Award-winning scholar Dr. Theresa Runstedtler provides incisive narrative of how Black players shaped the NBA in the 70s
March 8, 2023
The next time you watch a National Basketball Association (NBA) game on television and think about the ways in which the sport is packaged and how natural it is for Black stars to be celebrated, remember that the dominance players now hold and enjoy was not given to them.
There was a time when NBA players didn’t have the right to become free agents.
Regardless of how good they were, teenagers had to spend the full four years in college before entering the draft.
In her latest book, ‘Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood and the Generation that Saved the Game’, award-winning scholar Dr. Theresa Runstedtler provides an incisive narrative of the professional game in the 1970s and the Black players who shaped the league.
“It was this earlier generation of players that paved the way for what we see on the court today,” she said. “One of the things I found was there were these labour fights in the early 1970s, starting with Connie Hawkins’ antitrust lawsuit which really exposed the NBAs longtime practice of blacklisting players that disproportionately affected Black players, and Spencer Haywood’s antitrust case against the four-year rule which pointed to how the league and the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) worked to try to suppress players’ wages and control when they could enter the league and where they could play.
“There was also then NBA Players Association head Oscar Robertson antitrust suit against the league that pushed back against the reserve clause that tended to bind a player to a team for the entirety of their career, thereby suppressing their wages. I was really struck by the fact that all of these cases were successful, but so little of what took place was actually talked about as significant victories in African-American history and basketball history more broadly speaking. There are legitimate critiques of having to stay in a place that you don’t want to, not been able to shop your labor in a free market and getting what you think you can get paid. Ultimately, it is the team owners who are deciding how much you are going to pay the players.”
Runstedtler, whose research examines Black popular culture with a focus on the intersection of race, masculinity, labour and sport, said there was a double edge to the time period.
“You had this new Black majority in the sport that was pushing back against the traditional mechanisms of labour exploitation,” noted the Associate Professor in the Departments of History & Critical Race, Gender & Culture Studies at American University in Washington, DC. “Players were getting paid on a level they hadn’t been. But through their hypervisibility, they became flashpoints in other debates about violence and drug use and also what it meant to have Black men in positions of power, not just on the court, but in the front office and executive suites. I just saw this as a fruitful lens when thinking about White America’s reaction to racial integration in such a public forum. There was no shortage of sources to look at in terms of how folks were reacting in real time and how the players were trying to shape their identities and political commitments in that same time period.”
The group of players pushing back against White America’s rigid expectation of Black athletes included Abdul-Jabbar who has been an advocate for civil rights and social justice.
“As African American ballplayers gained strength in numbers and greater financial clout in the early 1970s, they were no longer content to abide by the rules and customs of the White basketball establishment, whether on or off the court,” wrote Runstedtler who won a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar fellowship to work on the book. “Some even refused to be bound by Black leaders’ ideas of what it meant to be respectable role models for Black youths. Diverse expressions of Black identity and Black Power from political and cultural currents outside sport seemed to be seeping into professional basketball.”
What else does the former State University of New York at Buffalo Assistant Professor of American Studies want readers to take away from the book?
“Athletes, particularly Black athletes, are human beings with lives that just don’t take place on the court,” said the Inaugural Chair of Critical Race, Gender & Culture Studies Collaborative at American University. “They were not removed from the realities of segregation and other forms of anti-Blackness in American society. They experienced it albeit in different ways than folks in their communities. They also have their own experiences of trauma, joy and their own critiques of the business of professional sport that we don’t talk about. I think they often get caught up in the image of them on the court without remembering they are people and they are complex individuals with their own ideas, politics and experiences.”
To help pay the bills to get through York University where she graduated with honours in History & English in 1998, Runstedtler signed up with a talent agency to perform as a freelance dancer/actress.
For three years, starting in the Toronto Raptors second season in 1996-7, she was a member of the Raptors Dance Pak (now the North Side Dance Crew).
“This book came out of my own personal story,” said Runstedtler who was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. “During my time with the Raptors, I got the opportunity to see some of the things that were out of view for many spectators. I loved my time, but I also saw how race and questions of waiver were working in the league. That really piqued my interest. I am a historian and, in looking at some of the game’s history, I noticed there was very little written about the period from about 1967 to 1984. There was very little scholarship of historical books looking at the amazing transformations happening in the league during that period.”
She is one of two Raptors Dance Pak members who have transitioned to academia. Choreographer Dr. Tamara Mose is a Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College.
This is Runstedtler’s second book.
‘Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Colour Line’ started as her PhD. dissertation and was extended into a comprehensive account of Johnson’s reign as the first Black world heavyweight champion and his struggle to find a home.
It was published in 2012.
Runstedtler – who was taught basic boxing skills and artistic skipping by former Canadian welterweight boxer Greg Johnson -- said there is a difference between the publications.
“The first one is academic and I had been working on the research for the second book before I chose to publish a trade book for a more popular audience,” she pointed out. “Writing this one was a little bit different in terms of the process as I tried to make it much more accessible to a broader audience by foregrounding the story and giving colour and detail to the narrative in a way that tells the story in a storytelling format as opposed to academic speak.”
Runstedtler was raised in Kitchener by a mother who migrated from the Philippines and a Canadian father who ‘was not savvy enough’ to talk about race and the effects of racism.
Dr. Theresa Runstedtler with her husband Joseph Johnson, brother Allan (r) and parents John, who died three years ago, and Elisea (Photo contributed)
He died in December 2018.
“I had to do my own figuring out of what it meant to be in-between, what this thing called racism was and what it meant to have proximity to Whiteness, but not be White,” she said.
Runstedtler found many of the answers while studying American History at York University.
“For many folks who were coming of age during the 70s, 80s and early 90s, there was no institutional space for people to talk about racism in the Canadian context in a systematic way,” she noted. “We were not learning about it in History, or about immigration restrictions, anti-Blackness and other forms of anti-Asian hate. Ironically, it was through taking some seminars in African-American History that I discovered there was a language for this and there is a long struggle. It was there that I got a historical context for understanding how segregation, colonialism and the social construction of race works. My goal was to continue to learn about that and do it where folks have been doing it for a long time.”
That led Runstedtler to pursue a PhD. in African & American Studies and History at Yale University in 2001.
“The plan was to go there, learn everything I could, bring it back to Canada and be part of efforts to include critical race in decolonial theory in a Canadian context,” the 2007 doctoral graduate said. “But doing a PhD. takes a long time, so I ended up becoming embedded in my life here south of the border.”
Prior to leaving Canada 22 years ago, the married mother of a five-year-old son spent a year in Toronto Metropolitan University’s Radio & Television Arts program.
After a few months, she was turned off.
“One of the things I quickly realized was just how White the Canadian media was,” the former Sportsnet Audience Relations Specialist said. “The other thing that didn’t suit me about media was how everything had to be down to a certain time limit. I am not always the briefest in my comments and writing and I found myself wanting to do more investigative-type work and really go deeply into unpacking a problem on a larger scale which is what I do as an academic, writing books and articles. I can control to some degree what I want to study and how I want to study it. I have a lot of anatomy that way. What I realized in that one year is that I wanted to analyze media more than I wanted to produce it.”
Runstedtler plans to do a book launch in the Greater Toronto Area this summer.
