Earlier this week, Adam Jones, an All-Star centerfielder for the Baltimore Orioles, was asked why neither he nor any African-American baseball player has followed the lead of 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and knelt or sat during the national anthem to protest police brutality against minorities. “Baseball is a white man’s sport,” said Jones.
The following day, Howard Bryant, an ESPN columnist who is also African-American, wrote an essay in which he took the words of Jones (which are factually correct in terms of demographics) one step further. “Baseball is a white man’s game,” wrote Bryant, “and is so by the specific design of the people who run it.”
The inference is that Major League Baseball—which is 30 percent Latino and openly welcomes players of all colors from the Caribbean, South America and the Pacific Rim—is racist toward black American men. Without seeking alternative explanations for the decline in African-Americans at the major league level over the past quarter century (e.g., was there an NBA when future Hall of Famers such as Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson were kids?), Bryant strongly implies that the low representation of black Americans in Major League Baseball, as compared with the NBA and NFL, is baseball’s intent.
Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week
Kevin Love is the only white American to be named an All-Star Game starter this century, and that happened only once. USA TODAY SPORTS
We wondered if there were another popular American sport where a significant racial demographic was underrepresented, and how that essay would read if we applied Bryant’s arguments toward it.
Basketball is a black man’s game, by design.
No, seriously. Basketball is a black man’s game, and is so by the specific design of the people who run it. In a country full of world-class white athletes (Michael Phelps? Hello!), basketball cannot seem to attract many.
The NBA is approximately 70 percent African-American, or nearly six times the rate of the general population (12.8 percent). Meanwhile, in a nation that is roughly 62 percent Caucasian, the NBA is less than 15 percent white American (heretofore, WA). It’s as if owners of NBA franchises look at WA youth and say, “If you ever want to work in this arena, pick up a hockey stick…or be related to Marv Albert!”
It’s not as if NBA executives are being completely unfair to men of fair skin. It’s just that for reasons no one likes to discuss, they prefer to sign Australians and Argentinians, Canadians and Croatians, Serbians Slovenians and Spaniards—even Germans—to signing WAs….probably for pennies on the dollar.
Basketball’s blackness in 2016 is so starkly in contrast to its postwar roots, where giants of the game like George Mikan, Bob Pettit and Dolph Schayes shared its face along with Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson. These men of different pigments fought side-by-side in ensuring a more prosperous NBA future, one in which chartered flights and 500-thread count sheets would replace layovers in Fort Wayne and Howard Johnson’s. The white heritage has disappeared along with its progeny. In basketball, only the nets remain white, and who knows how long that will last?
What is basketball doing to attract young white talent? Commissioner Adam Silver makes offseason “goodwill” excursions to China and India, but will he even attend a CYO game in his own backyard in Westchester County, New York? Basketball needs to create outreach programs in the suburbs, and in the exurbs and even the gated communities. After it has found footing in these uptrodden areas, where rims are never bent and backboards bear no hand smudges, basketball should boldly go forth into…New England (and not just for Hall of Fame induction weekend)!
New England, which is composed of states you’ve never heard of and would never dare visit (Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, to name a few) is the whitest region of the country, after all. It’s also where basketball was invented. How shameful that a game that has enriched so many should abandon its past.
