GREAT WHITE HYPE: There's a cover story in the Village Voice this week decrying "The Foreign Invasion of the American Game." A jingoistic response to the rise of Ichiro Suzuki and the resulting influx of Japanese and other foreign players in baseball? Of course not- this is the Voice. The piece, by Dan McGraw, is in fact an attack on the recent globalization of basketball, as in recent years dozens of foreign (i.e. European, i.e. white) players have come to play professionally in the United States- which McGraw slams not-so-subtly as a conspiracy by the NBA and its corporate partners to make the league more white.
Like a growing percentage of Voice material, McGraw's piece is at once thought-provoking and way, way off. It's the second such cockamamie exercise in the alternative paper of record this month, after Richard Goldstein's soon-to-be-legendary meditation on President Bush's package. At the crux of McGraw's argument is the observation that basketball as historically played in America is really two different sports- the finesse-oriented White Game and the power-driven Black Game. In the '70s and '80s, the Black Game overtook the White Game (Larry Bird notwithstanding), and when the sport began to globalize in the '90s it was the "black" style that was exported to foreign countries- therefore, Dirk Nowitzki, Peja Stojakovic, and all the other European stars learned from watching Jordan, Magic, and the rest. As a result, according to Maxwell, the white European players currently in the league are playing the "black" way, blurring longstanding cultural distinctions and taking away yet another innovation from black America (the author even likens Nowitzki to Elvis in this manner).
Its oversimplification and racial stereotyping aside, I don't find this line of argument as offensive and wrongheaded as I do the part in which McGraw alleges that rather than creating a meritocracy that has dramatically improved the overall quality of play in the league the last few years, the arrival of foreign-born players may in fact be a conspiracy by the league, the mostly white owners, and the league's corporate sponsors to make the league whiter. McGraw uses as evidence the goofy statistic that in 1995 the league was 82% black, whereas 8 years later the figure is all the way down to 78%. (Huh? Multiply 29 teams by 12 players, that's 348 roster spots in the league. Meaning there are 14 fewer black players in the league than there were eight years ago. Not that huge a number- and don't forget, there are also nearly twice as many black coaches now as then.)
But there's an even bigger reason to doubt McGraw's grand conspiracy theory- he alleges that the white players have essentially been brought in to make white audiences more comfortable with the game- after all, the average fan who can afford season tickets or a luxury box is rich, and would presumably prefer to spend his time and money in the company of a squeeky-clean white guy such as Nowitzki or Steve Nash, rather than the tatooed, cornrowed, and rap-sheeted Allen Iverson. But by that rationale, wouldn't the NBA attract a larger, more well-heeled audience if they went back to all-white rosters?
No, in fact, in that case they'd probably all go bankrupt. McGraw virtually ignores the fact that white basketball players not named Larry Bird are the objects of derision and vitriol pretty much everywhere they go. Anyone who followed the Christian Laettner Era in Minnesota can testify to that.
McGraw also says that the NBA's white-owned corporate partners prefer the influx of white Europeans as well. In fact, I would argue the opposite: whether selling tickets, jerseys, or endorsed products, the league and its partners are actually done a disservice by the presence of foreign-born players, many of whom speak heavily accented English (or no English at all), and therefore don't have the same endorsement value as those who who can speak to the American fanbase in their own language. Yao Ming, after all, needed the assistance of Mini-Me to make a successful commercial. And if this nefarious, make-the-NBA-more-white conspiracy really did exist, don't you think the league would be trying their darndest to groom at least a couple of American-born, English-speaking, white superstars? Now that John Stockton has retired, there isn't such an individual probably among the NBA's top 75 players. (Though several top stars, including Jason Kidd, Mike Bibby, and Doug Christie, are biracial.)
After the NBA overexpanded in the '90s, talent was diluted to the point where the level of play in the league dropped significantly. Just as the influx of Russians, Swedes, Finns, and Czechs helped fill the NHL's post-expansion talent vacuum in the mid-'80s, the NBA's quality has improved by drawing from a pool of talent not just nationwide, but worldwide. The most prominent player to emerge from that influx, Yao Ming, is not himself white; the international player of most significance in the upcoming NBA Finals (no, not Dikembe) is Tony Parker, the French-born son of an African-American father. Like it or not, the NBA is now a multicultural, international league- combining the best players of every race and every basetball-playing culture on the planet. If Dan McGraw doesn't like that he doesn't have to watch, but he can rest assured: there's not a true basketball fan alive whose goal is fewer black players in the game.