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This concluding chapter summarizes the NBA's troubled history and its eventual prosperity. It discusses how a series of events and decisions helped improve the league's prospects. The BAA/NBA struggled with many things in its first decade, from concerns over stadium capacities to lack of consumer demands for pro basketball games to racial integration and the rise of technology. Yet the owners' decisions to absorb NBL teams, ruthlessly pare weak teams, tamper with playing rules, introduce African American players, relocate to larger cities, and develop a relationship with television all proved beneficial, although sometimes with a lag. The league's survival, frequently precarious, was a testimony to a group of owners' determination and their willingness to absorb losses.

This chapter looks at the fledgling NBA League's attempts to stabilize itself internally and financially as well as the innovations undergone during its first few years. With the NBL gone, along with some of the original BAA franchises, the surviving owners hoped consolidation would provide stability if not prosperity. However, the elimination of six weak teams did not immediately create prosperity for the remaining NBA teams. Three more teams folded before the league settled into an eight-team circuit. The owners, seeking to reduce costs and bolster attendance, decided to rely on doubleheaders. They also worried about the growing roughness of league games and worked on trying to improve the product.

This chapter documents the league's continued efforts at expansion. Although some of the eight franchises were still struggling to earn sufficient revenues, the NBA's stability and the success of its twenty-four-second shot clock encouraged NBA owners. Some began considering relocating their teams to larger cities. Their improved product on the court and growing prosperity spurred other businesspeople to begin seeking teams of their own, leading to increases in franchise values and demands for expansion teams. Moreover, new players from this generation were elevated to nigh-legendary status among pro basketball fans. The league's general stability and incipient prosperity also bolstered player salaries and emboldened players to seek more rights.

The conclusion looks at the greatest threats to this form of South Asian American masculinity. One threat to masculinity is the exclusive nature of the sporting space, which is neither fully translatable to nor appreciated by the larger South Asian American community in particular and the United States in general. The chapter looks at the futures and future hero-making like a possible “Indian Yao Ming” that South Asian American athletes dream of in Canada and in India as a way to foreground South Asian American sporting masculinity as cultural foundation. They long for an Indian in the NBA as a way to dismantle localized experiences of marginalization. Another threat arises from the increasing number of South Asians arriving on U.S. shores and how that is related to the increasing number of co-ethno-religious leagues rather than a general desi space like Indo-Pak Basketball.

This concluding chapter revisits the book's major themes and arguments. Using a variety of examples drawn from local, state, and international political episodes, the chapter extends the book’s focus, turning especially toward the global implications of its findings and arguments. Using the frame of chocolate cities, the chapter invokes the global possibilities of seeing the world through the eyes of black people everywhere.

This chapter explores the role and production of race, specifically black athletes, in professional sports television programming, as well as in the imagination of the largely white viewing audience. Some claim that the shift in racial rhetoric that has resulted in the denial of racism is becoming the new form of racism. For them the race denial card is the most powerful and widely circulated in the deck, as evidenced by its ubiquity and the constant demonization of those who “introduce” race into the discussion. Examining the ways in which race—racial talk, the white racial frame—is central to contemporary sporting discourses, the chapter explores the ways in which these sites exist as contested spaces of racial meaning through an analysis of the reactions to the 2011 NBA lockout and LeBron James' decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010.

This chapter critiques the “allegorical power of sport” in relation to historical and contemporary manifestations of white supremacy. In particular, it argues that media discourse about the NBA commissioner David Stern as well as his public statements demonstrate white paternalism. From the onset of his career as commissioner, Stern normalized whiteness as a nonracialized space by repeating discourse that marked the racialized “other” as criminal. Moreover, in a popular sport in which seventy five percent of the players are black but virtually all of the corporate owners and commissioner are white, Stern's enforcement of extreme penalties and policies affecting primarily black players visibly reproduces a spectacle of the white father figure and black slave child relationship found on plantations during the antebellum South.

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 is a general overview of the economic aspects of professional team sports leagues as well as the American economy. The NBA's turbulent birth as the BAA demonstrated that professional sports team owners' twin advantages of price-setting power over ticket prices and enhanced bargaining power over players were not sufficient conditions to ensure profitability. Price-setting power without sufficient demand could still lead to losses. The challenge was to increase demand, which would have led to higher ticket prices, more attendance, and greater revenues and profits. Greater profits would have enabled owners to pay higher salaries and to improve conditions, helping to erase any fly-by-night image. Thus the chapter looks at the issues surrounding profits, player salaries, technology, expansions, discrimination, and so on; as well as how the American economy performed during the years 1945–61 and how it affected attendance and demand for professional team sports leagues.

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 marks a period of stability and growth for the NBA during the mid-1950s. With the NBA down to eight teams, owners still faced inadequate revenues, although their continued efforts to improve and innovate would eventually lead to the NBA's stabilization. They also continued to grapple with the unattractive aspect of the league's end games, where fouling and rough play were still the tactics of choice. How to reduce the primitive aspects of the game remained a difficult problem, but it was one with an elegant solution—the twenty-four-second shot clock helped transform the pro game into something quite distinct from other basketball games and would eventually prove popular and enduring. In addition, the owners also needed to assess whether television would prove beneficial for the NBA.

There is no doubt that the earth continues to be struck by objects from space. Most of the impactors are very tiny, such as those that produce common meteor trails, and major collisions no longer happen very often. But if a large object, a half kilometer across say, were to strike our planet, the consequences would be devastating. In 1989 an asteroid large enough to bring civilization to the brink of total destruction missed earth by 6 hours and this close encounter in itself should be enough to give us food for thought. There will be other close shaves in the years to come, but no one can predict just when or how close. Only time will tell. Fortunately there are several dedicated groups of astronomers around the world searching for near-earth asteroids (NEAs) in order to catalog their existence and figure orbits lest any should be on a collision course. As a result of their efforts, crucial data are being obtained that will allow the probability of impact to be more accurately estimated, even if only in a statistical sense. The best anyone can do, or will ever be able to do, is to offer odds on the chance of collisions. Odds on comet impact, in the form of estimates of the period between such events, have been published for two centuries. Each generation no doubt felt that the latest estimates were superior to those that went before. For example, in 1861 James Watson, in A Popular Treatise on Comets, said that “it has been found by actual calculation, from the theory of probabilities, that if the nucleus of a comet having a diameter equal to only one fourth part of that of the earth…the probability of receiving a shock from it, is only one in two hundred and eighty-one millions.” This estimate was also quoted by Thomas Dick in 1840 who, in turn, credited it to Francois Arago for calculating this around 1800.

The epic journey of the Land Acquisition Act, 2013 is the subject matter of this chapter. The chapter traces the travails of the 1894 Act through the various challenges including the Narmada Bachao agitation and various SEZ acquisitions in the early 2000s till the four separate and more recent agitations that set the stage for work on new legislation—Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal, Maha Mumbai SEZ in Maharashtra and POSCO acquisition in Odisha. The UPA’s 2004 Rehabilitation and Resettlement (R&R) policy was revised in a 2007 Bill, largely as per NAC recommendations, that however lapsed in 2009. During UPA-II, fresh trouble erupted in Bhatta Parsaul in UP and the government elevated Jairam Ramesh to fast pace the passage of the new law. After much contentious negotiation the Act came into being in 2013. The movement reflects a combination of Punctuated Equilibrium Framework and Advocacy Coalition Framework.