Racism in the NBA

NBA basketball is an exciting sport. The NBA features such star players as, Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson, Keith Vanhorn, and John Stockton. You could ramble on all day about Pro basketball. And two big questions always come up when talking about pro basketball. Why are 2/3 of the NBA players black? And do black and white players have two different techniques for playing the game of basketball?

Jeff Greenfield cites in his essay “The Black and White Truth about Basketball” theories from the book Foul by David Wolf. In today’s modern game of NBA basketball, over 2/3 of the players are black. Greenfield also cites that over the last two decades, no more than three white players have been among the ten starting players on the NBA All-Star team (Greenfield 209). David Wolf claims this dominance of blacks in the NBA is due to a natural inheritance. Wolf says basketball is a pastime of the urban poor since the fact most of them don’t have finances to access equipment for hockey, baseball, football, or other fairly expensive sports. And basketball is something they can feel pride about (Greenfield 210-211). Most of the urban poor are the black. And black star Penny Hardaway is a prime example of this.

Penny Hardaway is one of the NBA’s most recognizable stars in today’s game. He came from very poor black slums. Because he didn’t have the money for football, baseball, or hockey, he turned to the cheap playground sport called basketball. Like many other black players in the NBA, Penny took pride in honing his skills on those playground courts in the slum. Basketball was an activity that kept Penny out of trouble (Fox Sports Net: “Beyond the Glory”). Based on this story of Penny Hardaway, I agree with Greenfield and ...

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...’d wonder what they are doing in the NBA until you saw them swing free and throw up the shot. They actually drained the ball more times than many of their black counterparts who had much more skills. Bill Laimbeer and Dan Majerle played hard. They played hard from the tip-off to the final buzzer. In fact, Dan Majerle was the first and has been the only player to ever be a reserve on his team, but been selected to the All-Star Game. Stories like these prove the point that a white player uses a very plain approach to the game of pro basketball.

Not everybody who read Greenfield’s essay will agree with his views on the styles of play in blacks and whites. But Greenfield does try to make it a little more clear blacks and whites do seem to have two distinct styles when playing basketball. As for me, basketball is an exciting sport that I’ll always be a fan of.