Moonfixer: The Basketball Journey of Earl Lloyd

Preface: Earl Lloyd and Syracuse

xvii Preface Earl Lloyd and Syracuse Sean Kirst You’d have a hard time finding any reminder in Syracuse of what Earl Lloyd accomplished during his time in that Upstate city in New York. No school, street, or playground carries his name, even though Lloyd spent most of his playing career in the National Basketball Association with the old Syracuse Nationals, who later moved to Philadelphia and became the ‘76ers. Lloyd joined the Nats for the 1952–53 season, after he was honorably discharged from the army, and spent six seasons with the team before he was traded to Detroit. Even during his peak years, little was made of his groundbreaking status in basketball history. Despite the attention paid to racial pioneers in other sports, reporters in the 1950s rarely wrote or spoke about Lloyd’s extraordinary role in the game, an oversight that would only begin to be remedied in 2003, when Lloyd was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Yet his status can be seen as increasingly monumental, particularly when set alongside the role basketball plays in black America. On Halloween night, 1950, as a member of the Washington Capitols, Lloyd became the first African American to play in an NBA game when he took the court in Rochester against the Royals, whose franchise survives as the Sacramento Kings. As you’ll learn in this book, Lloyd prefers to downplay his own significance . He’ll tell you the real cultural groundbreakers for black America within the realm of sports were Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion boxer, and Jackie Robinson, who in 1947—as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers—shattered longtime racial barriers in Major League Baseball. xviii | Preface Lloyd’s admirers have a different view. Al Attles, a former NBA player and coach who became an executive with the Golden State Warriors, may have put it best when he said that what Lloyd did “softened the bed for the rest of us.” Ask Lloyd, and he’ll remind you that he was one of four blacks to play at least a few NBA games in the 1950–51 season, and that one of those contemporaries , Chuck Cooper, was taken much earlier in the league’s annual draft. Cooper was picked by the Boston Celtics in the second round, while Lloyd went in the ninth. Lloyd also maintains that basketball had already gone through a more gradual integration process, which offered him a gentler entry than the harsh and threatening landscape that Robinson had to navigate in Major League Baseball. Unlike baseball, Lloyd says, most professional basketball players had a college education, which gave them at least some basis for contemplating the benefits of tolerance. And by 1950 many white pros in the NBA had already competed at some point in their careers against teams with one or two players of color. The best way to judge the importance of Lloyd’s role may be to look at it through the prism of Syracuse, a then prosperous Upstate New York industrial city—its population in 1950 was at an all-time peak of 220,000— that had a wildly erratic history involving blacks and elite athletics. Indeed, you can argue that Lloyd’s major accomplishment in Syracuse was to shatter an unspoken national ban that began in the same city. Most of us are familiar with the tale of a legendary meeting between Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson, just before Robinson signed a contract to play for the Dodgers. Rickey was president of the Brooklyn team and ran its baseball operations. He was the guy who made the decision to crack baseball’s color line, but he also believed he needed a player strong enough to hold down the natural response of personal fury to vitriolic racism. Rickey understood that any kind of explosion or violence on the part of the first black in the Major Leagues—no matter how justified—would reinforce the ugliest stereotypes and fears throughout America, thus setting back efforts not only to integrate baseball but to transform fundamental aspects of life in this nation. In 1947, across the United States, most black men and women could not aspire to be police officers or Preface | xix firefighters or teachers or journalists (at least not for mainstream “white” newspapers). The doors to almost any meaningful job were open only to whites. Robinson’s importance, then, would extend far beyond sports...