The Crossover: A Brief History of Basketball and Race, From James Naismith to LeBron James

By Doug Merlino

The history of basketball contains all the drama inherent in America’s long struggle with racial intolerance and quest for equality. In ten focused chapters that highlight characters both famous (Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird) and more obscure (John McLendon, Earl Lloyd, Holcombe Rucker), this book explores how what’s happened on the basketball court has mirrored race relations in the United States—and often preceded changes off of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Doug Merlino
• Release date: Jul 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466108585

Doug Merlino

Doug Merlino is a veteran journalist who has written for Wired, Men's Journal, Legal Affairs, and many other publications. He previously lived in Budapest after leaving Seattle. He now lives in New York with his wife.

Book preview

The Crossover

A Brief History of Basketball and Race,

From James Naismith to LeBron James

By Doug Merlino

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Doug Merlino

Cover photo: Joshua Halvatzis Photography/Getty Images.

Table of Contents

Prologue

I. The Basketball Visions of James Naismith and Edwin Henderson

II. Image and Ownership: The Renaissance and the Globetrotters

III. John McLendon’s Long March

IV. Rucker Park: Win or Go Home

V. An Interview with Earl Lloyd, the First Black Player in the NBA

VI. Bill Russell Invents Modern Basketball

VII. Spencer Haywood and Self-Determination

VIII. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, Unwitting Racial Signifiers of the Reagan Era

IX. Michael Jordan and the Global Fame Machine

X. LeBron James Plays the Bad Cowboy

Credits

Further Reading and Viewing

About the Author

Prologue

Basketball, at its highest levels, is dominated by African-American stars. Virtually all of the professional game’s most famous, talented and marketable players—Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Kevin Garnett, Derrick Rose, Dwight Howard, Dwayne Wade—are black.

Like many white suburban kids growing up in the 1970s and since, my first experience with black people came through the vicarious experience of rooting for the players on my favorite team. In my case it was the hometown Seattle SuperSonics who taught me to understand basketball as a sport closely connected with African-Americans.

I loved power forward Lonnie Shelton, who crashed the boards and cleared the way for explosive Sonics guard Gus Williams and long-range bomber Downtown Freddy Brown. Defensive wonder Dennis Johnson and hard-nosed Paul Silas rounded out the nucleus of the team I rooted to the NBA championship in 1979, when I was seven.

At the same time, I never played on the same court with any African-Americans as a kid.

We lived in the northern suburbs of Seattle in a house that—as was the style in the 1970s—was nearly the same shade of green as our refrigerator. The other prominent color in the neighborhood was white.

In 1978, the Seattle school system had enacted mandatory busing, accelerating the process of white flight from the city. Almost all of my elementary public school classmates were white. At the time, most of the 50,000 African Americans in Seattle lived in or just south of the Central Area, a four-square-mile neighborhood where they were concentrated from the 1940s through the 1970s because it was nearly impossible for someone black to buy or rent housing anywhere else.

I didn’t know that I was growing up in what essentially remained a segregated city. I did notice that all my favorite Sonics were black—I didn’t much like the one standout white player, center Jack Sikma, due to the ugliness of his turnaround set shot—which made me wonder why I never saw any black people in my own neighborhood.

That absence of African-Americans in my life changed in 1986, when I was picked to play on an AAU team that mixed white kids from the private school I attended with black kids from Central Seattle. The idea was to see what would happen if these kids from the same city but different worlds could get to know each other on the court.

The hope was that white kids would come away with a better understanding of another side of the city, and that the black kids would get the exposure they needed to get private school scholarships. No matter the reality off the court, the thinking went, we should all be able to come together between the lines.

And we actually did. That season we won the eighth-grade Western Washington Amateur Athletic Union championship: the ragtag group of boys had united, overcome differences, and triumphed. It was a finale fitting for a feel-good sports movie

A year later, I switched schools, and lost touch with both sides of the team. It would likely have remained a nice memory if not for a tragedy: Five years after we played together, Tyrell Johnson—a kid with a brilliant smile, a talent for crossover moves, and a love of LL Cool J—made the front page of the Seattle Times with the headline: What Went Wrong? Tyrell Johnson Was Young, Black, Male—and Murdered. He’d been shot in the back of the head, dismembered, and left in a ditch in South Seattle. There was no explanation for why it happened.

Tyrell’s fate stuck in my mind for years. I eventually returned to Seattle many years later to try to learn more about what became of him as well as the rest of the team, and then wrote a book about it, The Hustle.

That process led back to some of my youthful memories about basketball, from cheering for Lonnie Shelton to the first time I saw Michael Jordan blow by a defender on the baseline and explode for a dunk.

It also made me question the origins of many of the assumptions I’d held about sports.

Why, I wondered, was the basketball court seen as such an ideal place to mix kids from different backgrounds? Why did I grow up as seeing success on the court as reflecting my own sense of achievement and manhood? And why and how did basketball come to be viewed as a quintessentially black sport?

The effort to answer those questions led me back into the sport’s history, which was more complex and fascinating than I knew.

I started to see connections between how early decisions in the game’s development still echo in what we see on the court today, from Derrick Rose running a fast break to the coaching style of Phil Jackson. I also found that the history of what’s happened on the basketball court has very closely mirrored that of race relations in the United States, and often preceded changes off of it—it contains all the drama inherent in America’s long struggle with racial intolerance and quest for equality.

The vast majority of that research didn’t fit in the book, and I wanted to take the opportunity to explore it further.

This book of nine short essays and one interview moves chronologically, from the 1890s until today. Each piece delves into one aspect of the game, explores its development, and places it within the context of American race relations at the time.

This is not an exhaustive history; I was motivated by the personalities and subjects that grabbed me. My hope is not only to bring attention to some of the characters who were instrumental in