12 The New York Review
do not receive the same retweeted love.
There are no “Fizdale 2020” shirts. The
basketball press does not lionize Van
Gundy, who, in addition to his repeated
support of Black Lives Matter, recently
argued for a $15 minimum wage.
Jackson also admires Popovich and
Kerr. “The outspokenness and frank-
ness,” he writes. “The realness and
openness. The courage and temerity.
All beautiful to witness. All necessary
in order to make the change they seek or
to force a change unwanted. But,” Jack-
son goes on, “theirs is without risk. For
they are protected. They are not threats
to themselves or to others around them.”
They are, in other words, white, and
enjoy all the associated safety that
comes with being it. But not all white
coaches, Jackson argues, are the same.
Two things set Kerr and Popovich
apart: the lack of compromise in their
statements, and, perhaps more interest-
ingly, and unlike Van Gundy, their ré-
sumés on the court. Kerr and Popovich
are able to stand on what they
stand for openly due to their his-
tory of winning and continual abil-
ity to win.... Same with any coach
who has amassed the respect that
comes with winning in sports in
America. Being white is a bonus.
An added uniqueness. Winning
one- ups race, sometimes gender,
often class, on occasion politics. A
coach—especially a white one—
who sets a standard for winning
is in most cases the most powerful
person in their respective sport.This, for the most part, checks out. Suc-
cessful coaches almost always last lon-
ger than their players. They are older
and carry a nearly professorial gravitas
that bleeds over into everything they
publicly discuss, whether zone defense
or police violence. Jackson doesn’t ex-
plicitly say why, but my sense is that the
self- consciousness that informs basket-
ball writing runs both ways: when white
people seek out the opinion they should
hold about race in America, they seek
out pedigreed white men who not only
have spent a lot of time with Black peo-
ple but also have led them to victory.
Popovich’s and Kerr’s dissent oper-
ates on two levels. They are the wiz-
ened translators for their Black players,
but their authority comes, as Jackson
points out, from the bizarre convic-
tion that winning games must require
some special insight into Blackness it-
self. Black coaches don’t get the same
credit: Doc Rivers, a Black coach who
won a title with the Boston Celtics and
guided the Clippers team through the
Donald Sterling controversy, in which
the league’s most trenchant racist was
finally ousted, also talks about social
justice, but until he nearly broke down
in tears while discussing the shooting
of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin,
his thoughts had mostly been ignored.
Similarly, the actual beliefs of Black
players are largely taken for granted,
which means the coach sits not exactly
as the medium for his players but for a
vaguely defined “Blackness.”For its non-Black, liberal fans, bas-
ketball exists in a sort of triple con-
sciousness. They love basketball in part
because it allows them access to Black-
ness. This, however, comes with guilt anddiscomfort, which gets processed into a
monolithic and easily accessible politics
of what these days is called “ally ship,”
which then needs to be codified and rub-
berstamped by the esteemed white men
who know the players the best. Popo-
vich and Kerr serve as models for white
allies. Underlying all this is a pressing
need to understand Black people.
In The Book of Basketball, Bill Sim-
mons, undoubtedly the most influential
NBA writer ever and the founder of
The Ringer, the sports and pop- culture
website and podcast network, wrote
that when he was a Celtics- obsessed six-
year- old, he told his teachers his name
was Jabaal Abdul- Simmons because he
wanted to be Black. Simmons has been
relentlessly mocked for this by other
NBA writers and fans, but he laid out
the simplest and possibly most honest
reduction of the white fan’s relation-
ship with basketball: at some visceral,
perhaps subconscious level, that fan
obsessively follows the NBA because
he wants to be culturally Black. This is
nothing new. The white jazz fans who
crowded into the Café Bohemia in New
York to hear Mingus or the white back-
packers who hung out in front of Fat
Beats in Los Angeles and spoke with an
affected Black accent were after some-
thing similar—they wanted to sidle up
to Black culture while only reckoning
with Black suffering through shallow
declarations of support for social jus-
tice and enthusiastic support for famous
Black people. They, like NBA fans, de-
fined themselves not so much by their
relationship with Black people as by the
small differences between themselves
and their fellow white culture- tourists.
As happened in boxing, successive
generations have brought to fandom
a more respectable and less cringe-
inducing language that gets policed
relentlessly. Jackson devotes an en-
tire chapter of his book to the analyt-
ics movement, which after giving rise
to Moneyball- inspired, Ivy League–
educated executives who ran baseball
teams like hedge funds moved over to
basketball. Jackson sees analytics as an
insidious development meant to strip
power away from Black athletes and ex-
ecutives. “Too many empty theories,”
Jackson writes,too many number crunchers, too
many pseudo- intellectuals, too
many white dudes stripping away
at the culture of the game by using
numbers to dictate how the game is
going to be played, and to discredit
the way it was played in the past.
It is the customary American pro-
cess of controlling someone else’s
American Dream.“We play the game,” he continues,for a greater purpose than num-
bers. There’s a passionate con-
nection we have to basketball that
no other race, creed, or culture in
America could understand unless
it has walked with us through that
four- hundred- year fire we call our
existence in America.When I worked for Simmons at the
now defunct sports and pop- culture
website Grantland, we published a lot of
basketball analytics writing. Part of our
project was also “celebrating” the NBA
through an obsessive coverage of “silly”
players like JaVale McGee, Nick Young,
and J. R. Smith, who became lovableantiheroes. Every lascivious Instagram
post, every tweet that read as “street,”
every boneheaded play in a game was
converted into smirking content. Ev-
eryone in the editorial office, save me,
was white. I don’t think we acted out
of malice, but the intent, at least sub-
consciously, was to create two points of
access for ourselves, and, by extension,
our audience of mostly white, mostly
educated sports enthusiasts. First, we
wanted to be the best analytics site on
the Internet. Second, we wanted to “hu-
manize” the league through a meme
parade. We were desperately trying to
wring our work through the hope, how-
ever misguided, that we could justify
our own place in a Black sport. What
Jackson understands is that the entire
structure of professional basketball—
whether ownership, marketing from
the shoe companies, or self- conscious
coverage of an overwhelmingly white
sports media—is just a variation on
that same ungainly attempt.In the winter of 2015 I took a break
from journalism and moved to
Portland, Oregon, to work at the
Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency.
The reason was simple: I needed the
money. But I also had reached a bit of
an impasse in a career spent writing
about sports and race. The problem was
that I didn’t really know if the two sub-
jects converged, at least in any mean-
ingful way. At the time, political sports
writing felt like a mostly nostalgic ex-
ercise with fixed yet somehow abstract
reference points—Muhammad Ali,
Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens—whose
modern- day equivalents, through no
fault of their own, never quite lived
up to the comparison. LeBron James,
for example, might wear an “I Can’t
Breathe” T- shirt before a game, but
that only seemed to inspire meta-
conversations about athletes’ respon-
sibilities, rather than pushing forward
an idea itself. I was tired of the stretch-
ing, so I decided that I might as well go
work for the company that had made all
my favorite Nike ads. The line between
sports journalism and sports marketing
didn’t seem wide enough to deny my-
self the comforts of an actual salary.
My work was mostly pleasant. I liked
my coworkers. Nobody seemed much
bothered by trivial dichotomies be-
tween story and commodity or brand
and truth. This was just a fun job where
you made cool stuff with every perk
you could possibly imagine, from lunch
meetings catered by one of Portland’s
culturally appropriated restaurants to
long shoots in Los Angeles under the
direction of Michel Gondry. I watched
Kobe Bryant’s last game, in April 2016,
at a bar with my colleagues because my
closest friend at the agency had been the
art director of the farewell commercial
in which a cast of fans and players sere-
naded Bryant with a satirical version of
Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You
Too Long.” We were all excited for him
when it aired. Scrolling through social
media that night, I saw that everyone
else had loved it, too. This, it seemed,
was a better way to be a sports fan.
After six months of pleasantness,
my wife got pregnant. We weren’t sure
if we wanted to raise our kid in Port-
land, so I went back to New York City
to take up journalism again. On my
third day at my new job at Vice News
on HBO, Philando Castile was killed
in Minneapolis. A Black copywriter atvitsoe.comFaithful
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