List: $27.99
| Sale: $19.59
Club: $13.99
Black Ball
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA
Author: Theresa Runstedtler
Narrator: Xenia Willacey
Unabridged: 11 hr
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Published: 03/07/2023
Categories: Nonfiction, History, Us History, Modern History, Sports & Recreation, Basketball, Social Science, Cultural & Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
Includes:
Bonus Material
Synopsis
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, 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 corrective in which 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 rise of the modern-day 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, 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 corrective in which 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 rise of the modern-day NBA.
