10 The New York Review
Ball Don’t Lie
Jay Caspian Kang
The Game Is Not a Game:
The Power, Protest, and
Politics of American Sports
by Robert Scoop Jackson.
Haymarket, 203 pp.,
$36.95; $16.95 (paper)
Sports metaphors, as a rule, are silly
and rarely accurate. Football is not
really like war, regardless of what its
legion of ex- players and commentators
will tell you. Baseball does not provide
a window into America—the gentle
tension between laconic, quasi- agrarian
pacing and the game’s values of grit and
meditative cunning feels nostalgic to the
point of absurdity now. There was a time
when every salaried sportswriter would
anthropomorphize every three- year- old
filly into Joan of Arc, but those stories
read like kitsch today. They may evoke
some past, but no one under the age of
sixty is sure if that past actually existed.
Basketball has always generated a
different set of metaphors than football
and baseball. Part of the distinction
comes from the sport itself, which, like
boxing, presents the athlete as both ordi-
nary person and superhuman. Because
it is played without caps or helmets and
in a relatively small space, basketball
allows us to see not only the emotions a
player experiences during the game but
also the beauty and extraordinary skill
that goes into every minute of action.
It’s possible that you or I might close our
eyes and picture ourselves playing sec-
ond base for the Mets, but only the most
delusional person would ever think they
could play alongside seven- footers with
forty- inch vertical leaps.
The closeness of the camera lens also
invites the fan to reckon with who, ex-
actly, the athletes are. The superstars,
around whom the sport has always
revolved, each has an interpretation
of the game, epitomized by Michael
Jordan’s singular intensity, or LeBron
James’s patience and perfection, or
Stephen Curry’s joy. Basketball, as a
result, becomes “like jazz” or “like
hip- hop” or “the heartbeat of the city.”
The “soul” of the game, to borrow an-
other coded cliché, is Black, somewhat,
though not entirely, in the way that
boxing was Black. Both sports have
been dominated by Black athletes who
take on a god- like status and become
among the most famous people in the
world. Both carry a vague, seemingly
political weight, wherein every argu-
ment about Black people will also be
freighted onto the Black athlete.
Boxing and basketball are both
Black sports, but their myths—at least
the ones that endure, whether Norman
Mailer’s writing about Muhammad Ali
in Zaire or Steve James, Peter Gilbert,
and Frederick Marx’s footage of Wil-
liam Gates and Arthur Agee in Hoop
Dreams—are created by white men
who are earnestly, and often clumsily,
trying to understand their subjects. The
reports always read a bit anxious—
there is no one more self- conscious than
the white boxing or basketball writer
who has to address race. Even the objec-
tions to the dominance of Black athletes
in these two sports exist in an anxious
state. You can cheer for the Great
White Hope all you want, but you know
he’s eventually going to get knocked out.
These contradictions are examined
in Robert Scoop Jackson’s recent
book, The Game Is Not a Game: The
Power, Protest, and Politics of Amer-
ican Sports. Jackson, who is Black and
most recently a writer at ESPN, has
spent the last three decades navigating
how, exactly, to present the concerns of
Black athletes and fans to readers in a
media industry owned and operated by
white people. His examinations of pro-
test and politics, as a result, read more
like literary criticism than anything
else. Through a series of essays and a
lengthy interview with Jemele Hill, the
Black SportsCenter anchor who was
dragged through the conservative out-
rage machine for tweeting that Donald
Trump is a white supremacist, Jackson
asks not who has the real power—the
answer is obvious: the white owners of
the league—but rather who controls
the cultural production of sports.
This examination is personal: Jack-
son came to prominence in the mid-
Nineties as the lead writer for SLAM,
a magazine whose covers showing
NBA athletes Kevin Garnett, Kobe
Bryant, and Allen Iverson in defiant
poses came at a time when “authentic-
ity” through hip- hop culture was sold
at scale to kids in the suburbs. Just asThe Source magazine and the Rap City
TV show on BET provided white kids
access to NWA, Notorious BIG, and
Tupac, Slam promised an unvarnished,
street- driven look at basketball. It was
selling “realness.”
I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Car-
olina, the breeding ground for “the
Carolina way” defined by Dean Smith,
the longtime basketball coach of the
University of North Carolina. His
teams took on an almost genteel affect,
one that both reflected and molded the
politics of the town. Smith was the first
coach to desegregate college basketball
in the South, and he was always given
credit for turning his Black athletes
into gentlemen, student- athletes who
could blend in with the wealthy donor
class sitting courtside in powder- blue
sweater- vests.
For a rebellious, Korean- American
teen like myself who was awkwardly
trying to situate himself, without much
success, Jackson’s writing, with its rap
and jazz references and its relentless,
engaging voice, provided a vision of
Black agency that felt almost illicit.
My high school did have a fair number
of Black students, the vast majority
of whom were poor and lived in a de
facto segregated part of town. ChapelHill prided itself on being more toler-
ant than the rest of the state, but the
markers of its past were everywhere.
We played youth basketball in the gym
of the formerly Black high school; we
walked past a now toppled Confed-
erate monument on our way to Pink
Floyd laser- light shows at the planetar-
ium. Slam, and Jackson’s vision of bas-
ketball, made the endless local debates
about the relative morality of UNC, the
public school with a civil rights hero as
coach, or Duke, the tobacco- baron in-
stitution for spoiled kids from New Jer-
sey who hadn’t gotten into Princeton,
seem both stuffy and parochial. It felt
political in a way that I could not articu-
late but urgently wanted to understand.
This was always the dialectic of box-
ing—even the most ardent racists were
trying, in their way, to deal with the
fact that, under the fair-fight Queens-
berry Rules, a Black man could beat
the living hell out of a white man. The
racists were usually rebutted by the
well- intentioned, like the famous New
York Daily News columnist Jimmy
Cannon, who said of Joe Louis, “He
is a credit to his race—the human
race.” Later, David Remnick, in his
book about Muhammad Ali, rightfully
took Cannon to task for that phrase
and pointed to its clear condescension
as a sign of Cannon’s own sublimated
racism. This sort of pileup of correc-
tions—white writers disentangling
the racism of other white writers and
saying that they knew better—was the
animating spirit of mainstream fight-
writing. Today, that tangle has been
shipped off to the NBA. The contours
have shifted and much of the discus-
sion around basketball has moved away
from the players, thanks to analytics
and the rise of obsessive reporting on
every transactions a team makes, but
Jackson is right to argue that any dis-
cussion of politics in basketball must
first acknowledge the innate warp in
the conversation. We’re still trying
to figure out who really got Ali best:
George Plimpton, Mailer, or Cannon?In June I went to a protest in Oakland
that had been organized by a group
of high school students. Thousands of
people were expected to show up, so I
parked about a mile away and walked
to the site. On my way, I passed a line
of cars that had stopped at a busy inter-
section. A barrel- chested, middle- aged
white man got out of a Mercedes SUV
and stood solemn watch as three teen-
age girls excitedly climbed out the back
holding “Black Lives Matter” and “De-
fund the Police” signs. He was wearing
a T- shirt that expressed his own politi-
cal beliefs: “Popovich/Kerr 2020.”
The most revealing chapter of Jack-
son’s book deals with the coaches Gregg
Popovich, of the San Antonio Spurs,
and Steve Kerr, of the Golden State
Warriors. Both are NBA champions who
have spoken out extensively on race,
policing, and Donald Trump. Other
NBA coaches, including David Fizdale
(formerly of the New York Knicks),
who is Black, and Stan Van Gundy
(formerly of the Detroit Pistons), who
is white, have given similar, if not even
more forceful, protestations, but theyHank Willis Thomas: Basketball and Chain, 2003Hank Willis Thomas /Jack Shainman Gallery, New York