Aram Goudsouzian

As commonly portrayed, pro basketball in the 1970s suffered from Black athletes who lacked not only the dignity of 1960s pioneers such as Bill Russell or Elgin Baylor, but also the mass-marketability of 1980s icons such as Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. The popular memory of pro hoops in this era includes accounts of contract-jumping, on-court fighting, and cocaine-sniffing. Theresa Runstedtler’s Black Ball seeks to dislodge this conventional narrative.

Howard Bryant, a senior writer at ESPN, has examined baseball’s tangled racial history in books such as Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston and The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. Like these books, Rickey combines impressive journalistic legwork, clear narrative writing, and sensitive analysis of the unique burdens endured by Black athletes.

As Cohan perceptively notes, fans tend to consider their sporting loyalties as matters of “nonfiction,” rooted in actual people and real action. In fact, our fandom consists of interpretative storytelling. We consume the tales generated by sports competition, and we refashion them to suit our personal needs.