Search Results

Phil Jackson is the most successful coach in the history of the National Basketball Association, though he has little in common with the players. The son of two Assemblies of God ministers from the most rural of states, he coaches mostly African-American players who come from large urban areas. Basketball team is a “commons” where studies show individual self-interest competes with group, or team interest. Jackson has coached the greatest of all basketball players, Michael Jordan, and also other outstanding individuals such as Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant; he has managed to turn them into team players where all who had tried before had failed. This chapter presents the story of this unusual man and how he overcame the multi-person prisoner's dilemma of the commons in a very public arena.

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.

Chapter 1 documents how Chicago elites welcomed and promoted Michael Jordan and the Bulls of the 1990s as saviors of the city's global reputation. This process supplemented larger efforts by Mayor Richard M. Daley to restructure Chicago's economy around entertainment and cultural attractions. While the new growth model appears to have boosted local economic expansion, this conclusion requires several caveats. First, any impact attributable to the Bulls was miniscule at best. Second, this impact resulted not from investment in the United Center, but from the serendipitous arrival of Michael Jordan. Third, the city distributed the fruits of new, tourism-centered growth very unequally. Officials concentrated the public investment that buttressed this model in Chicago's downtown, leaving many outlying neighborhoods (especially non-white ones) to fend for themselves. Moreover, the new leisure opportunities proved inaccessible to most residents, as businesses increasingly targeted the affluent with luxury goods/services. Efforts to tout the Bulls as a form of civic glue papered over this increasingly unequal growth by replacing definitions of community based on class with definitions rooted in fandom. They also ignored viable forms of more racially and economically equitable urban revitalization pursued with marked success during the early 1980s by Mayor Harold Washington.

Many have argued that the racial integration of sports is indicative of racial progress, since white fans now cheer for players of color. This chapter argues that although such fans may root for and valorize star players of color, they often do so by treating these players as mascots rather than heroes. Drawing on the work of Malcolm X, I contrast white fans’ hero worship of white star players like Tim Tebow with their mascotting of star players who are black or Latino men. Though both hero worship and mascotting are fantasies of identification, they are distinguished by different ways of imagining that player’s relation to the community of which one is a part. To treat a person as a mascot is to treat them as a symbol or object instrumentalized in the service of communal identity, even as they are excluded from full membership in it. Hero worship, in contrast, conceives of its object as “one of us,” and as belonging to the community in a representative, rather than commodified, sense. Both forms of fan identification contribute to the normalization of white masculinity, meaning that the mere existence of cross-racial sports fandom is not necessarily cause for optimism.

This chapter explores the decline of golf in America’s inner cities in the 1980s, subsequent efforts to increase minority participation, and the rise of Tiger Woods. Complicating the notion of Woods as a traditional, popular figure in sport desegregation, the narrative instead posits him as a reluctant civil rights hero, contextualizing his popularity and exploring why the media (and many golf fans) struggled to turn back the clock and fit Woods into the mold of historic black athletes. It was a process that future historians may consider a failure, not only because the traditional “civil rights era” was over but also because the young Woods himself asked not to be identified as “black” and instead told the world that he was “Cablinasian,” a term he coined to describe his multiracial heritage. The chapter features an analysis of Woods that draws on a comparison with other athletes, including lesser-known black golfers like Calvin Peete as well as superstars like basketball great Michael Jordan.