The racially driven marketing of the Celtics and Larry Bird coincided with technological change and the visionary direction of David Stern, who took over as league commissioner in 1984. If video killed the radio star, it made the NBA superhero. By the time the NBA had moved into prime time, networks had already mastered the technologies that would bring out the best in televised sports. With the refinement of instant replay and slow motion, basketball fans were given the tools necessary to fully digest the milliseconds of athletic brilliance that passed before them all too quickly. Highlight shows--a television trend gaining steam in the 1980s--converted lopsided games into thrilling spectacles by simply piecing together the finest moments of play. The NBA under Stern's leadership followed the highlight show model and began releasing all sorts of pseudo-documentaries on teams, superstars, up-and-comers, trends, and the like that were basically highlight reels set to music and sometimes accompanied by narration. The NBA Superstars series presented four- or five-minute MTV-like music videos of a star player's most exciting moments, set to a particular song that fit thematically with the athlete's "persona." In one piece, Charles Barkley dunks and struts provocatively to George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone," while in another, Larry Bird swooshes jumpers straight from the heartland to the tune of John Mellencamp's "Small Town." NBA athletes were now literally video stars, plugged as character types.
In NBA Entertainment's documentary, Larry Bird: A Basketball Legend, Bird is presented as the little white guy who could. Listening to narrator Daniel Stern, the voice of innocence inside the head of Kevin Arnold, played by Fred Savage on the The Wonder Years, one could almost believe that Larry Bird and Kevin could have a thing or two in common. Insecurity, social awkwardness, and small-town naiveté made both of their lives difficult at times. While shyness complicated Bird's adjustment to the spotlight, nerves seemed to do in Kevin any time he tried to tell a girl how he really felt. The similarities may not go much further; after all, Bird was a six-foot-nine basketball superman and Arnold, a love-struck teenager who looked about four-foot-ten on camera. Yet the video makes us root for Bird for the same reason we pull for Kevin Arnold: both are cast as major underdogs. Bird, an average Joe with limited natural athletic abilities and raised in humble surroundings, toiled doggedly to overcome adversity and make it big as a ballplayer.
The subplot of the triumphant underdog/everyman in Larry Bird: A Basketball Legend mixes with another story line: Bird as basketball's equivalent of apple pie. The film's imagery and narration, mostly a collection of analogies and clichés, align Bird with all things sacred and tradition-based in sports and America. Larry Bird, "a gangly country boy … resembling a twentieth-century Huckleberry Finn … would play with the passion of the underdog, the purity of tradition, [and, after a stellar career with the Celtics as] the savior of their proud tradition, he would … leave behind … a legacy."
A television piece entitled History of the NBA, which aired on HBO in 1990, opens with a montage that matches images of basketball hoops in different environments with shots of the NBA's all-time best in action. Produced by HBO Sports and NBA Entertainment, the documentary's voiceover informs us that while the game has grown and changed over time, it retains a "simple purity." With these words, the film cuts to a shot of two horses passing a basket mounted on a grass field (presumably on a farm) and then goes to a slow-motion sequence of Larry Bird pulling up for a three on Charles Barkley. Like horses and farmland, Larry Bird represents what is still untainted in America.
After the Boston Celtics beat the Detroit Pistons in the 1987 Eastern Conference finals, Detroit's Dennis Rodman, a rookie who had just been torched by Bird's hot shooting, told reporters that Bird was overrated because of his race. Rodman's teammate, Isiah Thomas, agreed. Much was made of Rodman's statement and Thomas's agreement; the two, who were labeled racists by the media, later called a press conference to rescind their statement and apologize to Bird (who didn't seem to care either way). If Bird were black, he would still have been a phenomenal basketball player; his gifts were undeniable. However, he would not have meant the same thing to white hoops fans nationwide, to a desperate NBA, and to the legacy of the Celtics organization.
In large part, Bird's national popularity and lasting legacy were propelled by an impulse that is probably inside of all white fans. It is simultaneously a frantic desire to be included and a patronizing belief that the white athlete can restore the sanctity that has been traditional to sports and reverse the damage caused by black irreverence. This is the motivation behind the long-lasting phenomenon in sports of rooting for the white guy; it combines a nostalgic remembrance of how sports used to be with anger over what's become of them. The NBA Entertainment videos tapped into this very theme of the white underdog/throwback.
Of course the white hip-hop kids with gangsta aspirations--dubbed the "Prep-School Gangsters" by Nancy Jo Sales in her New York Magazine cover story of the same title--didn't get their hip-hop fashion totally right. ("Prep-School Gangsters" refers to the wealthy but thuggish-looking kids on the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan and not to the downtown groups, depicted in the movie Kids, that were causing havoc at the same time.) Easily drawn to the preppy brands popular with their parents, Prep-School Gangsters wore too much of the Polo and Hilfiger gear trendy among East Coast hip-hop acts like Grand Puba and A Tribe Called Quest. Moreover, they bought so much of the ridiculously expensive preppy stuff that they looked less and less like the poorer blacks they were trying to emulate and more and more like parodies of real gangstas. To guard against being labeled poseurs, the prep schoolers started to steal the gear that their parents could readily afford; this way they weren't technically buying their way in. The black hip-hop kids often wore more black and less expensive stuff, and sometimes they matched all of their clothing to a color scheme featuring two solid colors (frequently based on sports teams [as noted above], widely recognized high-status fashion items, and street gangs).
The most voyeuristic and overt example of white wannabes pursuing coolness through "visiting" blackness was the quirky New York City phenomenon of the boomer cab. Boomer cabs were private cars provided by several city taxi services and catering specifically to the prep school troublemaking set. They were black luxury sedans--usually Lincoln Town Cars--with tinted windows and a set of subwoofers in the back to pump out a soundtrack of loud, bass-heavy rap. They provided a concealed, supervision-free, and transient space for illicit activities and the right ambiance in which to roll and smoke blunts, down a "forty," and generally play the role of gangsta. In addition to shuttling kids to specific addresses as conventional cabs did, boomer cabs offered a unique touring service: a joy ride through the 'hood. With a knowledgeable, usually nonwhite driver, the comfort of an air-conditioned car, and the anonymity of tinted windows, the cabs took white kids through black neighborhoods and places with a particular contemporary or historical relevance in hip-hop: a housing project from which a certain rapper hailed, a favorite store like Dr. Jay's in Harlem, or perhaps farther uptown to Rucker Park, where (as noted in chapter 1) rappers started the EBC summer tournament in the early 1980s. The white kids in boomer cabs weren't simply seeing these places; they were pretending to be a part of them--to live them and to do so with rap-video swagger, with a blunt hanging from their lips while they nodded to the beat. What better way to absorb the geography, style, and decadence of hip-hop while avoiding the poverty, desolation, and destruction from which it derived?
A boomer cab ride was a brief and safe trip to the wild side, a way to feel tough and reckless without giving up anything or changing anything about one's life. It's most significant that this normal teenage desire to be "bad" is experienced through acting black according to the tenets of black life described and often extolled by hip-hop. In some ways, it's the least creative and most obvious way to act on the teenage spectrum of rebellion. A white teenager's acting the part of a black gangsta is an easy way to challenge parental expectations, throw off neighbors, and provoke teachers. Of course, none of the wannabes actually want the burden of being black; the taking on of blackness was conditional.
The need to act out subsides as teenagers become adults, but it never fully goes away. For adults it is a vicarious high to get into the sinister characters in a good mob movie. When the credits roll, one leaves the movie feeling mischievous and darker. Sometimes the viewer feels a passing desire to dress more sharply, talk more slickly, and move with stealth and style. Adults of all ages love to talk tough, show off their knowledge of expressions from the lexicon of cool disseminated by hip-hoppers and teenagers, dress younger, laugh at black comedians, watch black athletes, and adore and/or hate them (sometimes both at the same time). Blackness specifically still equals cool, even for white adults. The white, Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody, approaching the age of forty, boasted in a hip-hop magazine about being down, claiming that as a kid he "went bombing in Brooklyn with Tupac."
In 1999, David Shields penned an unusual book, Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season. The book was the painfully honest confession of a white basketball fan's profound, sometimes perverse obsession with the black players on the Seattle Supersonics. Shields, who trailed the team for a year for his study, admits that by identifying with his favorite player, trash-talking point guard Gary Payton, and sharing in Payton's brash style of play, he could " fantasize about being bad." Shields reveals that his infatuation with black players permeates all areas of his life, even--and this is where he's at his most twisted--one evening after a birthday dinner, when he and his wife "make love." Shields immediately rethinks his choice of words and clarifies what he believes took place in the bedroom: "that's not quite the right term--it's more like fucking: a rough physicality that I realize later is my attempt to imitate the athletes I spend so much time watching and thinking about."
The fetishism extends to Shields's white friends. At a Sonics home game, his neighbor Richard, commenting on the decreasing number of white jump shooters in the NBA, explains that "'when you go to play ball in the ghet-to, you gots to throw it down, not shoot it.'" Neighbor Richard's brand of commentary--an exaggerated reproduction of black speak described by Shields as a "shucking-and-jiving routine"--is commonplace when white fans consume hip-hop or basketball in exclusively white surroundings.
Over the summer of 2005, a proudly uncouth Randy Moss, the controversial all-pro wide receiver, pleased with his having deluded the NFL once again, told Bryant Gumbel on HBO's Real Sports that he had smoked marijuana during his NFL tenure. Moss's Raiders jersey became the number one seller the same month. (The Raiders were already the official bad-kid team of the league for their tradition of taking chances on controversial players; their smash-mouth brand of play; and their apparel, with its California gang associations.) . The best-selling jersey surely requires plenty of white buyers following that desire to feel and look "bad," to take another temporary trip to the dark side, to hop in that boomer cab again.
The purchasing of jerseys is always based as much on politics as it is on geography. In 2001, in the post-Jordan era, the NBA Finals showcased two superstar guards on opposing teams: Kobe Bryant and Allen Iverson. The former was a league hero, and the latter was its antihero. Before his long fall from grace, Lakers shooting guard Bryant reveled in the role of Jordan's successor, while Sixers point guard Iverson renounced any label--good or bad--as an unwarranted attempt to apply a Jordanesque polish to his image. It was widely reported that when Iverson was a rookie, during a game between Philadelphia and Jordan's Chicago Bulls, he told Jordan that he didn't have to respect anybody in the league, His Airness included. During the 2002-03 season, Iverson's jersey outsold those of any other player with the exception of Kobe Bryant. The fans had chosen between hero and antihero.
There are of course no statistics on the racial breakdown of purchasers of Iverson jerseys, but for it to be a consistent best seller year in and year out--and it has regularly been in the top five--it is clear that there must be a major white contingent of purchasers. Purchasing a player's jersey is a meaningful decision for a fan. Wearing clothing with someone else's name on it--clothing "belonging to" and originally designed for another person--is like putting on a costume and exchanging identities. It's also a provocative item in our sports-obsessed society: it demands that others evaluate the wearer based on the team and athlete that is represented. A Shaq jersey--a jersey that arguably "belongs" to the game's biggest crossover star--communicates a different message from an Iverson jersey. The former symbolizes pulling for the favorite, basketball fun, a celebration of one's own overgrown kid tendencies, and complicity with mainstream culture and with the NBA. The latter indicates support for the underdog, mischievously siding with a troublemaker, and staging one's own small-scale revolution. An Iverson jersey is official badass gear, recognized in pop culture in the same way as a Sex Pistols T-shirt or a Rolling Stones shirt with the signature lips emblem. But because it's only a costume, it's only a temporary trip to the dark side.
The breakneck, furious ascendancy of hip-hop through the 1990s made it a universal, cross-racial cultural tour de force. But both its popularity and intensity boiled over during 1996-97 (my senior year in high school). Hip-hop imploded. The coastal beef between label heads Suge Knight and Puffy Combs and their best-selling artists, Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G.) became real-life tragedy when 2Pac and then Biggie were gunned down in September 1996 and March 1997 respectively. Though both murders remain unsolved because of increasingly obvious police complicity, facts eventually pointed to Knight, a bona fide gangsta, as their most likely orchestrator. Knight's underworld standing in California extended so far above ground that it enabled him to play puppet master with both the Bloods, a Los Angeles street gang, and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and evidently get away with two murders. While drug gangs have traditionally provided the creative inspiration as well as the start-up cash for hip-hop labels on both coasts, the slayings of 2Pac and Biggie, inarguably the biggest hip-hop stars of the day and most likely of all time, sobered up aspiring gangstas, black and white alike. The deaths were a reminder of hip-hop's foundations in the street; at any point hip-hop could transcend its subsistence as art. 2Pac and Biggie may have understood the street, but they were artists, gangsta-rappers at moments in their careers, but never real gangstas. Suge Knight, on the other hand, was a gangsta.
The deaths of 2Pac and Biggie forced hip-hop even further into the American public's consciousness, presenting an apocalyptic view of the music and the culture in the process. While hip-hop was at the apex of its popularity, it was also at its scariest and most capricious. For those uninterested in hip-hop but already assuming the worst about rappers even before the murders--those believing that all rappers were every bit as violent and criminal-minded as they claimed to be in their lyrics--the fatal shootings served as graphic, absolute confirmation. For those knowledgeable of hip-hop who had assumed that rap was about headline-grabbing feuds and lyrics that were as lewd and grotesque as possible so as to stir up controversy, increase record sales, and make money, this was a reality check. Rap really could be as violent and ugly as it alleged.
Regardless of one's familiarity with hip-hop, the 2Pac-Biggie saga made it unequivocally clear that hip-hop existed on two planes: on the one hand, it was a cultural and commercial powerhouse that had captivated an enormous audience that ranged across the color spectrum; on the other hand, it was a combustible force bound to the underworld and the impoverished streets from which it had been spawned. In hip-hop, the NBA had a new cultural location, image, and marketing direction to carry it, as a gradually declining Jordan, who had made the NBA into a major international entity, headed toward retirement. Whether Commissioner Stern and the league brass desired such changes is uncertain, but it is extremely unlikely. For them the challenge of managing the infusion of hip-hop, which inaugurated the arrival of pro basketball's new class of young stars, was akin to playing with fire: handle it right and it would power the NBA into the new millennium; manage it wrong and it would burn down the house that Stern, Magic, Bird, and Jordan had built.