think that that generation of players, do you think that they had an impact beyond their sport?

RUNSTEDTLER: Absolutely. I think that they became icons of a new, kind of more defiant black masculine identity. One that said, listen, we are gonna take control of the situation. We’re gonna figure out how to fight this. And even if we have to go to the courts, we’re gonna fight this. And when Oscar Robertson, who was the head of the NBPA back at that time, and is the, you know, the name associated with the lawsuit against the NBA that brought down the reserve clause when he was testifying, he understood that this was a struggle in which they could not back down because everybody was watching. And I think the hyper visibility of these guys helped to inspire, you know, a continued wave of, of racial activism at that time, whether or not they were actually out in their communities, they became these icons of defiance that, you know, I think that we, we overlook when we talk about the black freedom struggle.

MARTIN: Professor Theresa Runstedtler, author of “Black Ball.” Thank you so much for talking with us.

RUNSTEDTLER: Thank you.