This game we love so much is a product, no different than peanut butter or extension cords. Products have one reason for being- sales. I'm sure that New Coke was a splendid drink, but poor sales brought it Iranian-mud-fort-in-an-8.5-earthquake doom.
Likewise, the NBA has to put marketability over art. Forget argument, and take the superiority of the black NBA player as a given. Does this produce a better game? It doesn't matter. What matters is if you can sell it.
I love advertising. It's intimidatingly creative. You have to force someone to do something they don't want to do- without the coercive power of violence. There are people who feed their families by making some guy get off the couch and go buy a chainsaw. Their weapons are psychological: fear, envy, sex, gender roles, common sense, humor, and other assorted goodies.
Properly motivated, people will buy anything. One of the best examples of modern advertising I ever saw happened on the Howard Stern show, as a lark. Howard called his marketing team with an idea- acquire sponsorship for whenever he burps, sneezes, breaks wind or drains lil' Howie on the air. "This sneeze was brought to you by Verizon", and so forth.
While Howard thought it was a prank call kind of skit, it actually turned into a marketing class. The Ad Guy immediately seized on the idea, thinking as he spoke, and began strategizing: "I can move a burp...let me check with the lawyers about urinating...I think I can sell the sneeze to the Allegra account....". For some reason, he felt that the E-commerce accounts might have interest in sponsoring Howard's trips to the bathroom. In short, he was confident that he could sell feces...literally.
The NBA has a more palatable product. It also occupies a fairly unique place in marketing. It sells a black product to a white audience. Only rappers have this trick down, and they primarily market towards teeenagers. Black attraction/white crowd- sort of like a lynching, but without the evil. The NBA is a world-wide success.
There was a White Guy NBA once. It was a new sport, and it was on the fringe of disappearance. The addition of the black athlete slowly brought the game to new heights, both financially and artistically. Football and baseball experienced similar upswings. With accompanying factors like Television and Mass Marketing, sports grew into a gargantuan industry. ARod just signed a deal that makes him more money than Senegal makes in a year.
Rather than turning off the white fan, black athletes actually helped usher in a new era of sports enthusiasm. It paid social dividends. The black man was suddenly thrust into Hero stature, and people saw that they were just like everyone else.
Many of these new black stars were perfectly intelligent, honorable, courageous, and inspirational- and they proved so on a national stage. Kids who had parents telling them that a black man was no better than an animal might watch a Dr. J interview and start to think otherwise. Society moved forward.
I thought nothing of having a poster of Air Jordan in my bedroom as a young girl- something which would have got me sent to a convent in 1930s Alabama. I wasn't trying to batter down racial hatred- I just thought it was a sweet poster. To an innocent kid, Jordan wasn't black or white- he was just cool.
Larry Bird- who was too ugly for a bedroom poster- should think about that before he tries to advance the cause of the white man. The NBA is a major sport today only with the addition of the black athlete. Imagine an NBA White Guy All Star Game?
For the most part, the NBA is a Merit System. Be the man Black, White, Latino, Asian, or Mauve, he'll get his minutes if he can play. We were importing Russian talent while we had nuclear weapons aimed at them, because they could play the game. If some girl proves she can play with the men, she'll be in the NBA. If some alien lands on Earth possessing a 48" vertical leap, someone would sign him/her/it, trust me.
This is a Good Thing. It's color-blindness. The motivation- making as much money as possible- is selfish, but the ends justify the means. While adding more white guys may increase revenue, it would hurt the product in the long haul by weakening the Merit System. They'd be waking the NBA up during the American Dream.
I could put together a team whiter than a Seinfeld episode or an Olsen Twins movie, and I will go bankrupt- because nobody will want to see the home team get repeatedly posterized by the other teams with players who actually have skill. If I ignore color and draft by ability, I am more likely to put a successful product on the floor. If I end up with 12 white players, so be it- as long as I'm filling seats and winning. Same rule applies to 12 blacks, or any mix in between.
Don't get me wrong- I love white guys. I married one. But to quote Big Daddy Kane, "Romance without finance is a goddamn nuisance". My backcourt of Mary-Kate and Ashley would be prone to agree.
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