The Politics of the N.B.A. Have Always Been Ugly

In “Black Ball,” a new book about Black players in the National Basketball Association in the nineteen-seventies, Theresa Runstedtler, a professor at American University and a former member of the Toronto Raptors dance team, lays out a compelling history of the league, and the origins of what we today call player empowerment. One case study is the arc of Spencer Haywood, who, as a nineteen-year-old from Silver City, Mississippi, strained to remain apolitical while playing in the 1968 Olympics—he made the team only because stars like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wes Unseld had sat out as part of an unofficial boycott—and spent the rest of his career battling exploitative professional contracts in both the N.B.A. and its rival at the time, the American Basketball Association.