Black Ball; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA by Theresa Runstedtler was very interesting! I was truly thankful to have gotten to read this before most people! I would like to purchase this one for my physical library!

Fascinating. Interesting. The prose was not quite there though to be more enthusiastic about it unfortunately.

The decade of the 1970’s was a decade of both progressive change and a decline in the interest of mostly white fans of professional basketball. Some call it the “dark age” of the sport, but this book by Theresa Runstedtler tells why that is not necessarily the case.

The book has some great prose and well-written sections. One example is when she is writing about the American Basketball Association (ABA), a short-lived but very important professional league that directly competed for players against the more established NBA. She writes that the red, white and blue basketball the league used was not the only example of a change of color. This passage is typical of the language used in the book: “Little did ABA team owners realize that their upstart league would change the color of the game in more ways than one. It would soon be the incubator for a new style of pro ball - black ball - and its existence would help spur black players to lead a more forceful push for higher compensation, better contract terms, and more control over their careers."

This prose is not the only excellent feature of this book as it is well-researched and the arguments presented are backed up well with factual evidence. More than just basketball, issues that either are directly part of civil rights and racial justice or tangentially related such as labor relations are discussed in great detail. While that is the main focus of the book, it also describes how the game itself changed. With more Black players gaining jobs in both leagues, especially the ABA, the game changed from set plays and jump shots to a more freewheeling style with dunks and creativity.

All of this is told with racial integration and justice as a key theme and for the most part, Runstedtler is very convincing and will make a reader think, no matter their race. The only downfall of this argument was the last section about a punch thrown by Kermit Washington, a Black player, on a white player, Rudy Tomjanovich. Having seen that game and also having read other sources about the two men and the incident, there isn’t much agreement about the racial aspects of this and sadly, this isn’t of the same high quality as the rest of the book. However, don’t let that one chapter discourage you from reading this one. Anyone interested in civil rights or basketball from that era will enjoy it.

I wish to thank Bold Type Books for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

History books sometimes can be broken into two distinct classes. There are those that are researched from the start without preconceptions, and then conclusions are drawn from the available information. Then there are those where the author has a preconceived notion going into the research, and goes about the business of trying to prove that point.

"Black Ball" seems to fit better into the latter category.

Theresa Runstedtler is the author in question here, and her book, "Black Ball," is about the rise of African Americans in the NBA and their efforts to make the league and the sport more equitable. This is a somewhat underexamined area, so the publication is welcome. Runstedtler has a distinguished academic background, since she has a PhD and teaches at American University after a stint at the University at Buffalo. She is on target enough with her assessments to make her efforts worthwhile. Still, there are issues with the book and its contents that are somewhat troubling.

Race and basketball over the years have had a complicated relationship. The first Black to play in the NBA arrived in 1950 - three years after Jackie Robinson debuted for baseball's Brooklyn Dodgers. The numbers slowly increased from there to the point where Blacks were in the majority on the team's rosters. But even so, while the stars were disproportionately Black, the reserves often were disproportionately white. The Boston Celtics were the first NBA team ever to start an all-Black team (1964). That era where the league's teams were located in the East, Midwest and West Coast; no one even tried to put a franchise in the Deep South until the St. Louis Hawks moved to Atlanta in 1968.

Along the way, there were growing pains. Runstedtler explores some of them in the cases of Connie Hawkins, Spencer Haywood, and Oscar Robertson. Hawkins, a legendary player from New York City, was slightly touched by a gambling scandal while in college in the early 1960s. He was blackballed from the NBA without any sort of due process for several years. It was a clear injustice, and it took until the end of the decade for Hawkins to land with the Phoenix Suns.

Haywood was a member of the 1968 U.S. Olympic basketball team who decided to turn pro well before he was scheduled to graduate from the University of Detroit - which was against the rules at the time. It seems he wanted to help his mother, who picked cotton in Mississippi while raising 10 children. The NBA wasn't interested at the time, but the rival American Basketball Association was. Haywood jumped to Denver of that league in 1969 before trying to move to Seattle of the NBA in the 1970-71 season. That led to a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court before Haywood won the right to play in the NBA whenever he was able to do so. The book offers good summations of both cases.

Both Hawkins and Haywood deserve credit for winning those battles. It's important to note that similar cases were going on in baseball and football at the same time. As the money involved in pro sports grew in the 1960s and 1970s, players no longer felt forced to take whatever the owners would give them. The particulars and success rate varied by sport, but the players slowly inched forward.

Several of those inches came in 1976. Robertson's name was at the top of a lawsuit that delayed a proposed merger between the NBA and ABA for several years during the 1970s. The argument was that having two teams/leagues bid for players' services had increased their salaries, and it should be illegal. Once the two leagues had worked out the particulars of the merger, they had to have the players sign off on the deal before everything could be wrapped up. That essentially led to the beginning of free agency and the salary system we know today.

After covering the rise of the black player's influence on the style of the game (frequently in the air and always flamboyant) and the curious case of deputy NBA commissioner Simon Gourdine (who found that a Black man could only rise so far in NBA management), Runstedtler concludes with a couple of chapters on what could be called supplemental discipline. In other words, what happens when a player gets into trouble on and off the court? That covers measures taken by the league when fights break out during games, and when players are caught by authorities in cases involving drugs.

This is an area that has caused headaches for all of the pro sports over the years. However, the NBA's issues might have been more visible - particularly when a majority of its players are Blacks and thus giving the league some image problems with some sponsors. The extra discipline imposed by the league concerning fines and suspensions usually could be only appealed by going back to management to reconsider - not a winning formula for the players, and one that was duplicated by other sports. Racism may have played a role in some of those decisions, but in spite of Runstedtler's efforts it's tough to measure its degree of influence.

As you may have guessed at this point, the framework for the book sounds like it goes down an interesting path. But Runstedtler takes a number of odd little turns along the way that left me wondering about where a particular viewpoint came from, to the point where I had to stop and read the paragraph again. For example ...

* The author attacks NBA writers for not picking a Black coach as the NBA coach of the year in 1975 for the second straight year (Ray Scott of the Pistons won the award in 1974), even though both coaches of the NBA's Finalists were African American. Phil Johnson of the Kansas City-Omaha Kings won the award in '75. Coaching trophies often go to the leader of a team that exceeded expectations by the greatest margin, which is how Scott won it in '74. It seems like the same standard was in play in '75 for Johnson.

* Runstedtler is critical of references to the NBA's toughest players as "enforcers," while similar descriptions of counterpoints in the National Hockey League are "policemen." That has certain implications in a majority-Black league and a majority-white league. The problem is that anyone who has been around hockey knows that the tough guys in the NHL are called "enforcers" far more often than "policemen."

* Runstedtler seems still angry that Robertson wasn't offered some sort of coaching job once his playing days were over in the NBA. A problem with that argument is that those days ended right in the middle of the players' lawsuit over the ABA merger. "The Big O" probably was considered radioactive to many owners after the expensive settlement came in 1976, and we don't know if he even wanted to go down that road of coaching. Besides, success as a player doesn't always correlate to success as a coach.

* Speaking of the merger, Runstedtler still seems to be upset that it took place because of the effect on player salaries. The catch there is that if the two leagues hadn't come together through that agreement, the ABA might not have been around at all in the fall of 1976. The league was down to six teams at that point, and it might not have been worth it to stay in the basketball business.

One other area of concern concerns the treatment of the media along the way in the book. Admittedly, the columnists and sports editors of newspapers and magazines in the 1960s and 1970s were mostly old, conservative white men. Their viewpoints usually reflected that fact, backing up the status quo on a frequent basis. In hindsight, it was not their finest hour.

However, throughout the book the author chooses to paint everyone in that group with a wide brush, without even quoting a few major columnists of the day to back it up. We have to take her word for it. There are a few disturbing quotes from Basketball Times, a weekly newspaper that started in the late 1970s, but that's about it. If viewpoints about the dangers of allowing college basketball players to leave school early for the pros, it should have been easy to print a few.

The most quoted media source from the era is Black Sports magazine, which lasted for most of the 1970s and probably was more influential than popular. It is certainly good to hear reporting and commentary from a group of writers that were far more diverse than those from the mainstream media at the time. Runstedtler adds to that with some comments from writers from Black newspapers. Those reflections have their place in the story. Even so, it would have been nice to hear more from other viewpoints. I'd guess that by the Seventies it would have been far easier to find sports writers who wrote about the changing relationship between league and its players. Runstedtler was smart enough to include part of a column by the late Leonard Koppett, who in his professional life proved that "intellectual sportswriter" was not a complete contradiction in terms. He wrote about what a new economic system might look like. It's also odd that no one from the present is asked to look back on past events here in an attempt to add to the perspective that time provides. In other words, it would have been great to hear from someone like basketball writer Peter Vecsey.

"Black Ball" has received some very good reviews from the usual outlets so far. If it has helped prompt talk of race and basketball in an open setting, it ranks as a positive development. But some of Runstedtler's viewpoints and techniques lead to conclusions that are sometimes difficult to accept, and that takes the book down a notch.

For Black History Month included this selection in “12 Books Informed by the Past,” my round-up highlighting notable new and recent titles on the subject, for the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

Black Ball by Theresa Runstedtler tells the story of the racial transformation of pro basketball both on and off the court with a particular focus on how Black players changed the politics of the game in the 1970s.

Runstedtler does a phenomenal job sharing the history of the ABA and how it came together in the spring of 1967. She provides a well-researched background around the politics that resulted in the eventual merger of the ABA with the NBA. I really enjoyed reading about the political shifts this merger required, the advocacy of the athletes for themselves and for the younger generation of Black athletes coming after them, the role particular players such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood had on the political climate, and the impact this all had on Black America as a whole. To the present day, Black athletes continue to fight for their autonomy, equity, and economic rights and this powerhouse of a nonfiction book really provides readers with a well-rounded understanding of why.

Another aspect of this book that makes it special is who Theresa Runstedler is and the unique perspective she offers as an African American history scholar and researcher. Runstedler shares that the 1998-1999 NBA Lockout happened during her second season as a Toronto Raptors dancer when she was just twenty-three years old. She witnessed first hand the fight occurred between team owners and players. She saw for herself how the media tried to wrongfully portray the players as being greedy and ungrateful when all they were doing was fighting for their rights. As a reader, you can feel the conviction in Runstedler's research. Any lover of the game will enjoy this book. It's definitely one to add to the bookshelf collection of any sports lover!

Thank you so much to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!

Runstedtler has written an important and scholarly volume on the various personalities and events that shaped the path of the NBA in the 1970s. Meticulously researched with detailed footnotes, she tells the stories of well-known players like Connie Hawkins, Spencer Haywood and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as well as lesser-known people such as Al Attles, Simon Gourdine and Wayne Embry.

Enlightening and also at times infuriating to see how unfairly the players were treated by team executives, the media and the fans.

Ideal for anyone interested in the history of the NBA, the history of African-American athletes in American society, or in the history of labor relations in major professional sports.