The NBA doesn’t need a white superstar

Published 9:00 pm Friday, June 11, 2004

The coach opens the gym at noon for students to play basketball.

He tosses out three or four balls as several kids race onto the court.

All are black.

That scene was in a small town south of Chicago, 35 years ago.

The coach, a friend of mine.

I thought about him this week when I read Larry Bird’s remarks about the NBA needing more white superstars.

I called up my friend – his name is Denny Lehnus and he’s now the head basketball coach at Anderson University in Indiana – and reminded him of what he had said back then: “Before the balls ever stopped bouncing, there’d be kids on the court, all African-Americans. They thought basketball was their national game and that a black man invented the sport.”

The town might have been just 20 percent black at the time, but the really good players on the two public high school teams were African-Americans.

Lehnus, who is white, would have his two top players, who were black, baby-sit his kids. He was a man ahead of his time, both from a societal standpoint and from recognizing the impact basketball was already having on the African-American culture.

And why was that? Why were black kids gravitating so heavily to basketball?

Lehnus cites one primary reason: economics. “Back in the ’70s, a basketball was a cheap thing to come by,” he said. “You could go out in a schoolyard by yourself and play with a crummy old basket with no nets.

“If you played baseball, you had to have bats, balls, gloves and spikes. And you had to have somebody to play with.”

In the town we lived in, the black community wasn’t faring all that well economically. Cheap entertainment was found on the concrete courts of the north side, where a large portion of the black community resided. And those courts were always busy in the summertime, morning, noon and night.

It was the same story in Compton, Calif. A kid would show up at a basketball court, might be the only person there. But if he had a ball in his hands, within minutes he’d draw a crowd.

“It was as if everyone was looking out the windows, checking to see when someone showed up with a basketball,” Lorenzo Romar said. “Twenty minutes later, there’d be 10 people on the court.”

Or, if someone came without a basketball, someone else invariably showed up with one in hand. “Five hours later, day’s done,” Romar said. “You’d start the next day as you went to bed.”

For some African-Americans, like Romar, the hardcourt summers laid a foundation for a hardcourt career, first as a college player, then as an NBA player, and, ultimately, as a coach. For the past 13 years, Romar has been a college coach, the last two years the head man at the University of Washington.

Romar agrees with Lehnus that one of basketball’s big attractions to inner-city kids was that it was the least expensive sport. But as one of those minorities, he thinks there was an even bigger appeal. Basketball gave black kids an outlet for expressing themselves. They could show emotion, they could be creative. “It was the ultimate game to be able to do that,” he said.

It was also a game they could excel in, as they were starting to find out.

Chicago teams were becoming so powerful, so dominant, that Illinois went to a two-class system in basketball. Ostensibly, it was to give the small schools a chance to win a state title. In reality, I think it was to give the small “white” schools an opportunity to come home with a trophy.

Four decades later, African-Americans dominate the NBA. Name a current white NBA superstar who was born in the USA.

Lehnus heard that question asked the other day. “I couldn’t come up with one player,” he said. “(Steve) Nash is a Canadian (born in South Africa), (Dirk) Nowitzki was born in Germany … “

African-Americans also reign supreme at the NCAA Division I level of college basketball. Their emergence as great players has not opened doors, it’s knocked them down. Schools in the Deep South that used to be lilly white now start predominately black lineups, even put their pictures on the covers of media guides.

Black head coaches guide teams at schools that were once rock-solid bastions of racism.

And some argue that sports have no impact on society. Please. If the rest of society got along as well as athletes do, we’d all be better off. “One of the greatest things for me to see,” Romar said, “is for a black and white to embrace after one of them has scored a basket or a touchdown. That’s awesome.”

What is also awesome is that little kids, little white kids, now put pictures of athletes on their bedroom walls and say, “I want to be like Mike.” Or Barry. Or Tiger.

We’re not totally colorblind in this country yet, and we might never be.

But we’ve come a ways.

Too far to fret about whether we need more superstar white players in the NBA.