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This chapter describes the new life for Allen Jones and Connie Boyer in Luxembourg. Connie and Jones found Luxembourg's culture to be different from France's, and they liked it. In more ways than one, they felt right at home. They also were glad to discover that Luxembourgers spoke English. With a population of only 400,000 people and the farm-based economy shifting toward business, good relations with other nations were essential. To help ensure this, the people learned four languages: Luxembourgish, French, German, and English. Playing and coaching with Amicale Steinsel was very different from playing and coaching in France. Most of the players on the team were amateurs; only the coach and the one American player got paid. The team had come in fifth out of twelve teams the year before in the Federation of Luxembourg Basketball, and his job was to take them to a championship.

This chapter examines the origins of the BAA, which was fraught with disappointment and difficulties. The nascent BAA sought the two advantages of territorial rights and the reserve clause that other professional team sports league owners possessed, but the league faced competition from an incumbent league—the National Basketball League (NBL). The two basketball leagues contested just one or two cities and were largely able to avoid a ruinous bidding war for players, including graduating college talent. This low level of strife was unique to professional basketball and may have contributed to the eventual success of those teams that survived. The BAA owners also made crucial decisions regarding revenue sharing, team salary caps, and differentiating their product from the college game.

As a sport that originated in North America, basketball is a privileged site for the study of transatlantic sporting exchanges. In France, since the mid-1980s, basketball has evolved as a practice and spectacle in line with changes in the game in the United States, and particularly in the foremost professional league of the NBA. Particular attention is paid to the basketball craze of the early 1990s, when clothing companies and the NBA attracted a new public to the sport in France. This had consequences for the demographics of basketball, the meanings associated with the sport, the style of play, and ultimately for the game in America, as increasing numbers of non-American (and especially French) players now populate the NBA. Basketball emerges in this chapter as an important example of French responses to American-led commercialization of sport and American-led globalization more generally.

In France, conflicts over nationhood in a globalised world are refracted through competing visions and models of the role of sport in society. The first model holds that sport has intrinsic virtuous qualities and acts as a space for the development and performance of Republican values. This model contends that the sport should be organised by and for the people through the democratic institutions of the State. The second vision recognises sport as primarily a form of entertainment for the masses, dictated by television corporations and media outlets, with sports stars constructed primarily to further commercial imperatives. In the back-and-forth between these rival visions, a range of issues are played out in the sporting sphere, from France’s postcolonial heritage to its post-industrial future, through concerns over Americanisation, corporatisation, immigration and commemoration.

This introductory chapter describes the “bush league” characteristics of the National Basketball Association's (NBA) early days. While basketball was quite popular in the 1940s, and college basketball had shown promise as a spectator attraction, professional basketball still had an air of disrepute: barnstorming, uncouth players, and poorly lit (and often poorly ventilated) gyms or dance halls. The Basketball Association of America (BAA), the NBA's precursor, had struggled to gain credibility and popularity among the country's sports fans during this time. The BAA/NBA during its early seasons relied on exhibition games featuring the Harlem Globetrotters, on playing doubleheaders, on using territorial draft picks of stars from local colleges, on playing regular-season games out of town, and on having teams fold mid-season. Some teams continued to play league games in high school gymnasiums well into the 1950s.

This chapter examines the Congressional hearings of 1971–1972 that addressed the petition of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the American Basketball Association (ABA) for partial antitrust exemptions for their proposed merger. Yale Law School lawyers analyzed the proposed merger, comparing it with the professional football merger: “the concerted action produces efficiencies which arguably outweigh whatever restraints on competition are involved.” They suggested thinking of leagues as being similar to “law partnerships, a firm.” This chapter first considers the arguments presented by basketball owners to justify a merger before discussing the views of economists Robert Nathan, Roger Noll, and Benjamin Okner, along with other pieces of evidence presented at the hearings, regarding the owners' claims of losses. It also assesses the implications of the proposed NBA–ABA merger for player rights and concludes with an overview of Nathan, Noll, and Okner's recommendations about the proposed merger.

Yao Ming, while not the first Chinese athlete to play in the NBA, is the most well known and regarded Chinese athlete to star in America’s professional league. Groomed at a young age to follow his parents into the sport of basketball, Yao Ming has competed for the Chinese national team, in addition to the NBA. Yao Ming’s stardom in the NBA translated into the NBA’s successful expansion of the league into one of the world’s largest populations. The all-star appeared in a number of commercial endorsements, making him a familiar face to Chinese and American consumers.

The introduction begins with a thumbnail sketch of some of the schools that played in the 1958 NCAA College Division Basketball Championship and the varying identities with the NCAA that each represented. The 1958 tournament included liberal arts colleges, regional and small state schools, and historically black colleges, each of which pursued athletics differently from, and often in opposition to, the big-time commercialized model that gained the majority of media and public attention. These varying groups and their agendas ultimately created conflict within the NCAA and all of college athletics over the function of college sports within American higher education and American culture. The chapter examines the historiography of early college sports and reform efforts, showing the primacy that college football plays in existing scholarly interpretations while also noting the fairly limited examinations and scholarly depth of early college basketball. Both strains of scholarship tend to imply a certain inevitability of the varied roles of college football and college basketball, an inevitability rejected by Before March Madness.

Where chapter 1 showed multi-ethnic spaces where ethnic and religious difference were not critical to team formation, chapter 2 looks at Indo-Pak Basketball tournaments, especially in Chicago, that offer a way to disrupt the uniformity of South Asian American sporting masculinity through ethnicity, religion, and class. Though the young men affirm a sameness as South Asian Americans through shared racializations, they affirm difference through their religious, ethnic, and class backgrounds. In the process, they also set up difference from each other through particular athletic feats.

This chapter discusses the impacts of the issues that Michael Jordan has faced after retiring for the third time. It points out that Jordan’s image took the National Basketball Association (NBA) by storm and it can be said that the world was tuning in to NBA largely because of him. It also points out that Jordan’s success is not without stain, as there were criticisms leveled at his reputation: his political neutrality toward race relations; political sterility; his abandonment of the black community; and his behavior as a ruthless capitalist.

Meet Martin Feinberg, the sole American basketball player on the storied Paris Université Club (PUC) roster in 1956. That December, Feinberg organized a team tour through the American Midwest, the first such journey undertaken by a French basketball club. PUC’s travels (including a 1962 visit) were not subsidized by the U.S. Government, thus not “official” exchanges. The trips were nevertheless strong examples of sport’s ability to carry social and political messages with deep consequences. Basketball was first played in Europe in 1893 in a small sports hall located at 14, rue de Trévise, in Paris, France. Basketball, however, remained a niche endeavor in a country that favored British sports, notably football and rugby. The young PUC players who traveled to the United States were thus not the “typical” representatives of their generation. Yet, many of them, even the more anti-American Socialists, came away with favorable impressions of France’s sister republic in most matters, save that of race relations. “Barnstorming Frenchmen” examines how the earliest French-American basketball exchanges created lasting impressions on young players in ways traditional diplomacy and diplomats rarely could. Set against the larger context of post-war French anxieties and reconstruction, French-American Cold War diplomacy, and race relations in both countries, these trips are noteworthy.

This chapter chronicles the 1949 merger between the BAA and the NBL and its aftermath. The BAA owners' decision to absorb the most attractive NBL teams obviously looms large in the league's development, although the move and subsequent merger ultimately could not save several BAA franchises. By ghettoizing the later NBL refugees, BAA owners may have ensured the demise of those teams. Fortunately, there were not too many people paying attention to the league's upheavals. The league's integration did not initially create much excitement either. Yet the streamlined NBA still struggled to entice fans—in many ways the professional players' experience and savvy led to brutal, foul-plagued games that alienated fans. The chapter also looks at how league owners struggled with racial integration.

This chapter traces the history of professional team sports in order to place the issues covered in the Congressional hearings in the proper context. It first considers the rise of baseball as America's national pastime and Major League Baseball (MLB)'s decision to maintain two separate leagues, the American League and the National League. It then discusses the dispute between MLB and the rival Federal League, along with the emergence of other sports that achieved Big League status, namely, football and basketball. It also examines the prosperity of the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the appearance of new challengers to their dominance after World War II. Finally, it looks at the Flood v. Kuhn, a Supreme Court case that challenged baseball's reserve clause, along with the rise of free agency.

This chapter examines the issues surrounding player draft in professional sports leagues. During the postwar era, baseball officials and players often mentioned free agents. Unlike the free agents of our era, however, these players were talented amateur players. Indeed, high school and college players constituted the remaining vestige of a free market for baseball labor during the postwar era. The owners quickly discovered that this free market for labor was costly and made attempts to curb spending on amateur players, sparking allegations of cheating that led to distrust among them. This chapter first considers the creation of the amateur draft in Major League Baseball (MLB) before discussing the reverse-order draft in the National Football League (NFL) and the player draft in the National Basketball Association (NBA). It concludes with an assessment of the impact of the draft on owners and players.

This chapter focuses on the Congressional hearings conducted in 1957 and 1958 to address whether basketball, football, and hockey should be given a broad antitrust exemption similar to that of baseball. It first considers the introduction of different bills pertaining to professional sports and antitrust following the Supreme Court's ruling in Radovich v. NFL, with particular emphasis on antitrust legislation focusing on the National Football League (NFL), before discussing the farm systems in baseball and hockey pioneered by Branch Rickey of the St. Louis Cardinals. It also looks at the issue of the reserve clause and its effect upon competitive balance and concludes with an assessment of Congress's decision not to grant even partial antitrust exemptions for the reserve clause, draft, territorial rights, and commissioner powers in the NFL, National Basketball Association (NBA), and National Hockey League (NHL).

This chapter focuses on the Congressional hearings conducted in 1959 and 1960 to address the issue of expansion and prospective new leagues. All of the league constitutions contained clauses pertaining to relocating or selling existing franchises and creating new franchises. These clauses typically required a supermajority, in some cases unanimity, of owners to approve franchise relocation or sales and expansion. However, incumbent owners were lukewarm about franchise expansion and hostile towards new leagues. This chapter begins with a discussion of tactics employed by team owners to prevent the entry of a new league, including territorial rights. It then considers the demise of the Continental League due to a number of hurdles, such as getting television contracts, providing pension benefits equivalent to Major League Baseball's (MLB) scheme, and and getting stadiums. It also examines the expansion policies of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL), along with the legal wrangling between the NFL and the American Football League (AFL) over expansion.

This chapter focuses on the Congressional hearings of 1972–1977 that addressed the National Football League's (NFL) television blackout rules. It first considers the economic and legal aspects of the proposed antiblackout law before discussing the Senate hearings that resulted in a temporary experiment in lifting the blackouts under specified circumstances. It then examines the NFL's defense of blackouts, along with empirical evidence regarding lifting the blackouts and the lawmakers' concern that NFL owners might allow cable and pay television to telecast games after the blackout was lifted. It also assesses the responses of Major League Baseball (MLB), National Hockey League (NHL), and the National Basketball Association (NBA) to the proposed antiblackout legislation, as well as those of network television officials such as ABC Sports president Roone Arledge and CBS president John Schneider. The chapter concludes with an overview of various reports on the effects of the television blackout law and the impact of the antiblackout rule on NFL gate attendance, no-shows, and revenues.

This chapter uses film theory and visual culture studies to parse Malcolm D Lee's film The Best Man (1999) and Gina Prince-Bythewood's film Love and Basketball (2000) as well as the corresponding soundtracks, screenplays, and publicity. It illuminates how the films unsettle genre boundaries as well as encode progressive and pernicious messages about the formation of African American marriage and Black love for its Black middle-class characters.