Before his murder in 1997, rap god Biggie Smalls articulated a survival guide of sorts for drug dealers in his genre-defining single, “Ten Crack Commandments.” Biggie rapped about the crack game, but he could just as easily have been lecturing about the business side of pro basketball: To “get over” in a cutthroat world—the street-corner economy, the sleazy record industry, or the hyper-capitalist NBA—look out for yourself. Can’t Knock the Hustle articulates the interdependent language, values, and looks of hip-hop, contemporary basketball, and the drug culture to reveal how today’s rap-music-reared generation of NBA players interprets the business and political aspects of the sport.
Allen Iverson’s debut season in the NBA, 1996-97, coincided with the murders of hip-hop’s biggest stars, 2Pac and Biggie. Iverson filled the void by expediting the NBA’s previously incremental hip-hop makeover. While the NBA simultaneously sold and censored its controversial star (even airbrushing his tattoos out of official photos), Iverson effortlessly empowered the hip-hop generation, which now included poor black kids as well as rich white kids masquerading as gangstas.
When Latrell Sprewell, in 1997, jumped on his coach, PJ Carlesimo and choked him, he forever changed power relations in the NBA. Sprewel’s dismissal from the league galvanized a conspicuous, highly political solidarity on the part of many black players that emerged again in the aftermath of the 2004 courtside brawl in Detroit, when Ron Artest supplanted Sprewell as the poster-boy for violence in the NBA. Power Game highlights the different analyses of the Sprewell-Carlesimo showdown in the mainstream and black press, tells how and why players rallied around Sprewell and Artest, and explores the clever tactics a savvy Sprewell used to manipulate his own image and resurrect his career.
He may have retired 15 years ago, but Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird is still celebrated by frat boys, older hoops fans, and Bostonians of all stripes as the last American-born, white hoops superstar. This chapter looks at the race-specific marketing of Bird by the NBA, the cultural meaning of Bird’s legacy in post-busing Boston, and the theme of white nostalgia in sports and beyond. The Bird story of race in basketball has never been more relevant: in 2004 Bird sparked major controversy when he declared on ESPN that the NBA needed more white players to attract a broader following in this country.
The 1986 Oscar-nominated film Hoosiers is the ultimate David and Goliath tale. Obscured by the changing of the year in the film, however, is that the underdogs of Milan High, who overcame a tiny enrollment and severe height and talent limitations to capture the state title, competed during the last season before the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education. From a town without a single black resident, the little school mastered a strategy known as the cat-and-mouse to contain and baffle faster and bigger mixed-race and all-black teams. The iconic Coach Bob Knight brought this loaded 50s-style approach to Big Ten college basketball at Indiana University in the 70s and stayed with it through the 1990s. Cat-and-mouse became the formula used by white schools—many of which resisted desegregation—to contain teams playing up-tempo “black” hoops. The tides of old and new still clash in Indiana: when Coach Knight was fired in 2000, venomous Knight supporters nearly burned down the Bloomington campus and called for the head of Mike Davis, Knight’s replacement and the university’s first black coach of any sport. The hateful hailstorm never let up and Davis stepped down in 2006.
Just fifteen years ago, USA Basketball deployed the Dream Team to demonstrate American world dominance in the sport at the expense of outmatched foreigners who, until just a few years ago, were thought of as the effeminized others—too soft and dainty to share a court with our boys. Today, the storyline has shifted entirely: foreign players are venerated in the same way as American-born white athletes—as heady, fundamentally sound ballplayers who play the game right. Once the world’s finest, America’s players, given their lack of discipline, dubious work ethic, and shoddy understanding of the game, now seem to be begging to be replaced. In this glaring role reversal and heated backlash against black players, sports commentators almost universally see the American system as somehow less to blame than these selfish, education-spurning athletes while they cheer the soccer-club-style European system, which plucks children from school for basketball apprenticeships. The chapter breaks down what’s fact and what’s fiction in this story and tells how top sneaker companies, with the NCAA as an accomplice, seized control of amateur basketball to the detriment of young players, opening the game up to foreign programs that do a better job of developing the next generation on the court.