Black Men on the Blacktop: Basketball and the Politics of Race
Black Men on the Blacktop: Basketball and the Politics of Race
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626377172 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The Black Man's Game
Basketball's all we got left.
— Clark
It was about 5:30 on a summer Saturday afternoon at the park. The day's heat had just begun to ebb, and there were only a few other players out on the courts, certainly not enough for a real game to start-up. As far as outdoor venues go, these courts were in better shape than the courts at some of the city's more neglected parks and recreation centers. During his 2009 campaign, the mayor had promised to transform the city's twenty-six recreation facilities into "activity centers" that provide inner-city youth with meaningful alternatives to street life. Unlike other politicians who often seem to leave their promises on the stump, the mayor kept true to his word. The department of parks and recreation resurfaced the courts, replacing the traditional asphalt with a more professional feeling acrylic surface, and the courts had been outfitted with new baskets, backboards, and paint. The old and damaged single basketball rims had also been replaced, but with double rims to prevent them from breaking or bending from overly enthusiastic dunks. Nobody prefers double rims, because the greater surface area creates more friction and bounce, and the rims require greater accuracy for a shot to go in. Basically, they can make average shooters look bad and bad shooters look worse.
While I waited for other players to show up, I began shooting around to warm up. After about twenty minutes a few others had arrived, but none were among the regular ballers who frequented this court, at least not anyone that I knew. Since we still didn't have enough players to run a full-court game, those of us shooting on my end of the court decided to play twenty-one. While some of the rules for twenty-one vary depending on where you are in the country, in essence twenty-one is an every-man-for-himself game in which the objective is to score twenty-one points before your opponents.
Whenever games of full court are about to start, there is a sizing-up process where players casually try to estimate the skill level of others on the court. And the good thing about twenty-one is that this evaluation process can be accomplished fairly quickly. Usually, when sizing up another player, you pay attention to their height, general athleticism, jumping ability, and the overall style of game they play in a one-on-one setting. Basketball is a game of matchups, and this process can be critical to determining a team's success. You try to figure out who on the court might be a slasher, an individual who can drive the ball to the basket; who might be a shooter, someone who can score from mid- and long range consistently; who might be a balanced player capable of doing a little of everything; and who might be a scrub, someone whose skill-level commands little attention as either a teammate or opponent.
The other benefit of twenty-one is that it is a good way to find your shot. In basketball, shooting is largely mechanics, and even professional basketball players have a shoot-around to fine-tune their jumper and "find their stroke" before they begin an actual game. Over the course of our three games of twenty-one, eight additional players arrived, all black. Even though this court had one of the best runs around, rarely did white players venture out to play here. And when a white player did show up, you knew he brought "game." Many of the brothers assembled this afternoon were regular ballers who frequented this court, and it was obvious that the time had come to get the real action underway.
The protocol varies from place to place in determining who gets to play in the first full-court game and how particular teams are chosen. In some places the first ten guys to show up automatically get to play. On other courts, regardless of when players arrive, once it's determined that full-court will be played, players shoot for a spot on a team by making a free throw or three-pointer or are chosen by captains. The selection of captains offers another procedural layer, usually involving some form of shoot-out in which, for example, the first two players to make three-point baskets are chosen as team leaders and take turns selecting which players they want to man their squads.
In this day's contest, the winner of the final twenty-one game was designated as one team captain and the first of the remaining players to hit a three-point shot was designated the second captain. I was neither, but I was picked up fairly early. Teams were quickly chosen and the evening's games of pickup were nearly underway. By this time the temperature had cooled off enough to draw a small crowd of kids and young women, many of whom were there to cheer on a boyfriend or father. A couple of "old heads," whose basketball days were well in their rear view, took the sidelines and would soon begin their ritualistic public discourse, "Back in the day, when I played ..." seemingly unwilling to move on from their prior status as a baller. Other passersby, drawn to the energy of the court, stood off in the shade to take in the scene.
Even though nothing of material value was typically at stake in pickup ball, I always get a bit anxious before the start of a competitive full-court game. Today was certainly no exception. I could feel my heart rate elevating and a little churning in my stomach as we determined our defensive assignments and more informally gauged what respective roles we would play on offense. On the offensive end, I've always been more of an assist and "garbage man," someone who cleans things up through rebounding and either kicking the ball back out to a teammate or putting the ball back up off the rebound for an easy score. In more recent years, as age has nibbled away at my athleticism, I have developed a decent mid-range game — but I still wouldn't consider myself a "shooter" and pose no consistent long-range threat. Therefore, depending on the size of the other team, on offense I'll either play down in "the block" closer to the basket or, because I've always had a fairly good sense of where a missed shot is going to come off the rim, I "crash" in from the perimeter for rebounds. On the defensive end, I like physical play and tend to guard bigger men who present a tougher defensive test for more wiry teammates. There were some fairly big guys on the court this afternoon, so I figured my offensive role in the first game to focus more on mid-range shooting and crashing in for offensive rebounds. Playing in the block with my back to the basket in an attempt to post-up the bigger defenders would be a challenge, and next to having an opposing player slam-dunk over you, there's nothing more embarrassing in basketball than having your shot thrown back at you by a defender.
One of the captains took a shot from the three-point line to determine which team would start on offense. His shot sailed through the rim and splashed through the fresh net, and my team started on defense. We went down early, five to three, but we rallied back and won the first game eleven to nine. The next game began in much the same way; we fell behind early. But the tenor of this game was different from the first. As they pulled ahead, our opponents began to trash-talk. Their point guard — the guy on their squad who was most trusted to bring the ball up-court because he had the best "handles"— was slowly dribbling the ball between his legs from right-to-left and left-to-right, staring down his defensive matchup and saying to no one and everyone at the same time, "This scrub can't guard me." I was playing defense down in the block, matched up against one of their team's bigger players, who had his back to the basket in a "post-up" position and called out to the point guard "ball, ball" as a public declaration that I wasn't capable of defending him. To communicate to my opponent that I didn't appreciate his disrespect, I hooked him with my elbow and "fronted" him, positioning myself between him and the point guard, daring the point guard to try to get the ball down low. Their jawing at us was clearly intended to demoralize our squad, but it instead proved to be a motivator for us; no one wants to lose to someone or some team that's been talking trash the entire game. Without speaking, we collectively tightened up our defense and began to play more physically and aggressively, and we ended up winning the second game eleven to ten. As a mark of ownership, none of us left the court to cool down, chat with friends, or get water from the nearby fountain until our opponents fully cleared the court.
The third game started differently from the two previous games. We jumped out to an early four-to-zero lead and began playing with a little too much swagger. Basketball is a game of rhythm and runs, and before we knew it, our opponents scored eight unanswered points. Aside from the bewilderment and dismay that comes from being on the receiving end of a run like that, I could tell that my teammates were becoming fatigued. We were giving up wide-open jump shots, had guys not getting back from the offensive end to play defense, and began openly bickering with each other. Instead of focusing on our opponents, we berated each other for poor shot selection — "Fool, pass the goddamned ball!" or lazy defensive play — "Get your ass back on D!" When you start yelling at teammates, it's lights out.
We ended up losing the game eleven to eight on an uncontested layup. By this time, about ten new players had arrived, meaning that we were effectively finished playing for the day as the next game for us wouldn't come for at least an hour. I decided to hang around, watch the next few games, and engage in some superficial chatter with some of the guys who were still waiting for their turn to play. Pickup games can be special because they represent basketball and basketball culture in their most pure forms. There are no scouts evaluating your skills for the next level. There are no referees interrupting the flow of the game. There are just ten guys competing to win and to be the best on that court and on that day. It's an often ludic escape, a rare space in which one can be temporarily freed from life's worries and life's stressors. I think that's why so many black boys and men play the game: pickup basketball offers them a transitory departure from society's ordinary hierarchy and a rare arena for them to earn a complete stranger's respect, something I suppose we all strive for in life.
Ballers
In ways that go well beyond a ubiquitous presence on city courts and symbolic domination of the sport, for decades the world of pickup basketball has belonged to black men. It is no understatement to say that black men have defined basketball as we know it today; as Rick Telander said aptly in the introduction to his classic street-ball tome, Heaven Is a Playground, "Basketball is the black man's game" (Telander 2009, 1). More casual observations might suggest that the game in its outdoor asphalt context is just recreation, shucking and jiving, trash talking, and showboating. Perhaps to many onlookers and passersby of the public parks in and around American urban centers, the dozen or so primarily black men that might be found assembled on the asphalt during any given afternoon game of pickup basketball are engaged in little more than frivolous recreation. Spectators who find the pickup culture unappealing, threatening, and "too street" may feel not unlike early-twentieth-century social critic Thorstein Veblen, who referred to the proliferation of recreational sports as a "transient reversion to the human nature that is normal to the early barbarian culture" and saw passionate involvement in sports as "manifestations of the predatory temperament" rooted in "an archaic spiritual constitution" and markers "of an arrested development of the man's moral nature" (Veblen 1899, 117).
However, and in direct contrast to these narrower understandings of recreational sports, to many of those brothers running up and down urban blacktops, the pickup arena is not just about playing basketball. Rather, it is through this medium of sport, pickup basketball in particular, that these principally young black men, consciously or otherwise, carve a collective identity out of the unforgiving physical and economic landscapes that have come to characterize post-industrial US cities. For a half-century, these landscapes have increasingly told a tale of limited opportunity and the unfulfilled promises and dying dreams of a stunted civil rights movement. In James Baldwin's words from his essay "Many Thousands Gone," "The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people very rarely is" (Baldwin 1998, 19).
That's what this book is about — an often un-pretty look at black life, and therefore American life, told in part through the lens of basketball. But, this isn't simply a story about basketball any more than Carlin's Invictus was a story about rugby, Buford's Among the Thugs was a story about soccer, or the documentary film Hoop Dreams was a story about high school ball. What it amounts to is a story about race, particularly blackness and especially in the context of how race politics are mediated through sports. By using ethnographic accounts, history and policy, media, and other lenses, race is placed in its curiously US framework; and I also contextualize American anti-black racism as a stain that our country still has yet to fully come to terms with.
Throughout the book, I use ballers as shorthand to describe the core group of participants who serve as the central figures of the pickup basketball world at the urban courts I frequented. To many of these ballers, the blacktop functions as a semi-public platform for exhilarative expressions of cultural relevance, black masculinity, and ultimately personhood for people who, because of structural opposition to social and economic inclusion and a history of requisite deference to an unyielding dominant culture, frequently find it difficult to establish a satisfactory identity in other ways. What Evelyn Hu-DeHart wrote two decades ago continues to ring true: "Most American institutions ... still remain largely impenetrable to the vast majority of those on the wrong side of the color line" (Hu-DeHart 1993, 6). And, perhaps filling some of that void created by disconnect, as Charles P. Pierce wrote of the black man's game, "Basketball's basic appeal is that it offers fellowship, a sense of belonging, a means of drawing strength from something larger than oneself" (Pierce 1996, 59).
Coast to Coast
For legitimate reasons, most considerations of street basketball have focused on the East Coast, specifically New York and Philadelphia, and to a lesser extent, Chicago. Beginning in the waning years of the Great Depression and carrying well into the 1970s, America's iconic East Coast cities were physically, structurally, and demographically transformed through urban renewal initiatives that created massive "tower" housing projects placed on city "superblocks." Perhaps the most significant policy shaping this transformation was the American Housing Act of 1949, which established a national housing agenda pledging "a decent home for every American family." In carrying out this promise the Housing Act called for "well planned, integrated residential neighborhoods" and included a requirement that housing projects reflect the racial demographics of the areas in which they were constructed. In spite of these provisions, for at least the first twenty years after the Housing Act became law, this integrated neighborhoods requirement "carried no greater legislative momentum than moral intent" and ultimately resulted in "massive displacement of lower-income and minority families" (Martinez 2000, 468).
What does national housing policy have to do with basketball? Well, even though the Housing Act deliberately reshaped the way Americans lived across the nation, its unintended impact on East Coast urban housing and the proliferation of the racialized vertical poverty that came to characterize housing projects in Eastern cities is of particular significance to the evolution of basketball in the United States and the central role that African Americans have come to occupy in the game. As Darcy Frey wrote in his now classic look at basketball dreams in New York's Coney Island housing projects, "The experiment of public housing, which has worked throughout the country to isolate its impoverished and predominantly black tenants from the hearts of their cities, may have succeeded here with even greater efficiency because of Coney Island's utter remoteness" (Frey 2004, 3). The same type of densely packed projects that became hallmark characteristics of larger East Coast cities did not form in the more rural, less densely populated South, where football dominates the sporting landscape, or in the sprawling cities of the American West. Neither region formed the concentration of basketball talent produced from these gritty urban conditions and generated by youth who, as Frey noted, seek "the possibility of transcendence through basketball" (Frey 2004, 5).
(Continues…)
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