Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947–1979 by Thomas Aiello (review)

Pete “the Pistol” Maravich holds an exalted place in basketball history and lore. As a player at Louisiana State University, Maravich averaged forty-four points per game. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), Maravich’s flamboyant style (the man always thought that the behind-the-back pass was a good idea) brought fans to arenas during the 1970s—a time when the NBA was still struggling. In Thomas Aiello’s Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947–1979, however, it is not Maravich’s on-court prowess that reigns as most important. Instead, Aiello adeptly uses Maravich—a white southerner—as a case study to understand the process by which professional basketball gained a foothold in the South.

This study is short; it spans just 120 pages, not including the notes. But in that space, Aiello performs several important tasks. Dixieball begins by situating professional basketball’s rise within the broader landscape of southern sport history. Before 1960, none of the four major sports leagues in the United States (Major League Baseball, the NBA, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League) had a franchise in the states that had once made up the Confederacy. There were, however, minor and semiprofessional leagues (especially in baseball) in the South before 1960. Relying heavily on the New Orleans Times-Picayune and other southern dailies, Aiello paints a rather dismal picture of these fledgling professional circuits. When the Professional Basketball League of America (PBLA), for example, placed teams in Atlanta, Birmingham, Chattanooga, and New Orleans in 1947, it did not go well. “For New Orleans,” Aiello writes of the PBLA, “the league’s end meant that the city’s first run at professional basketball had come to an end after little more than a week” (p. 11).

Aiello focuses most of his attention on Atlanta and New Orleans. Atlanta became the first city in the Deep South with an NBA team (the Hawks) in 1968. New Orleans built basketball momentum with the New Orleans Buccaneers franchise of the iconoclast American Basketball Association (ABA). Interestingly, Morton Downey Jr., whom many may remember for his loud television presence in the 1980s, played a pivotal role. “While Downey was a carpet-bagging northerner, his civic activism would ultimately develop the Crescent City’s professional sports reputation and lay the groundwork for its future basketball endeavors,” Aiello argues (pp. 33–34). “Precisely because Downey was a carpetbagging northerner, he would do so largely without regard to race” (p. 34). The ABA quickly gave way to the NBA in the city; the New Orleans Jazz began play in the NBA in 1974.

Aiello is at his strongest in the second half of the book. He uses Maravich (who played first for the Atlanta Hawks and then for the New Orleans Jazz) to demonstrate how professional basketball in the Deep South both advanced and floundered due to franchise owners’ desire for a white superstar. Maravich was an All-Star player who created fan enthusiasm, but he also exacerbated racial tensions within the league and the cities where he played. Racial progress came haltingly. Atlanta in 1970 was, according to Aiello, “a city that wooed a successful professional sports team, only to ruin that success for the sake of race” (p. 86). When Maravich joined the New Orleans Jazz in 1974, he created and confronted mixed signals there as well.

Aiello must be commended for doing the financial spadework that many sports historians overlook. He compares Maravich’s 1970 rookie contract ($1.5 million) to league norms; he details what it cost the cities of Atlanta and New Orleans to build the arenas necessary to attract the NBA; and he tells how the owner of the Sambo’s restaurant chain provided the backing necessary to get the NBA to come to New Orleans. He also makes a compelling case that...