The Breaks of the Game

by David Halberstam

FOR RACE OF course touched everything. It was not that the NBA was a racist place—quite the contrary. In contrast with the rest of American life there was more real contact and friendship between blacks and whites than almost anywhere else, barring perhaps the armed forces. It was simply that the NBA was a showplace for American racial tension; no matter how successful the black athlete, and no matter well paid he now was, he brought to the game a complicated assortment of anxieties about growing up black in a white nation. For all of his success, he played in a league where the owner was always white, the coaches were usually white, the sportswriters were almost always white, the referees were almost always white, and the fans were almost always white.