You Dance and Shake The Hurt (Day 13)

The latest from Yago Colas.

My students, and readers following me here, know that in 1968, when I was 3, my family moved to Madison, Wisconsin and that my memories of my first few years there are dominated by the Bucks and their meteoric rise to a title and to perennial contention. But all that changed forever in the summer of 1975. The knowledgeable among you are thinking that’s the summer that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar left Milwaukee for LA. But that’s only part of it. The other part is that I celebrated my 10th birthday with a family vacation to Portland, Oregon (where I was born) and came back with a Trailblazers pennant. So this chapter of the Undisputed Guide to the History of Pro Basketball, which links the mid to late 70s dominance of Kareem and Portland’s Bill Walton, seemed tailored especially for me.

Maybe three months before we headed west for my birthday trip, Kareem played his last game with the Milwaukee Bucks on April 6th, 1975, a home loss to the Chicago Bulls. The season had been a disappointment, especially after taking the Celtics to seven games in the NBA Finals the previous season. But Oscar had retired, Lucius Allen, the other starting guard, had already been traded, and Kareem himself had missed the first two months of the season with a broken hand. Kareem was in the last year of his contract, and though he wrote fondly of the Milwaukee fans in his 1983 autobiography Giant Steps, he was feeling isolated, alien, and alone: a 7-2 black Muslim, native of Harlem, in a small market Midwestern city. The Bucks ultimately agreed to trade him to the Lakers, where, as everyone knows, he would play the rest of his career, winning 5 more championships alongside Magic Johnson and becoming the all-time leading scorer in NBA history.

As for the Bucks, they sucked for the next two seasons before Don Nelson began to turn them around in the 1977-78 season. I still liked them and wanted them to do well, but I had moved on, adopting the Portland Trailblazers as my new home team on the grounds that I had been born there and that I had visited there in 1975. I even had that Trailblazers pennant up in my bedroom, right next to the Bucks pennant. Now, the 75-76 Blazers weren’t anything to write home about either, finishing 37-45 and missing the playoffs. But even so they held my attention because, among other things, they had Bill Walton, in his second year out of UCLA. As I’ve written elsewhere, as far as college hoops went I was a Bruin. And indeed, the very next season Walton led the Blazers to the NBA championship and vindicated my decision to adopt them as my home team.

In his chapter on this period of my life – I mean, on these two centers and the period of NBA history they dominated – Shoals first establishes some of the contrasts, in fact and perception, around which we might organize our understanding of their careers. There are, first of all, the very arcs of their careers. While Kareem played over 1500 games in 20 seasons, Walton played less than 500 games over 10 seasons. Kareem won six titles and six MVP awards, and played in 19 All-Star games. Walton won two titles, one MVP award, and played in two All-Star games.



But if that were all there was to it, then it would seem Walton – exceptionally skilled though he was -- hardly merits a co-starring role in the story of this period of league history. But that’s not all there is to it. Though to fully and honestly understand why Walton continues to be considered among the all time great centers of league history and as one of the dominant players of the 70s we have to follow Shoals out of the arena and into American society at large.

There we find that each player embodied different facets of 1970s America. Kareem, as is widely known, converted to Islam and changed his name from Lew Alcindor in May 1971, the day after the Bucks won their first and only NBA championship. That was right around the time that Walton would enroll at UCLA and embark not only on a legendary college career, but also break the athletic mold by experimenting with a variety of extra-curricular activities from political protests to vegetarianism. Kareem, already perceived as stoic if not aloof, came with his conversion to emblematize angry blackness that would not be appeased or assimilated. Walton, meanwhile, would be seen as the eccentric, outgoing campus radical.

But in an NBA era in which the increases in black players, salaries, and reports of drug use would combine to turn off a white audience that would rationalize its disinterest as a sorrowful lament for the decline of the team game, the rise of egotism and flamboyance, there was more: Walton would be stationed as the standard bearer for the traditional game played the right (read: white) way. This perception would culminate, and Walton’s historical reputation be set in stone, when his disproportionately white Trailblazers team, playing an effective passing game, defeated what Shoals calls the “badder than thou” 76ers of Julius Erving, Darryl Dawkins, and World B. Free in the 1978 finals.

I was oblivious to these dynamics at the time, though in another way I was living them and, in yet another way, I was undoing or at least complicating them. As I’ve written before, one of the more striking aspects of my memories of the Bucks is how sparsely attended their games in Madison were. In Packer country, none of my (all white) Catholic school friends really cared much about the Bucks, let alone about basketball. So I gravitated to the only kid who did, who also happened to be the only black kid in my neighborhood, Robb. Robb had moved into the neighborhood in 1976 and went to public school. He was a Dr. J fanatic.

I will be the Blazers and Robb will be the Sixers. Best of 7. Blazers home games will be played in my driveway. Sixers home games will be played up on the court up The Park, which borders Robb’s back yard. His terrifying German Shepard, Ginger, chained to her dog house in the back yard, will cheer Robb on and intimidate me, especially when Robb, laughing, will say, “Kill Ginger Kill.” We will have boom boxes blaring music during our games and, for night games in my driveway, we will hook up shop lights to the garage door. We will introduce the starting line-ups: “at forward, from the University of Massachusetts, NUMBer SIX, JOOOOLLLLIUSSSS ERRRRRRVINGGGGGGGGGG.”

Robb had the edge in one respect for sure: it was much easier to imitate the Sixers than the Blazers. He could pull up for long jumpers and be World B. Free, he could back me in for a power lay up as Darryl Dawkins or a little Caldwell Jones jump hook, or, of course, he could swoop in for demoralizing driving Dr. J. layup – the crowd in “The Spectrum” going nuts (or the crowd in Memorial Coliseum hushed by the display of athleticism and blackness).

Meanwhile, what was I going to do: be Bill Walton throwing an outlet pass? Be Dave Twardzik hitting Bob Gross for a backdoor bounce pass? Maurice Lucas ripping down a board? Of course, I did all these things, but it wasn’t quite the same and I still recall the confusion I often felt as I attempted to translate what I was doing in my one-on-one game with Robb into the language of a Blazers broadcast.

I don’t remember how those series turned out. I remember we kept stats, “arbitrarily” assigning a certain number of points, rebounds, and assists to each of our “players.” Robb was about a year and a half older than me and though his time was split between hoops and football (and mine was not), I think he probably still won more of those games than he lost (that would change over the course of high school). I know that our games were fiercely competitive and serious, frequently leading to arguments, but these always seemed to resolve themselves over post-game meals. At the Spectrum, we would enjoy postgame homemade sweet potato pie and iced tea. At the Coliseum it was more likely to be fresh baked chocolate chip cookies and milk,

I came to consider Robb my closest friend, even though we went to different middle schools, high schools, and colleges. He introduced me to Earth, Wind and Fire, and later to Luther Vandross. We went to see Purple Rain together, several times (but also, before that, Rocky, also several times, and Conan the Barbarian too, because of Wilt’s cameo – just one time). We even “recorded” a song together, covering EW&F’s “After the Love is Gone” under the pseudonyms McAlister and Whitehead, for which we carefully drew the LP art.

To this day, Robb erroneously believes it was McFadden, not McAlister. We don’t get in touch regularly, but every time we do it is as if no time had passed. We smoothly integrate the victories and defeats of our respective passing lives into our friendship, a friendship we built when we were competing for the NBA title back in the 1970s and stumbling with awkward gait through family discord into adolescence.

But I realized reading Shoals that Robb and I were also playing with social and ideological, especially racial, dynamite. It’s as though the grownups left us these fucked-up toys and we still did something cool with them. After all, we saw and loved both Rocky and Purple Rain (maybe we loved Purple Rain a little more). Robb may have been the Sixers and I may have been the Blazers, he the hard-to-contain slasher, I the dead-eye shooter, he black and I white. But somehow, for better or worse (for better and worse), we never seemed to understand that these affinities had racial significance. Or maybe, at some deep level we did, but we didn’t care. I certainly don’t remember us talking much about race until we were older, maybe late in high school. Maybe I’ve repressed it and Robb remembers this differently. Maybe it just wasn’t as important as trying to find a way to feel less alone and more at home.

Or (and) maybe we were both tapping into something that Shoals points out toward the end of his chapter, something that undoes the dichotomous opposition between Kareem and Walton, Blazers and Sixers, and all the broader moral and racial meanings mapped onto those figures; something that the two of them shared, not only as players but as figures on different edges of the American mainstream at the time. “Each,” Shoals argues, “embodied a different kind of purism. In the stately Kareem and the playful Walton, there was a wholly original perspective on how to approach the game, philosophically speaking. . . . Each lived by his own version of the philosophy expressed in this statement by Kareem: “Don’t ever forget that you play basketball with your soul as well as your body.”



I’m not sure that the philosophy was a new one, but I think that the articulation of it and in those terms specifically was a new one and very much of its time. I suspect, for example, that Bill Russell also played basketball with his soul as well as his body, but I don’t think Bill’s time (nor perhaps his temperament) were ready to say so, let alone to stand for that. But Kareem and Bill both did stand for that, as did by the way, in my opinion, Dr J and the Sixers of that era. Those Sixers after all more than any other team at the time embodied the ABA genome that was just then impacting the NBA, a genome, as I wrote last week, that could be summed up with the phrase psychedelia, or “soul, manifesting.” It’s a nifty way to sum up, perhaps, what is shared by every wonderful player, event, or moment in the game’s history: they are played with soul as well as with body. I think Kareem and Walton hold the distinction of being the first notable players of the modern NBA to fully live the consequences of that commitment, on and off the court.

Given the durability of our friendship, and the other interests that we shared and introduced each other too, given the intensity with which we constructed an imaginary space in which we could, with soul and body, embody these heroes of ours, I suspect that Robb and I were more than anything loving and trying to live Kareem’s maxim in our games and in that way to elude the painfully alienating dichotomies that marked the time, and the game at the time, and that we were perhaps just beginning to fathom, each in our own way.

A French philosopher I much admire, Gilles Deleuze, once wrote in favor of what he called “intensive reading,” which he described in the following terms: “the only question [of a book] is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through you try a different book. . . . A book is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Writing is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows. . . This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything…is reading with love.”

Let me now just type that passage again with some simple substitutions: “the only question [of the game] is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through you try a different game. . . . A game is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Hooping is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows. . . This intensive way of playing and watching, in contact with what’s outside the game, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each player and fan in the midst of events that have nothing to do with the game, as tearing the game into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything…is playing (or watching) with love.”

The cases of Walton and Kareem’s respective careers and personas, Shoals writing on those cases, and my own memories of the time offer, I think, another important instance of how the game is more than a game, or, in other words, of what it means to play, watch, and think about the game with love. In this particular case, the instance is inflected specifically by the tones of the era in question. And the cases are instructive of that time, in which during the decline of American civilization some people were still talking about soul, desperately trying to find their way to something like an integrated existence in a rapidly transforming (not to say disintegrating) culture that was America around the time of its bicentennial, in the wake of Vietnam, and Watergate, and in the thick of the energy crisis.

In this, we can see also the conditions under which the game allows itself to be experienced and understood as more than just the game, more than just the moves on the court, more than just the technical innovations. Kareem and Walton offer examples of throwing oneself so fully into the game that you come out the other side and see the game as a swatch in a much vaster fabric through which our very selves are threaded.

We were just playing, sure, Robb and I, just like Walton and Kareem and the Doctor were just playing, but we were also, like them, taking the promising and unpromising threads of our time and place, private and public, and weaving ourselves, body and soul, from them, And in turn, we were – we are -- weaving those unfinishable selves into the fabric of the world.




[postscript for readers with writerly interests: I didn’t actually have a class this week. I cancelled it to stay in St. Louis to care for my fiancée, Claire, who was sick. I expected that to have no impact at all on my post this week (odd as I realize that may sound). But it did. Normally, I leave class and take a few minutes to jot down a few key notions – some from the book, some from the clips, some from the students, and some of my own. Then later, when I have some time, I write out the blog, which usually comes out in the first draft more or less as you have been reading it. This time, of course, I didn’t have those notes. But I didn’t think that would matter at all. I wrote and wrote. What I wrote was a lovely, extensive recollection of my life between 1975 and 1977. But, as Claire, who I believe is a more talented writer and professor than I, gently pointed out when she read it, it didn’t have much to say about what was important, in terms of the Cultures of Basketball, about Kareem and Walton and the game at that time. We went back and forth once more: me drafting and she reading, before, lo and behold, I found myself jotting down a few notions: some from the book, some from the clips, some from the students, and some of my own. And these became the basis for the post you’ve just read.

That really might only be of interest to me. But it strikes me as offering yet another instance of what I think Deleuze is promoting in the passage I quoted above. I had mistakenly thought that the class and the students weren’t important to my own thinking; that, in a sense, I didn’t need anything but myself and my memories to communicate about the history of the game. And it’s not that that was useless. But it was, in a sense, closed. What Claire did, which is perhaps what my students in their own way do in class, is open the game, open my game, my experience of the game, and my thinking and writing about the game out to that wider world. Talking about this with Claire, she reminded me of an adage along the lines that you must study the Torah in pairs so that God can come in between. It might be sloppy analogical thinking on my part, but that strikes me as another way of recommending reading with love. Or sometimes, to put it in other words, the best way to tear the book, or the game, into pieces is to share it with someone else.]

Ain't No Use Clutchin' At The Butter

Or, if for once you want a title that makes sense, "Who Owns a Meme"?

I don't claim to have invented the "Positional Revolution". That would be the players who dared to do fifteen-hundred things at once, or the coaches subverting the conventions of their day. But I do know that I coined the phrase, started the conversation (on the internet) at least, and, have pursued it with some seriousness for the last 4.5 years, along with the help of brave souls like Tom Ziller. Unlike that batty "Liberated Fandom", which was formulaic, purposefully rude, and at some point gives way to common sense, I am relatively proud of the writing I've done about positionality in the NBA, and even the phrase "Positional Revolution" itself. When I was in OKC, I had a long conversation with Sam Presti about it and didn't feel the least bit self-conscious, something of a minor miracle for me.

Why am I bringing this up, on a near-defunct blog whose readers are well familiar with my snappy little phrases? Well, it appears the Positional Revolution has gone mainstream, and I've been left behind. There is a band that makes a perfect analogy here, but I'm blanking on their name. Last summer, the blogosphere suddenly flared up with new discussions of position, and quickly, the phrase "Positional Revolution" entered the picture. I thought this was neat, until it kept going, with no acknowledgment of, well, ME. Finally, I spoke out, and was accused of, basically, not understanding that online, everybody knows I made up that term and constant genuflection would be a waste of everybody's time. I posted something pissy that updated my thoughts and then went on with my life.

Well, it's back again, but this time, I genuinely worried from a "branding" and "marketplace of ideas" standpoint.

It doesn't really matter that Rob Mahoney and I disagree on some of the finer points of positionality and its discontents. If you want, when my back hurts less and I'm less generally angry, I can link up all the posts I've done, many of them with TZ, on the subject of structure in basketball. Basically, categories must wither and die, and instead you get heuristic groupings that vary depending on situations. The re-distribution of responsibilities takes place not only on the macro- level of a starting line-up, but also within the ebb and flow of any given possession. This is possible because of players who feel, and respond to, the game in this way; as I wrote in 2007, "the Positional Revolution becomes most radical when the inflamed individual is transubstantiated into a form of basketball logic." Certainly, it doesn't really get into defense, something Danny Leroux has dealt with.

The point is that, when the phrase "Positional Revolution" is written about at great length on the New York Times site without my receiving any credit, it upsets me. I can't assume that everyone reading Rob's piece there knows about what I've done in the past. Is that egotism? Maybe. But it's also a question of how much right I have to be identified with this conversation that sprang up from the web—especially when it's a phrase I coined myself. When I load up the NBA page of Business Insider, a site I write for, and find Adam Fusfeld crediting Rob with ushering in a new era of positions, I can't help but get frustrated and write in this tone.

I know, I have no right to complain about anything, my life is one big party, etc. But you try and spend hours and hours working through an idea—even coming up with a snappy name for it—only to find yourself more or less invisibly as it starts to find a wider audience. Or, to be perfectly blunt about it, this was my Revolution. Take it up if you want, just don't, in effect, pass it off as your own. And yes, at some point, omission is an insult, not proof that my ideas have become part of the ether.

On second though, I'll just trademark the term, and content myself with royalties. Since that's what this is really all about.

The Crispa Files

Rafe Bartholomew is the author of Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball. He has previously written for FD about style in Philippine hoops. Monitor his every move at @rafeboogs, and visit his website.

Five years ago, about a month after I first arrived in the Philippines, I bought a photo album. I was shopping at an upscale swap meet in Metro Manila. After eying a case full of antique watches, some bearing the likenesses of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in gold and silver relief, I noticed a crate of Frank Sinatra and Paul Anka vinyl LPs on the ground, and next to it a stack of basketball photos. I found the album underneath the single prints. It was nearly thirty years old, although I had no way of knowing at the time. All I could tell was that it looked ancient—tattered and coverless, with the wax paper between pages humidity-bonded to the photos themselves. Each image was devoted to the game, and even though I couldn't yet recognize the players, I had already heard of the name on their jerseys: Crispa. Almost as soon as I landed in Manila to learn about the Philippines' unparalleled basketball jones, sports writers began telling me about Crispa. This team, along with its 1970s rival Toyota, turned the Philippine Basketball Association into a force in popular culture whose reach and influence rivaled that of politics, the local film and television industries, even the Church.

I bought the album because it looked cool. A hundred or so worn, black and white pieces of basketball history couldn't hurt my research on Philippine hoops. It would take years of interviews and library digging before I understood how important it was. Much has been made of YouTube's role in creating a video archive of basketball history. I can watch Wilt Chamberlain catch lob after lob in a 1957 Kansas victory over my alma mater, Northwestern. What I can hardly watch any of, however, is a Philippine Basketball Association game from the late Seventies, an era considered the golden age of professional basketball by most Pinoys old enough to remember it. The players in these photos are their country's innovators, the Philippine anologues to Oscar Robertson, Clyde Frazier, Bird, Magic and Kareem, the athletes who set the PBA game on its course to the high-skilled, high-scoring, flamboyant modern era.

Now imagine not being able to see Clyde on D, Magic on the break or Bird on a hot streak. With rare exceptions, that's basically the case for Philippine basketball. When the PBA released a five-disc set of classic game DVDs, the oldest game chosen for the series was played in 1990. The Toyota-Crispa DVD showed a reunion game from 2003, when most of the players were in their fifties. If the mother lode of early PBA footage exists somewhere in the Philippines, it seems to be as well hidden as Yamashita's gold, because in three years of research on Pinoy hoops, I never saw a second of tape from the Seventies. The television networks that played the games are either kaput or unrecognizable in their more recent incarnations, and few, if any, records of their PBA broadcasts seem to exist. When I met Crispa greats like Atoy Co and Philip Cezar and they asked me if I had found footage of their old games, I realized how grim the situation was. For Co, the silver lining was that he still possessed betamax tapes of several Crispa games; he just needed a functional betamax player or a machine to convert his tapes to a modern format. Presumably, the PBA has a video archive, although I never gained access to it.

So this album, finally digitized, is not just a cool-looking score from an antique shop. It's one of the best records I've seen of 1970s professional basketball in the Philippines, and although we can't see how Atoy Co set up his split-legged jumpers or assess Freddie Hubalde's bank shot from the wing, we can get a sense of how vibrant the Philippine game was back then, both on and off the court. You can almost smell the funk in wide shots of packed, humid arenas filled with cigarette-smoking patrons; you can sense the speed and intensity of the Philippine game in the players' stretched, splayed, soaring bodies; and you can feel the depth of the nation's passion for the sport in the solemn expressions on the faces of fans, coaches and players alike during the lulls in and around games.

Here are a handful of photos that stand out, with a few thoughts devoted to each. Most of the comments are based on my previous research, although I also consulted Jay P. Mercado, an amateur PBA historian of legendary stature on Philippine basketball message boards. Do yourself a favor and check out the entire album, because I've been digging into the history of Philippine basketball for years, and I've never seen anything quite like this.



Most of these pictures come from the 1977 PBA season, which might explain why so many of them feature Crispa's Freddie Hubalde (#10). Hubalde was the back-up small forward throughout Crispa's first two PBA seasons, playing behind Bogs Adornado, who won the MVP award in '75 and '76. Bogs blew his knee out before the next season, and Hubalde more than ably filled Adornado's shoes by winning his own MVP trophy that year. Adornado was a gifted mid-range shooter who needed little more than shot fakes, jab steps and a sliver of daylight to be an effective scorer. Hubalde was more of a slasher and hustler; if images like this jumping jack knife move are any indication, Hubalde must have spent much of his career airborne with legs akimbo.



Crispa Coach Baby Dalupan and manager Danny Floro sit in the center of the frame, praying for, among other things, victory. The identity of the woman shooting the extremely salty glare into the camera is anybody's guess. It appears obvious, however, that she disapproves of bringing the hoopla of professional basketball into church. Not that there's much she can do about it. The Pinoy basketball universe is as fervently Catholic as the rest of the country. (See Manny Pacquiao's recent stand on birth control.) On my second day of following a PBA franchise through the 2007 season, I bowed my head with the entire team and their families at a special mass to bless the forthcoming campaign. A true believer would say it paid off; the team won the championship.



When imports are allowed to play in the PBA (the season is typically split into separate mini-seasons called conferences, one All-Filipino and one or more where international ringers can be hired), they are the kings of the league. Cyrus Mann, a 6-10 fourth-round draft pick of the Celtics in 1975, wound up anchoring Crispa's defense during several title seasons in the late Seventies. There's something very regal about him – his long, loping gait, his silk shirt, bellbottoms and hat. Crispa Manager Danny Floro leads him across the court, with a child that is almost surely Mann's son in tow. Trailblazing imports like Mann, Byron “Snake” Jones and Andy Fields were the first to taste the PBA's royal treatment.



Here we see “Fastbreak” Freddie Webb, the brightest star of the Tanduay Rhum franchise in the 1970s, who retired from basketball to become a sitcom star, film actor and politician. He was a senator from 1992 till 1998 and has been all over the Philippine press this week, because the country's Supreme Court overturned his son Hubert's extremely specious conviction on rape and murder charges after the younger Webb spent 15 years in prison. Webb is generally credited as one of the more successful and useful athletes-turned-politicians in the Philippines, although rumor has long had it that Webb's political enemies were involved in his son's frame-up.



Felicisima Bais, AKA Mommy Crispa, is probably the best-known fan in PBA history. Truth be told, every team has a Mommy Crispa, a den mother figure to lead the flock of pseudo-professional die-hard fans who receive free tickets and usually a per diem to form a cheering section. Crispa's Astroturf pep squad was known as the Crispanatics, and because Bais led the troupe devoted to the PBA's most-storied franchise, she gets the nod in history books as the league's preeminent superfan. Her accidental death in 1978, after falling down a flight of stairs, only amplified her legend.



Four Crispa players stretch before a game while a ballboy watches. From left to right, Tito “Kojak” Varela, Freddie Hubalde, Rey Pages, Abet Guidaben. In the olden days, this was about the extent of PBA players' physical training. There are probably as many photos of these guys lighting up cigarettes as there are of them limbering up before games. Many players back then believed weight training would ruin their shooting touch; others thought knee braces were for sissies. Practices were simple—sprints and scrimmages. A handful of all-time greats from this era supposedly had a hard time dribbling with their off-hands. Yet even though the skills may have been a bit underdeveloped and the sweat may have reeked somewhat of nicotine back then, few have ever claimed that the game was anything less than electric.

Highlights For Children

Hardcover edition:



Paperback edition:



Hmmmm....

A High-Tech Lynching, Or An Exercise in Verbal Disenfranchisement

Earlier today, Mike Fisher of DallasBasketball.com wrote a point by point response to Bethlehem Shoals's recent Josh Howard post. In my view, it didn't really add much to the discourse, so I won't bother with a point by point response to his response. But, I did find his other post on the situation, entitled "'Disenfranchised' In Dallas: J-Ho's Latest Diss," to be much more interesting and quite revealing, although maybe not in the way he intended.

I specifically want to address the issue of disenfranchisement, since Fisher uses the word in his title and repeatedly invokes the phrase "the Disenfranchised Black Man" throughout the post. When he first uses it, he actually calls it "the Legend/Myth of the Disenfranchised Black Man." Perhaps I'm being too literal, but the disenfranchisement of the black man is not a myth. It is a verifiable, horrible truth. I am sure that, being a patriot, Fisher knows enough about American history to know that, prior to the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, black men did not have the franchise, or the right to vote. It's probably safe to assume that he knows about the Jim Crow era, during which black men were effectively denied the right to vote, and that this period did not end until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Hell, Fisher might even know that 1.4 million black men are not allowed to vote today, as a result of felon disenfranchisement laws.

Since Fisher's a Mavs fan, I'm sure he knows that Howard is from North Carolina and that he was raised by his grandmother. He probably realizes that this means that black people were not allowed to vote for a significant portion of Howard's grandmother's life. Indeed, he writes: "Maybe he's got a personal tale of racial oppression. More likely, he's got a personal tale relayed to him by an older relative." Fisher even encourages Howard to "use it" and "express it," but then comes the key quote, the moment when Fisher shows his (white) ass: "But not like this."

Fisher, a white man from Texas, seems to think he gets to determine how and when it's appropriate for a black man to express himself. Not only that, but he also gets to determine who has and has not suffered from racism: "[W]hile racism exists it certainly hasn’t resulted in [Howard] personally suffering too greatly." And he criticizes Howard for being arrogant! An offhand, off-color comment at a flag football game pales in comparison to a white man stating in a public forum that he thinks he gets to decide when racism exists and when it's appropriate for black people to speak. I don't know how well Fisher knows Howard (I'm guessing not at all), but even if they were boys and went bowling together every week, the level of presumptuousness here would still be shocking. And it runs throughout the entire post.

Let's take a look at the full quotation:

This circumstance does not call for a dissertation on the meaning of The Star-Spangled Banner. That dissertation is provided (for free, J-Ho) to every second-grader in this country, and while Josh might’ve skipped that day in school (maybe he was smokin’ in the boys room?) the information is certainly available to him. He might learn that the flag is neither white or black, that while racism exists it certainly hasn’t resulted in him personally suffering too greatly, and that whining as if he’s somehow been penalized by being an American is a insult to citizens (black, white and otherwise) who over the course of the last 250 years truly had a reason to be upset, angry and disenfranchised.

First, given the chronology I laid out earlier, the use of "250 years" is quite curious, since the United States of America didn't even exist 250 years ago, and it's only been 43 since the Voting Rights Act. Yet, in 2008, a white man from Texas is telling people that "the Disenfranchised Black Man act" (emphasis mine) is "tiresome." Also, nowhere have I ever read that Howard feels he has been "penalized by being an American," but it's absolute fact that he's been penalized for being a black American. If one takes even a cursory look at the statistics, one knows this. Black men are far more likely than their white counterparts to be unemployed, to be incarcerated, to be killed, to die of disease, etc. The depressing list goes on and on. But, no one today "truly" has a reason to be upset or angry. It all happened 250 years ago. And I won't even get into the infantilization of framing this as a second grade education Howard is too dumb to process, or the use of the word "whining" (but I will note that Phil Gramm is also from Texas).

Before I end, I want to return to this word disenfranchisement. The right to vote is not a joke. It is something to be taken extremely seriously, especially in the black community, where people literally died (and not that long ago) for it. If Fisher's breezy (and incredibly condescending) prediction: "I’m taking odds that while Josh talks of supporting Obama, he’ll never actually make it to the voting booth on Nov. 4." is any indication, he doesn't get it. Voting is an expressive right, one that Fisher presumably is okay with (although if you're a black man, Fisher would appreciate it if you check with him first), but it's not the only one. Humor has traditionally been one way that black people have expressed themselves in the face of oppression, laughing to keep from crying. It's one thing for Fisher to not be amused by Howard's comment, but it's a far graver thing for him to attempt (even in his indirect, ineffective way) to silence him.

Maybe for Fisher, the flag and the national anthem mean "soldiers-lives-bought freedom," but is it really that difficult to understand that it might mean something else to a black man from North Carolina? Somewhere where the American flag flew for hundreds of years, while black people were terrorized and abused and denied the right to vote. Somewhere where black men still suffer from great inequalities. That it might not symbolize freedom, but oppression? And even if doesn't signify that, that a black man from North Carolina might be indifferent to the national anthem? Isn't that his right? Can he not express that indifference to friends in what, even ten years ago, would have been a private moment?

I want to be clear that I'm not saying Fisher is a racist, but it is apparent that he has, to use his phrase, "visited arrogant foolishness". How willing should we be to excuse him? If we held him to the standard he uses for Howard, he wouldn't make it. After all, the information is certainly available to him. But I'll be generous and turn his advice back on him: Please swap your sense of humor, your Holier Than Thou White Man act and sense of entitlement in exchange for some humility.

Be sure to check in on the Presidential 21 Tournament, still going on below.