Black Ball Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA

Theresa Runstedtler, Xenia Willacey

eAudio - 2023

A vital narrative history of 1970s pro basketball, and the Black players who shaped the NBA Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation's imagined descent into disorder. A new generation of Black players entered the league then, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood, and the press and public were quick to blame this cohort for the supposed decline of pro basketball, citing drugs, violence, and greed. Basketball became a symbol for post-civil rights America: the rules had changed, allowing more Black people onto the playing field, and now they were ruining everything. Enter Black Ball, a gripping history and corrective in whic...h scholar Theresa Runstedtler expertly rewrites basketball's "Dark Ages." Weaving together a deep knowledge of the game with incisive social analysis, Runstedtler argues that this much-maligned period was pivotal to the... more