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A Vancouver Sun reporter lashed out at the NBA on Saturday, calling it "American at its worst" and a "ghetto gutter run by money grubbers".
Mark Hasluck's article cited NBA commissioner David Stern making the following admission last week: "I wish we hadn't had the Vancouver experience," he said. "Great city, and we disappointed them and we disappointed ourselves."
Stern was making reference to the NBA's ill-conceived attempt to house a franchise in Vancouver, that being the Grizzlies.
Hasluck writes:
The once proud league, which peaked 20 years ago during the Bird/Magic/Jordan era, has morphed into a reality TV show, where money and image trump teamwork and athletic achievement. Players like Allen Iverson--perhaps the greatest basketball talent of his generation--spend more energy producing sneaker commercials than winning basketball games. NBA players wear saggy shorts, roll in posses and cuss on camera. Television ratings have dropped steadily since 1996. Basketball icons such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the late Red Auerbach have denounced today's players, calling them "thugs" and "bums.
Hasluck goes on to blast the hip hop culture but blames lawyers like Stern on the NBA's decline.
Basketball traditionalists (older white guys) blame the overwhelming influence of hip hop culture in the NBA. But they're wrong.
Hip hop, a cultural movement spawned in 1970s New York, has been dead for years.
It sold its soul to corporate sleaze merchants, who repackage black music for a white suburban consumer base.
Nope, the remnants of hip hop--flamboyant chauvinism, jailhouse lingo, black ink tattoos--didn't kill the NBA. It was New York lawyers like Stern, who cashed in on the athletic ability of young black men while ignoring the social realities of basketball in America.
Oh, but it gets worse.
According to a New York Times report, more than 70 per cent of black American children are born out of wedlock. Most NBA players hail from poor neighbourhoods--and despite token college careers--graduate from broken public school systems. They are often ill-equipped to handle multi-million-dollar contracts, or the expectations of a community desperate for positive male role models. To be fair, the NBA, like other professional sports leagues, is a business. And it's not responsible for the endemic problems of black America. But considering basketball's influence on black popular culture, the NBA has a responsibility to produce a "positive" product, not the ghetto garbage we see today.
Tyrone Black, Gambling911.com
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