The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [13]
As recently as 1962, there were only thirty-seven black players in the NBA, less than one-third of the League’s players—with no team having more than four black players. The quota seems to have been broken in the 1963-1964 season. The first time that five blacks were on one NBA team was detailed in K.C. Jones’ 1985 autobiography, Rebound: The Autobiography of K.C. Jones and an Inside Look at the Champion Boston Celtics. “Over the mantelpiece in Willie Naulls’ beautiful house is a large painting of five Celtics with their heads together on the court,” Jones wrote. “There is Russ [Bill Russell], Satch [Sanders], Sam Jones, Willie, and myself. Five black men. We were the first NBA team to put five black men on the floor. We are all proud of that; that ‘we’ includes Red [Auerbach], the spirit of Walter Brown, and I’ll bet everybody that’s ever worn a Celtics uniform.”
By the time Stu Lantz, now a broadcaster for the Los Angeles Lakers, entered the NBA in 1968 with the San Diego Rockets, the quota system had become, by his description, “more subtle. We still heard the jokes about teams not being able to start more than two blacks at home, that kind of stuff,” Lantz told me recently.
What happened between the early 1960s and the late 1960s? Did the dominance of the Boston Celtics (eleven championships in thirteen years, from 1957-1969) create a situation in which teams attempted to emulate their blueprint for winning?
The ABA came into existence in 1967. This new League showcased a different brand of basketball, as it featured players who played above the rim. Connie Hawkins, Julius Erving, and players like the electrifying Hawkins and Erving found a home in the ABA, and gravitated to the upstart league for a few reasons. For one thing, unlike the NBA, players were eligible even if their college class hadn’t graduated. (Chamberlain, for one, had to play a year with the Harlem Globetrotters, as he wasn’t eligible for the NBA draft until his senior year was complete.) Therefore, players who wanted to leave school early found a home in the professional ranks of the ABA. The League became quite good—and quite memorable—and created leverage for players and real competition for the established NBA. The ABA featured players like Marvin “Bad News” Barnes, George “Iceman” Gervin, “Mr. Excitement” Wendell Ladner, and Artis Gilmore, also known as “The A Train.”
Before long, NBA teams were featuring all-black starting lineups. By 1972, the Western Conference All-Star squad had only two white players on the team (guards Gail Goodrich and Jerry West, both with the Lakers). The NBA had expanded to seventeen teams by then, and there were close to 250 players who appeared in at least one game that season. Only seventy-seven of those players were white—and many of them were fringe players or seven-foot centers.
Despite the reluctance to integrate its players, the NBA has been progressive—some might say the most progressive—in terms of hiring black coaches and black general managers. In 2007, there are even black team owners.
In John Taylor’s The Rivalry he writes, “In the early fifties, when there were few black players in the NBA, they were almost all forwards and they would be assigned to guard each other, which in effect meant they canceled each other out, leaving the game to be played by the four white players on each team, who often refused to pass the ball to the black players. By the late fifties, blacks were playing all positions and black representation on teams had increased, but a de facto quota system was in place limiting the number per team.”
CONCLUSION:
#3
Baseball owners collude against free agents in the