BLACK BALL

Engrossing account of professional basketball’s decades of transformation, focused on complex labor and racial politics and the roles of many compelling figures.

Runstedtler, a professor of African American history at American University and a former member of the Toronto Raptors’ dance team, is well acquainted with the massively popular sport’s “unspoken racial politics,” and she has the ambition to look beyond the palatable victory narratives of recent years. Beginning with how maverick players endured segregation and harassment in the 1950s, she captures a disturbing long-term narrative of Black players being exploited for decades by (White) team owners. “As Black players became even more numerous and more dominant in the NBA,” writes the author, “they came under heightened scrutiny.” The author goes on to examine the multidecade tumult of American racial politics amid urban and industrial decline, especially in the 1970s. Yet she also captures an intricate legal drama, as the increasingly powerful NBA sought a merger with the outlier ABA despite obvious antitrust issues and also to protect the exploitative and stingy draft system against players’ organization attempts. The book’s three sections follow a rough chronology. The author points out how antitrust fights coincided with the burgeoning political consciousness of an increasingly Black workforce—and the prominence of transformational figures such as Julius Irving, Spencer Haywood, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “This fight,” writes Runstedtler, “was about the players’ dignity as workers.” In the epilogue, the author shows that while the NBA as a whole “began to fashion itself as a space of both colorblindness and multiculturalism,” the owners (still overwhelmingly White) continued to overlook “their own pattern of greed and mismanagement” during long-term attacks on the labor rights gained by athletes in the ’70s, in tandem with overblown accusations of violence and drug abuse among players. The writing is crisp and detailed, and the author skillfully manages social panorama, legal issues, and racial history to produce a compelling and well-researched tale.

A strong, engaging look at a poignant, neglected aspect of pro sports.