Black Ball

A poll taken earlier this year found that over two-third of African-American male teenagers believe they will one day be professional basketball players. Considering the current state of the National Basketball Association (NBA), I guess it's lucky for them that they're horribly misguided.

It's been a bad couple of years for black athletes. And it's getting worse.

May, 1997: Mike Tyson, already on parole after his 1992 rape conviction, tries to eat his way to a heavyweight title and receives a one-year suspension from the Nevada State Athletic Commission. On Tuesday Tyson pleaded no contest to a charge that he kicked and punched two men after an August, 1998 traffic alteration, a plea that threatens to land him back in prison.

December, 1997: Latrell Sprewell allegedly tries to suffocate his coach with his bare hands.

March, 1998: Sprewell, allegedly doing 90 on Interstate 680 in California, bangs up his Mercedes, a small Toyota and a couple of innocent people.

May, 1998: Sports Illustrated publicly wonders where daddy is. In an article exposing the strong paternalistic instinct of certain athletes, black basketball players with absurd numbers of out-of-wedlock children seem the running joke. The magazine mockingly forms an "NBA All-Paternity team"-nine black players and Larry Bird-who have been the subjects of paternity-related lawsuits.

October, 1998: The NBA cancels regular-season games for the first time in its history. Over 200 games have been canceled so far, and, barring a major break-through in today's negotiating session, the season cannot begin before mid-January.

It is tempting to chalk up the lockout to the trendy labor strife that has hung over professional athletics ever since Curt Flood and Marvin Miller helped bring us free agency back in 1974. We know-the players are greedy, the owners are greedy and the fans are underappreciated. Let them fight it out, let us complain and then let's play ball.

It was an easy story for the National Football League strike of 1987 and for the baseball strike of 1994. But the NBA is not like other boys.

Eighty percent of its players are black. Billy Hunter, the director of the players union, is black. Union President Patrick Ewing, besides having the ignominious distinction of belonging to the All-Paternity Team, is black.

When the majority of young black males aspire to be like Mike, such that Sprewell and All-Paternity Team MVP Shawn Kemp-also a prime example of the maleducated millionaire-are elevated to the position of role model, the fate of the NBA should not and cannot generate the same ennui as that of its sports brethren.

More than a million Million Man Marches, the NBA lockout puts black Americans in the public eye.

In a panel discussion held Tuesday night at the Arco Forum entitled, "Images and Coverage of African Americans in the Media," talk show host Montel Williams recounted the warnings of program managers that "a bald black man on TV" would not work in their cities.

Maybe those program managers never heard of a guy named Jordan. The black basketball player is the dominant image of African Americans in the media. And now that he is no longer playing basketball, perhaps some light can finally be shed on the age-old question of whether his dominance is good for black America.

We love to call professional athletes selfish, but NBA players have the particular and ironic distinction of carrying at least a chunk of the banner for an entire race of people. It sounds like naive overstatement, but a chunk is all you need for the proposition to turn frightening.

For the Boise dry cleaner with a hoop in his backyard and a dish on his roof, the prevailing representation of black Americans shifts from highlight-reel dunker to greedy businessperson. He who once had only to ponder the black athlete must now ponder the black man. And where else will he see a black face?

For the 16-year-old in East St. Louis, we add, to his unfinished self-portrait of a hoop star with a year of college education and six kids by six different women, a suit and an unflinching desire to be the richest man alive, even if undeservedly so. Where once we acknowledged that NBA players could at least teach youngster the value of hard work, we must now worry that they teach instead the value of avarice.

The NBA has always been accused of fragility. Its success, some say, rode on the shoulders of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in the 80s and Michael Jordan in the 90s, and the presence of these superstars kept a veil over deeper structural problems.

The lockout which appears to threaten the NBA's premature demise debunks the most unmentionable of those problems-that its shaky legs are flesh brown, and bear the burden of much more than just a league.