BETTERBALL

 

               To say that the NCAA men’s basketball tournament has been upsetting is to say the least. A No. 16-seeded team beat a No. 1, a No. 15 beat a 2. All four regional top seeds didn’t make it to the round of eight. Kentucky, Duke and Kansas were out by the Sweet Sixteen, Florida Atlantic, Creighton and San Diego State were in. What in the world was going on?

               The TV commentators and sports-blab radio hosts were full of complicated answers, of course, but a simple one should suffice. It’s that lots of good young basketball players are around these days, lots and lots. Too many to man merely the game’s traditional blue-blood college teams and conferences, for sure.  In case you haven’t noticed, or even if you’d only sensed it, basketball has become our best-played team sport, by a mile.

               Not only are there more good teams than there used to be, but the players also are better individually, also by a mile. I wasn’t much of a basketballer myself—the playground on which I grew up had hoops but was covered in gravel, and you can’t really play basketball on that stuff. But my first paying newspaper job, in 1957 at age 19, was covering Champaign High School sports for the Champaign-Urbana (Illinois) Courier, and the basketball coach there, Lee Cabutti, was nice enough to give me a grounding in the game’s tactical side. That gave me a leg up as an observer.

`              As reporter and fan I’ve followed the game closely since, and its improvement in all areas can only be called immense. Back in the 1950s most players over 6-feet-4-inches tall could pretty much be written off as stiffs. Today point guards routinely top that height. High-school teams now are better than good college teams were then. The NBA is so good it can be enjoyed as performance art. The women’s game has kept pace, and then some; on a percentage basis its improvement has surpassed that of the men’s.

             Much of that can be traced to the nature of the game. It’s five players on a side as opposed to nine in baseball and 11 in football, meaning that it affords individuals a greater chance to shine. Basketball courts require less real estate than baseball or football fields and, thus, are more suitable to urban environments. Equipment costs are small—a ball alone suffices, no protective gear is needed.

 Football can be dangerous—someone’s out to get you on every snap. Baseball can be boring—an outfielder can stand around for hours and get maybe two or three balls hit his way. Basketball is the most fun to play and practice; a kid can spend a pleasant day alone dribbling and shooting, and games can be played one-on-one or two-on-two, up to the regulation five-on-five.

               Coaching is better at every level, and not all of it takes place on a court in a formal setting. Just about every pro or major-college game is widely televised, and with instant replay and ex-coaches or players at every microphone, every game is a clinic for those at home. Kids today know about things like ball screens and box-and-ones from early ages. It’s like with computers—it’s as though they were born with the knowledge. 

               And while basketball was a seasonal sport in ancient times, it’s year-around today, with the high-school season followed by summer camps and AAU leagues. Specialized high schools that put sports first flourish; even some public schools play “national” schedules that include air travel to meet out-of-state foes. Some high-school games are on ESPN, and the players are too sophisticated to say “Hi, mom!”     

               Behind all that is the sociological change that has affected all our sports, but basketball the most: the field gates and gym doors opening wide to African-Americans. It was anything but instant. It’s well known that Major League Baseball was integrated by the elevation of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, but less known that basketball took a full two-more decades before all its heavy bars were lifted.

The NBA signed its first black players in 1950, but it was a young and not-influential league at the time. The college game ruled then and took it’s time manning up. My school, the University of Illinois, had its first black basketball starter in 1957. He was Mannie Jackson, who later played for and still-later owned the Harlem Globetrotters. The Southeastern Conference didn’t integrate its teams until 1966, probably not incidentally the same year an all-black five from the University of Texas at El Paso defeated a favored all-white squad from the University of Kentucky for the NCAA crown.

In that same fateful year the empire struck back by banning dunk shots with its so-called “Lew Alcindor Rule,” informally named for the 7-foot-2 star, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who that season would lead UCLA to the first of three NCAA titles in his tenure there. Then as now most high schools followed college rules, so dunks were forbidden at that level, too. The NBA permitted dunking at the time but the practice wasn’t suffered gladly by foemen; any player who leaped for one could expect to have his legs cut out from under him.

 By the time the rule was repealed in 1976, just about everyone cheered. Dunking added a new dimension of showmanship to basketball and made it more fun to play and watch. Kids today learn to dunk on tiny goals before they learn to shoot.

The African-American ascent has lifted basketball, and brought riches to a few, but by me it hasn’t been an unmitigated boon. Too many black kids— and some white ones, too—fritter away their youths dribbling basketballs and dreaming hoops dreams to the exclusion of other goals, but for even the very talented making an NBA roster remains a struck-by-lightning proposition.  Someone should write a pamphlet for high-school basketballers titled “Have a Plan B.” Don’t read it, don’t play.