Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball (review)

Jeffrey Lane argues that in the past thirty years, basketball has grown fascinating and successful by marketing a "transcendent culture" (xvii). It has both fetishized and fettered an individualist ethic rooted in black masculinity, and it has pumped up heroes who evoke nostalgia for a white-dominated past. Lane reminds us that when trying to understand basketball's cultural significance, race always matters.

He begins by examining the intersecting values and vocabularies of three black cultural institutions: basketball, hip-hop, and drug dealing. All celebrate a "savage individualism" (3) based on conspicuous consumption, machismo, and manipulating the group for personal gain. Each is a "game" that rewards a select few. Yet basketball's commercial interests have marketed its association with "authentic" black masculinity, allowing customers a safe vacation into a media-driven image of gangsters and ghettos. The tattooed, corn-rowed, brutally honest superstar Allen Iverson is the popular emblem of this ethic, and Lane explores how basketball has aggrandized, manipulated, and harnessed Iverson's deviant image for commercial ends.

The third chapter investigates race and power relations in the modern NBA. In 1997, when Latrell Sprewell of the Golden State Warriors tried choking his abusive coach, P. J. Carlesimo, an uproar ensued: An angry black male had attacked a white authority figure! The NBA suspended Sprewell for the season, and the media painted him as a thug. Yet his teammates stood by him, a sign of racial solidarity. Some African Americans pointed to a racial demonization of Sprewell, resulting in an overly harsh suspension. This black–white gulf remains a taboo subject within the NBA, even as race was central in the disparate reactions to the 2004 brawl between the Indiana Pacers and fans of the Detroit Pistons.

Subsequent case studies consider Larry Bird and Bob Knight as white heroes of basketball's past. "In sports," Lane writes, "whiteness is synonymous with the forces of good—hard work, tradition, sound fundamentals, morality" (115). Bird was venerated not just for his astonishing skills, but also because his Celtics lent an antidote to black flamboyance. His stardom plugged into Boston's continued racial and ethnic tensions. Knight's teams at Indiana University thrived by sublimating individualist impulses. He became an icon of a simpler, more rural, whiter Hoosier history. When he was fired in September 2000 after repeated abuses, he won passionate defenders, because his conservative, militaristic image reflected a sense of white control.

A final chapter looks to basketball's global future. International players—well-drilled products of a professional club system—comprise a growing percentage of NBA rosters. Rather than knock the young black males who have become both heroes and pariahs, Lane faults the exploitative, inefficient, "amateur" player development model in the United States, dominated by sneaker companies and universities.

Throughout the book, Lane maintains this balanced, measured approach to basketball's transformations. Under the Boards does not break so much new conceptual ground as it does provide an accessible, intelligent account of the sport's racial and cultural meanings. It provides a revealing lens into modern American culture, and it should be an important resource for any scholar of basketball.