Basketball In The 80's

“… This was change that had been brought about from outside powerful new commercial interests that recognized in professional basketball a vehicle to expand markets, and artificial impulse. (Halberstam 9) Basketball in the mid 60’s to early 70’s was still a young, new, exciting sport that was not rooted in the deep history that baseball or football had been for decades. Couple this with the expanding use of television and basketball was on the fast track to becoming a popular sport. The only problem was the amount of people trying to get a piece of the action all at the same time caused an inflation of interest in the sport which pressured those involved in the actual product. Halberstam wrote that basketball was being pressured by an “unparalleled

(Rader 265) Pro football had always been popular among the masses but until the 1960’s was second fiddle to professional baseball. Television changed that entirely. Football added drama that baseball could not. It kept the fans entertained and that only added to its success. “…The central requirement of the game set up recurring crises, keeping the viewer’s attention riveted to the little silver screen.” (Rader 263) Television allowed people to view and understand football as they never had before. People felt as though they really understood and had a firm grasp on the game for the first time. Rader called watching the game form the stands “an incomprehensible tangle of milling bodies.”. (263) Replays and slow motion (used by CBS in 1963 (Rader 264)) allowed people to look at specific parts of the field over and again and actually capture the entire play. You could watch one side of the field live and the other on the replay and have a grasp of everything the play entails. This was exciting and new and allowed the average fan to become more than that. It allowed them to become pseudo experts. In one decade the amount of fans nearly doubled from eleven million to nearly 20 million from 1967 to 1977. (Rader 265) This is what the NBA lacked during this time. A larger consistent fan base that would watch and be intrigued by every game. The NFL had an enormous fan base and that

TV contracts were happening but not sticking for the NBA. They had games being dropped and the amount of money paid to the league for these games was nowhere near the success the NFL felt. The quote from Halberstam holds true for the NBA. The artificial impulse as he called it, nearly decimated them. The support for the league just was not there at the time. People did not have as much interest in the teams and no one wanted to watch the product especially once players started fighting teammates over salary. The NFL did not have this problem. The NFL started expanding slowly in the 60’s and by the 80’s had grown into an enormous business and product. It was officially the king of the castle in terms of American sports. Halberstam’s artificial impulse was felt by basketball, but football’s pulse was anything but