TY - JOUR
AU - Romyn, Michael
AB - In his 2019 work No Win Race, Derek Bardowell described the act of watching British basketball as a source of identity for his younger self, and a revelatory generator of self-concepts: I discovered for the first time a side of Englishness that spoke to me, spoke about me and spoke for me. Through the mid-to-late eighties, I followed a group of basketball players, primarily children of the Windrush generation, who played the game with a distinct Black-English style. A ‘hyphenated’ style. A style that reflected the dual identity of being black and being English. A style that came to personify my experience.1 Bardowell grew up in Newham in east London in the 1970s and 80s, a place and time in which discriminatory attitudes, police harassment, and racially motivated attacks were for many black people a part of daily life.2 For Bardowell, racism was inescapable: ‘Bus stops, shops, school, trains, my everyday spaces, brought conflict, stares, stop and searches, anxiety, false accusations’. It underpinned his emotional life – ‘fear, paranoia and insecurity consumed me’ – and informed his belief that he was an outsider, an alien in his native country. Situating this everyday trauma within a broader context of large social rupture, Bardowell explained how news of the New Cross Fire in 1981 and images of the Brixton ‘riots’ that same year had fed an internal state of shame and self-resentment: ‘My skin terrified me…[it] made me feel apologetic, guilty, watched, scrutinised, as if a constant spotlight had been covering my every move.’3 Plagued by insecurity, confusion over his identity, and apprehension about his future – what Ellis Cashmore and Barry Troyna termed the ‘crisis of black youth’ – it was only through watching the successes of black athletes that Bardowell experienced feelings of positivity, even pride, about the colour of his skin.4 As Kieran Connell has shown, for many Caribbean men who migrated to Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s cricket became an important ‘means of evoking their previous lives’.5 This was the case for Bardowell’s father, Keith, who arrived in England from Jamaica in 1960, and for whom cricket played a role in ‘transporting him “back home”, albeit for brief moments’; his ‘yearning for Jamaica’, and for a space of sociability and belonging, was in part ameliorated by supporting the West Indies side and by starting a cricket team of his own, in Balham.6 Bardowell himself found some solace in cricket – the successful 1970s West Indies team ‘validated me, my past, my present’, he writes. And yet, as someone born and schooled in Britain, Bardowell had no recourse to the kinds of cultural belonging and affective attachment to the Caribbean which, through cricket, sustained his father.7 Instead he was forced to negotiate the complex duality of growing up British and growing up black in Britain in his own way: in a society and at a time in which anti-black sentiment was extensively inscribed, Bardowell ‘needed to find the English me, the non-white-defined English me, the something that represented a side of me that my father could never be’.8 Identities, Stuart Hall argues, are constituted using resources of language and culture in a ‘process of becoming rather than being…they relate to the invention of tradition as much as to tradition itself’.9 In this sense, and in Bardowell’s telling, it was British basketball’s burgeoning culture – its developing ‘Black-English style’ – that provided the materials he needed to construct a positive narrative of self-identity. Bardowell discovered British basketball at what was perhaps its fleeting pinnacle. In 1982 the National Basketball League (NBL), England’s top-tier league at the time, signed its first contract for live televised games with the newly-launched Channel 4.10 While the weekly Monday night broadcast was cancelled after three years, Channel 4’s coverage of the ‘minority sport’ was significant – not only in terms of exposure (audiences reached 1 million),11 but also, as Bardowell noted, for showing young black men in a rare positive light: Black players were the main men…There were black coaches and black television personalities. In the eighties, if you wanted to see three or four black men on your TV not related to a crime, then basketball was the only place.12 This sizeable black presence within basketball’s top ranks was indicative of a changing tide within the sport as a whole. Until the mid-1970s basketball was an overwhelmingly middle-class pursuit, a ‘game played, by and large, by “respectable” white Britons’, in the words of Joseph Maguire.13 The lack of affordable facilities, an absence of organization on a school and local level, and the scarcity of black players and coaches in what was for much of the 1970s a largely ‘amateur’, under-publicized and thus ignored top flight all combined to curtail the participation of black Britons in the sport.14 However, just as the numbers of black players in the NBL rose drastically – from 13 per cent in 1977 to 60 per cent in 1993 – so too was there a marked transformation in the demographic character of the game overall: by 2018, 58 per cent of adults participating in basketball were from black and minority ethnic groups, the highest of any sport in Britain, while 18 per cent of basketball clubs in England were located in its most deprived urban wards.15 At a national level, Britain’s men’s, women’s, and junior teams were all predominantly black at this time – a picture much changed from the homogenously white teams of the 1970s.16 The emergence of basketball in Britain as a sport played by a disproportionate number of black people in disadvantaged areas – ‘An inner-city game. Blacks, ethnics, working-class kids’, wrote Bardowell – has gone largely unexplored.17 Maguire has cited the ‘Americanization’ of the domestic leagues from the early 1980s as a possible cause.18 Others have linked racist stereotypes of black athletic superiority to the over-promotion of black participation in sport – including basketball – in schools.19 The influence of the National Basketball Association (NBA), North America’s foremost league, as a globalized cultural product has also been used to explain the game’s popularity among young people in Britain generally.20 Certainly, as exporters of carefully marketed expressions of ‘urban blackness’, the NBA and its commercial associations with popular sporting brands such as Nike and Adidas are understood to have made the sport ‘fashionable’.21 Yet a consideration of how these, as well as other underexamined factors such as the importance of black community leaders, clubs and initiatives, converged and interacted in specific local and historical contexts to form a distinctly black and urban British basketball subculture, is lacking. This article traces the changing social and cultural makeup of basketball in England from the 1960s until the present day. From the sport’s initial position of ‘respectable’ middle-class whiteness, it will explore how it came to be adopted by many young, often embattled black Britons as a means of identity construction and confirmation. Writing in the New Socialist in 1987, Paul Hoggett and Jeff Bishop described sport and leisure subcultures as a source of belonging and mutual aid, and as collectivities through which the dominant values of wider society are often negotiated, challenged or resisted.22 For the men and women whose testimonies inform this article, basketball equipped them with the cultural resources to develop a coherent account of themselves; a black identity that was used as a way of resisting or coming to terms with the fear and oppression they reckoned with daily.23 Paul Gilroy argued that black British music’s power to organise consciousness and develop black struggles through creativity and expression ‘supplies a great deal of the courage required to go on living in the present’.24 I suggest here that basketball, an expressive form in its own right, has worked in similar ways. Counterposed against an often hostile and unstable life-world, it represented for many young black people a community of shared goals, life experiences and emotional registers that regularly coalesced into sites of friendship and belonging.25 In common with more obvious youth cultures, it also offered a space in which meaning and agency could be found, self and collective expression explored, and, in the context of the rhetorical ‘inner-city’ especially, racialized stereotypes disrupted. Considered within the wider formation of blackness in Britain since the 1960s, the example of basketball thus helps demonstrate the role of everyday acts, events, and interactions in the construction of identities and cultures of resistance.26 As Rob Waters wrote in relation to Peter Fryer’s study of black British history, Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain, such processes occurred ‘as much in day-to-day life as in organised political activism’.27 For Bardowell, the British basketball players he watched and admired exhibited the ‘flash and brashness of urban America, the toughness of their inner-city upbringing, and the discipline and work ethic implanted by their Caribbean parents’.28 Basketball in Britain was undoubtedly shaped by a transnational dialogue with certain forms of black American culture: the vernacular styles, fashions, artistry and attitudes associated with hip-hop in particular heavily informed the cultural makeup of the sport from the mid-1990s. ‘No doubt part of the attraction is the shoes, the gear, the lifestyle’, said Laurent Irish, a Londoner and former professional basketball player, in 2017. ‘The music they relate to – grime, hip hop – it all goes with basketball. It’s the urban sport’.29 Hall, Gilroy, and Bill Yousman, among others, have described the ways in which ‘urban’ creative forms and expressions, such as sport, music and art, have become dominant commercial considerations. ‘Black equals cool equals revenue’, wrote Glyn Hughes.30 The commodification of American blackness through branding strategies and precision marketing helps explain the consumerist sensibilities – ‘the shoes, the gear, the lifestyle’ – that have become bound up with basketball in Britain. Yet, as Gareth Millington has argued, immersion in consumer society does not automatically preclude the development of more politicized forms of consciousness, or indeed the community formation and shared sense of identity that helped many black people – including those in this article – to navigate their daily lives.31 Nor does the establishment of basketball and its adjacent ‘urban’ cultural forms in the British marketplace suggest that the game has come to be seen and treated by the mainstream sports establishment as anything other than ‘niche’.32 As this article suggests, the historical marginalization of basketball, as a sport played and watched by an increasingly disproportionate number of black people in inner urban areas, should be understood as consistent with the reproduction of racial subordination and inequality in British society over the last half century, in which cuts to community groups and youth services have played a part.33 ‘BLACK KIDS JUST DIDN’T DO ANYTHING LIKE THAT’ In 1960, the newly-established magazine Basketball painted a generally dismal portrait of the sport in Britain at the time. Columnists bemoaned the lack of suitable gymnasia, low spectator turnouts at matches, the absence of national media attention, and the relatively small numbers of players taking part.34 Some of its readers were similarly discouraged. E. Pinder wrote of the lack of court space within the national league, which would eventually collapse two years later, while M. L. Constable, manager of a club in Camden Town, stated, ‘Many basketball teams throughout London…have a great difficulty in obtaining courts'.35 Over the course of the decade Basketball would revisit many of these themes, noting for example the paucity of Olympic basketball coverage on television in 1968 (‘not more than a total of five minutes’), the inadequacy of provision and organization both within and outside schools, and the ‘very small percentage’ of players continuing with the sport upon leaving school.36 It was a situation well recognized by Paul Ambrosius, who began playing basketball aged 15 at Liverpool’s Paddington Comprehensive, a purpose-built ‘multiracial’ secondary school, in the late 1960s:37 There was no facilities available outside of schools, and schools were closed outside of school hours, you know — you couldn’t say, ‘Can I just leave the classroom to go and practice me J [jump shot]?’…Yeah, it was a case of, it was so middle class, that only the people with keys to the gym were able to excel… every single England player was in the forces or a teacher, or teachers' training, just ’cause you can get in the gym any hour of the day.38 Basketball’s first decade was also conspicuous for the absence of black faces in its pages. White were the photos of Great Britain’s 1968 Olympic squad, London’s Central YMCA 1960 national championship-winning team, and the illustrations of players that accompanied articles and advertised basketball shoes, for example.39 This continued with few exceptions until the beginning of the 1980s; in the 1960s especially, it well reflected the realities of participation on the ground. For Tim Martyn-Jones, secretary of the Liverpool YMCA Basketball Club in the mid-1960s, the teams [in Liverpool] were white…they were middle-class and the rest of it, black kids just didn’t do anything like that… There were not a lot of black kids in it at all, even though, you know, they had the America sort of image and things like that, it was not there as a kind of black sport or anything like that in this country.40 In 1969, Jimmy Rogers, a black assembly line worker at the Ford Motor Company in Halewood, near Liverpool, established ‘Atac’, then one of the few (perhaps the only) predominantly black basketball teams in Britain. Rogers, an activist and basketball coach until his death in 2018, set up the club in response to a lack of youth provision for young people in Liverpool 8, a small, overwhelmingly black district in the south of the city, where he lived.41 He said: ‘There was nothing else at all for young black people, nothing, nothing at all’.42 Ambrosius, like many of his teammates, knew little about basketball when he was encouraged by Rogers to take up the sport, but was captivated by the ‘America sort of image’ that Martyn-Jones described: And [Rogers] goes, ‘See you’, and I’m like, ‘Yeah what?’, and he goes, ‘You remind me of somebody, hang on a minute, I know who it is’, and he went to his bag and I thought, ‘Oh shit, he’s going to pull a hammer out and hit me’, and he pulled out a Sports Illustrated and it had a picture of Wilt Chamberlain in the [Los Angeles] Lakers’ uniform in the late-sixties…and I was just enamoured at looking at the uniform, you know, it was just literally, I was jarred out of being that sort of dyed-in-the-wool Liverpool supporter following football to the point where, ‘Oh shit, a black man looks like me, you know, in a Lakers’ uniform’, whatever a Lakers’ uniform was, I didn’t understand it at the time…And that was it, that was it, I was done for, I knew at that point that I’d still be playing until I dropped.43 Informed by such images, and by other forms of black American expression – ‘Remember the James Brown tune? Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud?…that was our jam’ – the team adopted a distinctive and defiant style: ‘We all had big mad fros…they saw the fros, they saw the attitude, and we had a kick-arse uniform as well…We sold these lottery tickets to fundraise our own kit and we got kit from America, we were the first junior team to have an American kit’.44 In 1974, the Merseyside Community Relations Council noted that Liverpool, as a recreational locus for black American serviceman, was a ‘very Americanized city, our kids take their heroes exported from America’.45 This was perhaps particularly the case for adoptees of an American pastime: ‘people would, like, travel ten miles to go and watch a game if they thought that somebody was wearing a pair of Converse [basketball shoes]…you couldn’t get Converse in the sixties in England unless you went to a specialized shop’, according to Ambrosius.46 For Vincent Edwards, the adopted son of white parents, who lived on the ‘white side’ of Liverpool 8, style was a way of fitting in with the team, of establishing and sharing an identity: ‘I grew an afro, it was kind of like, it was a bit of a statement in so much as, you know, one, I am black…and secondly, you know, you were accepted for it… appearance and that was definitely the order of the day in terms of like being accepted’.47 (Figure 1) Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Atac 1970. Jimmy Rogers is on the far right; Paul Ambrosius wears 13; Vincent Edwards wears 9. Photo courtesy: Paul Ambrosius. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Atac 1970. Jimmy Rogers is on the far right; Paul Ambrosius wears 13; Vincent Edwards wears 9. Photo courtesy: Paul Ambrosius. While style was important to the team’s self-image, helping to create a sense of commonality, its collective identity was not generated simply through the internal processes of the group, but also by the development of the group in relation to its environment.48 As in Bardowell’s London, racial discrimination and disadvantage was rife in Liverpool at this time. A 1968 report of the Liverpool Youth Organisations Committee, Special but Not Separate, described a situation in which young black people faced racism in school, the job market, and through a lack of positive opportunities.49 ‘When we went to school in Liverpool’, Edwards recalled, ‘it was if you did well you were going to be a mechanic or a chef, that was it, there were no professions other than those that you would even contemplate’.50 In 1973, the Liverpool Community Relations Council (LCRC) – for which Rogers was by then working, under the direction of anti-racist campaigner Dorothy Kuya – stated that racism in the city ‘had to a large extent become institutionalised’.51 To be sure, in circumstances familiar to black and Asian people across the city, members of Atac were routinely tyrannized by racially motivated attacks, and by police mistreatment: ‘we were stopped weekly, on a weekly basis, just because we had bags, because we were going to training’.52 In the midst of such oppression Atac, as a rare safe space for young black people to come together, was something of a relief valve for many of its members.53 Under the tutelage of Rogers, who knew well the realities of discrimination and police brutality, these members discovered in basketball an interest through which they found friendship and belonging:54 I loved the game, I loved playing it and that…but it was the whole thing, the social thing…the basketball club was a community within a community, very much so, and so we all felt privileged in that way, and you would never get those personalities and those people together under any other circumstances really.55 This sense of ‘community’ and ‘privilege’ was especially significant in the context of general hostility. Marginalized, disadvantaged, and defined as a ‘problem’ by white society, many young black people in Liverpool 8 saw Atac as a rare point of pride and dignity, and as an opportunity to stand up for themselves at a crucial stage in their lives. A clear example of this, as recalled by Rogers, was when the team faced off against the Liverpool Police squad during league play: Everybody in Toxteth [Liverpool 8] hated the police. Everybody…and [Atac] became quite good, quite young. Four times a year, twice at home, twice away, we, me with these black kids, were able to give the police a good hiding, their place or ours, I was a folk hero [in Liverpool 8] …They weren’t allowed to swear, I told them if you swear you’re not going to play, I mean they shouted so much abuse, but they never swore. They loved it. Imagine, four times a year they can go there and shout abuse, they loved it, loved it.56 ‘THERE WAS A REAL KIND OF EMERGING SUBCULTURE OF BASKETBALL’ On the one hand, Atac was indicative of how basketball, in an urban context, could function as a space for the articulation of black identities and even as an emotional bulwark against structural forms of exclusion and inequity. On the other, it stands – as one of the few ‘black’ basketball clubs in existence in Britain at the turn of the 1960s – as an example of the lack of diversity in the sport at the time, underlining how the lack of accessible facilities militated against any real democratization of the sport. As Ambrosius explained, Atac players were only able to practice outside the club setting once they ‘requisitioned’ a hoop and backboard from an independent girls’ school: …we took it back to the local youth club, because it had a back yard…and hooked it onto the fire escape of the yard…You know all these basketball courts like you see now everywhere, there wasn’t any hardly, there wouldn’t even have been one to a city. Any hoops were on school property and if you tried to shoot around on school property you were gonna get done for burglary especially if you were black, and the ones that were on school property were usually in posh schools, they were never in inner-city schools.57 In Farnborough in 1971 a teenaged Mark Dunning, who would go on to coach alongside Jimmy Rogers in Crystal Palace and Brixton in the 1980s, went to school ‘around the corner from…one of the first and only stores in the whole country that sold anything to do with basketball’ – 4Sport, owned by George Whitmore, a former England international: You couldn’t find any basketball gear in those days…we were in there all the time. There were about four or five of us who became junkies even at that point…and he [Whitmore] started to then get some of the original like Chuck Taylors canvas, all colours, then he started stocking the Dr J [moniker of Julius Erving] model. You know there was only really Converse, Nike hadn’t started…and we would buy everything.58 As described by Dunning and Ambrosius, specific American styles and basketball brands and the professional players that endorsed them – Dr J, for example, ‘the Michael Jordan of his time…a superstar [who] wore a large afro and platform shoes’, was the face of Converse – were a part of the game’s appeal in Britain as early as the 1960s.59 Beyond Liverpool, basketball’s emergent popularity – by 1974 it was the sixth most played sport in the country, ahead of table tennis and hockey, according to one reader survey – was at once fuelled by the cultural allure of the American game and limited by the general absence of coverage of the US professional basketball leagues as well as the home teams.60 Nonetheless the visibility of the Harlem Globetrotters, a touring troupe of black American players, had a popularizing effect. Cashmore argued that the Globetrotters gained traction among white audiences because their ‘clownish’ act conformed to the stereotypical image of black men as physically adept, but ‘too limited intellectually to harness skill to firm objectives’.61 For many young Britons, however, the Globetrotters, who played a series of exhibition matches in London in the 1960s and 70s, were a captivating introduction to the game: ‘As soon as I saw them I wanted to be the first white Harlem Globetrotter…when everyone was playing football in the playground, I was on the netball, and I was practising’.62 Far from being seen as ‘clownish’, the Globetrotters, along with professional players like Dr J and Michael Jordan, were embraced for their flashiness, improvization, and soaring feats of athleticism – gestural elements that were duly marketed on both sides of the Atlantic (see below), and that remain prominent aspects of the contemporary game. An excessive emphasis on flamboyance and particularly athleticism in discussions of on-court aesthetics risks playing into a regressively racialized discourse, still perpetuated (largely in North America, but also in Britain) by journalists, commentators, coaches, and fans.63 Yet at the same time it is important not to diminish or obscure the myriad ways in which black and urban cultures have shaped basketball, and how it bears the marks of the contexts in which the game has been played. In Liverpool, for example, Atac adopted the personality of its ‘determined’ coach by playing a relentless style, fast-paced and meticulous: [We were] the fittest team in the Western hemisphere, honestly. We ran to the point where nobody could live with us. I remember running against men’s teams who literally were coming off dying against us, just boom boom. And tenacious D [defence]. Like [Rogers] taught us defence like never let a loose ball go anywhere…you know, like it’s an exploding bomb, you just jump on it. Yeah, he just taught us mad tenacity.64 Joel Moore, one of the black British players whom Bardowell grew up watching, also discovered basketball via the Globetrotters, as a nine-year-old in 1973: Mesmerized by their flair, the sport soon became an obsession…Basketball gave him confidence, a platform to express himself more than he could in the school playground at Deptford Green or in class. Moore also felt that basketball was the most individual of team sports, where one man could truly make a difference to a team, and shine.65 Moore was one of a cohort of talented black British players who burst onto the professional scene, and, in Moore’s case, into the national squad, during the 1980s – a ‘big shift’, in Moore’s words, from the white-dominated landscape of a decade before: ‘When I went to Crystal Palace the entire under-16 Eagles team was black…The men’s team had two black guys. So, it was a culture change seeing all these little black kids running around playing basketball’.66 For Roger Hosannah, who also played for Palace in the 1980s, and who again was introduced to the sport by a teacher ‘obsessed by the Harlem Globetrotters’, the early 1980s saw ‘a real kind of emerging subculture of basketball around south London and north London. So we were part of the south London group of basketball players, later it evolved into Brixton basketball club, historically it was Crystal Palace’.67 Just as the Globetrotters had a role in the growth of this emergent generation of British players, so too did the ‘Americanization’ of the English first division – the recruitment of American players, the adoption of American marketing practices, and the centring of ‘American spectacle and entertainment’.68 In terms of grassroots basketball this process, which began in earnest in the mid-1970s, not surprisingly coincided with a sharp rise in attendance at NBL games and in participation numbers in schools and local clubs, from 240,000 in 1972 to 1,150,000 in 1981.69 Vince Macaulay, who began playing under Rogers at Atac, said: ‘I think the Channel 4 thing had just come out and…so everywhere you looked there were young up and coming players. East London, west London, south London, all over the place actually’.70 While much of this growth was probably attributable to the ‘spectacularization’ of the game, and the improved quality of play – ‘[the Americans] were the stars of our league, the guys who scored all the points’71 – there was also direct influence at work. ‘Imported Americans…are quite happy to share their knowledge and experience with others’, wrote Mike Ainger, team manager of Crystal Palace, in 1975. ‘Americans at [Crystal Palace] visit schools and colleges and also run coaching clinics’.72 As Chappell, Jones, and Burden argued, the popularizing influence of the American players, who were by and large black, was especially telling for young black Britons.73 Take for example Nhamo Shire, a fan of the American Larry Dassie, who came to London in 1977: In an era of truly great import players, he may well have been the greatest of the great. I was beyond privileged to watch Larry first-hand as a kid on the sidelines at North London College. He…really got me hooked on the game back as a wide-eyed young teenager…Athletic, quick, high-flying leaper with handle and a silky smooth jump shot — he was the biggest star amongst stars… he always took time out for us kids too, showing us how to shoot or how to dribble and protect the ball, finish with both hands. Just a huge, huge influence on all of us from North London College.74 The influx of American players was not unanimously embraced. Despite soaring attendances and media coverage (culminating in the NBL’s previously mentioned deal with Channel 4 in 1982), sections of the basketball establishment, citing concerns over the marginalization and development of native players, railed against the presence of ‘too many overpaid Americans’.75 Such resistance to American players should be viewed in the context of wider anti-immigrant narratives, which, as Sara Ahmed explained, positioned migrants as ‘those who are “not us”, and who in not being us, endanger what is ours’.76 ‘[T]hese players may be doing harm to the Association by excluding our own players from the better teams’, wrote Bill Browning, one-time chairman of the Amateur Basketball Association, in 1975.77 Narratives such as these gained fresh legitimacy with the election of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979, as borne out by the passing of the British Nationality Act in 1981 – an attempt, argued John Solomos, to further restrict the rights of migrants and ‘construct the question of nationality along racial lines’.78 For the black British players who would go on to change the composition of the domestic game in the 1980s and 90s, and who themselves were at the sharp end of this increasingly racist climate, American players in the NBL – migrants, as many of their parents had been – were important figures. At a time when positive representations of black men were few and far between, these local and often accessible black figures allowed them to imagine a more hopeful and expansive future. School, as the most likely place to have basketball facilities, was a typical route into the sport; former professional players such as Joel Moore, Roger Hosannah, and Peter Scantlebury singled out school teachers as instrumental in terms of introducing them to basketball and, crucially, providing access. Scantlebury, for example, who grew up in south London, said of his school and club (Guildford) coach, Kevin Hibbs: [T]he big importance is the people in the game, I mean…we wouldn’t have gone to Guildford if he hadn’t of got the minibus from school to take us to Guildford every week, or practice, or open up at the court…so we could practice – every lunchtime, before school, after school, any breaks we would get in there and we would be playing, and you know, he would be in there supervising.79 Clearly the support and encouragement of Hibbs had an uplifting impact on Scantlebury; it was an early and significant factor in his success. As a number of sociologists documented in the 1980s, however, schools were regularly engaged in the reproduction of forms of racism and exclusion through an over-emphasis on black pupils’ participation in sport.80 Bruce Carrington, most notably, found that commonly-held racist attitudes and assumptions within schools – ‘Teachers…tend to regard West Indians as a problematic group: disruptive, aggressive, unable to concentrate’ – often facilitated ‘black academic failure by channelling black pupils away from the academic mainstream and into sport’. While there were undoubtedly teachers, like Hibbs, who viewed basketball as an opportunity for black pupils to flourish, sport was also all too often, as Carrington described, a tool of social control, ‘curbing, containing or neutralizing pupil disaffection’.81 As Gus John pointed out in 1981, many white-led institutions tasked with working with young black people, including youth and community centres, did ‘little more than assist the State in controlling their lives and tempering their conduct’.82 Moreover, the Sports Council – a government agency granted executive powers in 1972 – had by the end of the 1970s begun to frame participation in sport as a solution to the problem of those ‘who would otherwise be attracted to delinquency and vandalism’, i.e. those who were young and black: ‘The Council’s work…in the concrete jungle of inner cities has begun’.83 While New Cross resident Annette Hinds was not pushed into sport by her teachers, she knew first-hand what it meant to be circumscribed by low expectations: When I was in the sixth form I remember they had careers teachers and they just didn’t give a shit, literally…There were a couple of bright girls but the majority of us were just, you know, needed a push, and I don’t think those teachers really bothered, I really don’t think they bothered. And I remember there was a factory in Deptford where I lived, a big factory called Molins, they made cigarette holders…I remember a girl saying she got a job there and the teacher was like, ‘Oh that’s really good, you got a job at Molins’, you know, and I thought, ‘Oh wow gosh, Molins’, even I thought, ‘Blimey, that’s not much of a job’.84 Hinds also played football, but it was basketball, and in particular her involvement with New ERA, a black-led club in south London, that helped her navigate an escape route from the life to which she was ‘supposed’ to aspire. Hinds left school aged 16, in 1979, and began work as an administrative assistant at Her Majesty's Treasury – ‘I did that off my own back, [school] did not do anything for me, they were rubbish’.85 Two years later, in the wake of the New Cross Fire (Hinds knew several people killed in the fire), and in search of something ‘positive’ to do, she began attending basketball sessions at Moonshot youth club in New Cross. (Figure 2) These were run by Jimmy Rogers, who, having moved from Liverpool in 1980 to take up a job managing a community housing scheme in Brixton, found ‘no inner-city kids playing basketball to a reasonable level in London’.86 Hinds commented: It was amazing because there were problems in New Cross as I said to you before, they had the Deptford fire in ’81, and this was ’81 when [Rogers] came down, so everyone was feeling a bit, what’s the word…you felt lesser. We knew as young as we were, we knew there were problems racially, so you know, you felt…‘What’s happening? What’s going to happen to us?’…so by the time he came down it was like, ‘Oh wow, this is really something’, and we did, we ploughed ourselves into it.87 Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Ocho Rios basketball team, c.1982. Annette Hinds sits back row, third from the right. Photo courtesy: Annette Hinds. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Ocho Rios basketball team, c.1982. Annette Hinds sits back row, third from the right. Photo courtesy: Annette Hinds. Hinds began playing for Ocho Rios, a women’s team set-up coached by Rogers, which competed in an established London league: ‘We had a proper season, and we had games every week, or every other week…There must have been at least a dozen teams’.88 As Hinds observed, the initially all-black team, like Atac, was rare in containing more than a handful of non-white players: ‘There weren’t many black teams. Balham, as I said, they had blacks in their team, and there was a north London team I can remember. YMCA was largely white…yeah, they were all pretty white’.89 The popularity of women’s basketball at Moonshot led to the creation of a national league side, Southside Stealers, and, as described below, the founding of a major men’s and women’s programme in Brixton in 1985. For Hinds, basketball had been an unknown quantity: the Globetrotters were her only point of reference upon joining the club. However, through Rogers’ instruction, and his enthusiasm for the sport, it quickly became the focus of her social life: He was all about basketball, he introduced names to us we never heard before. Magic Johnson, and there was one they called Dr J. I’d never heard of these people, you know. And around his house he used to have videos of the games…and then we used to go and see, our local team was Crystal Palace. He knew the guys up there, and so we used to go to Crystal Palace occasionally to watch them or to watch tournaments, and that was it, you know, it was all about Jimmy really.90 In May 1981 Rogers and his friend Courtenay Griffiths founded New ERA (the New Educational and Recreation Association) in response to the exclusionary attitudes Rogers witnessed at Crystal Palace, where he briefly coached, but also to the scarcity of black-led and centred youth provision in south London, particularly in the wake of the 1981 disturbances. ‘The Association intends to motivate young people, initially through the sport of basketball’, stated the New ERA constitution. ‘Participation will have an effect on young people's self-perception and self-confidence, and…will operate to alleviate some of the frustration of life in a somewhat depressed and deprived environment’.91 Like many of her teammates, Hinds was asked to join the New ERA committee, and was also encouraged by Griffiths – then a young barrister – to pursue her ambition of a career in law: It was Courtenay who said, ‘Yeah, you can do this, you can be a lawyer’, and I was like, ‘Wow’, ’cause nobody in my family had even been at university at that time…Courtenay helped me with my application at the time, and I got in, and that’s that…but it came from that, it came from out of there.92 In contrast to the unequal treatment that many of its members encountered in school, at established basketball clubs, and indeed throughout their daily lives, New ERA offered a rare space of inclusion, empowerment, and improvement, both in basketball and other areas of life: ‘Every time we see them a black kid has to learn two things: one basketball, one non-basketball. That’s our thing. Every day’.93 Unlike school, where success was often only achieved within the narrow stereotypes imposed on them, the club was a place in which black people were free to define their own self-image, to build positive self-conceptions. Here, basketball was not viewed as an investment against delinquency; rather, it encouraged a belief that ‘we could be anything we wanted to be’.94 THE ROUGH HOUSE By 1985, New ERA – now renamed ‘Brixton Topcats’, after the cartoon character, Top Cat, who was perpetually harassed by the police – had moved into the newly-built Brixton Recreation Centre (BRC). In an improbable coup, the club was officially launched in August that year by Michael Jordan, who had just completed a spectacular debut season in the NBA, and with whom Rogers had forged a link during a trip to the United States.95 As Dunning described it: ‘There’s a whole buzz around the place, it was awesome. Michael comes in, he’s like hands on, he’s working with all the kids’.96 (Figure 3) The event allowed Nike, Jordan’s primary sponsor, to promote its latest shoe, the Air Jordan 1, and to announce a partnership with the club: We were the only club, and the only outfit in the world who have this Jordan gear…I think Nike came to us because of the inner-city thing…and it kind of fit with their remit, their urban type of deal. They were just starting to get into that urban type of vibe at that time…Of course the team got all the gear, uniforms, warm-up suits, the lot.97 Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Michael Jordan and onlookers, Brixton Recreation Centre, 1985. Photo courtesy: Brixton Topcats. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Michael Jordan and onlookers, Brixton Recreation Centre, 1985. Photo courtesy: Brixton Topcats. Such an association was characteristic of how the NBA and its ‘global partners’ (Nike included) would mobilize ‘grassroots’ initiatives in the 1990s as a way of establishing themselves within the British marketplace.98 Moreover, it was an early example of how the NBA came to capitalize globally upon expressions of blackness and urban life (in this case the seductiveness of Jordan – ‘Flair. Imagination. Grace’, wrote Bardowell, ‘Jordan’s style [was] rooted in black culture’) allied with the ‘inner-city thing’ that the Topcats represented (future NBA stars like Allen Iverson would also visit the club to promote their sponsor’s apparel). For Bardowell, it was a heady combination: ‘Everybody knew the Topcats. The black and red vests. Practically an all-black team. Based in Brixton…This wasn’t just a basketball team. It was a movement’.99 The fledgling club’s relationship with Nike afforded it valuable exposure, and a cachet that would prove important to its growth and viability: as a response to a lack of public funding, the club was forced to adopt a self-sustaining economic strategy in the form of members’ fees, club subscriptions, community fundraising, and business partnerships.100 Both the necessity of this approach (familiar to most community basketball programmes) and the club’s emphasis on hard work, discipline, and self-betterment – ‘we could be anything we wanted to be’ – might suggest that the Topcats and other black-led basketball initiatives (see below) were in some sense born of Thatcherite enterprise culture, and particularly Thatcher’s nominally entrepreneurial approach to the ‘inner cities’, which included stimulating black ventures.101 However such a reading, which perhaps at first sight complicates the club’s radical community vision, disregards the history of black ‘self-help’ initiatives that proliferated in Brixton and other multicultural districts from the 1970s on.102 While not at odds with elements of Thatcherite ‘enterprise culture’, the practice and promotion of business and self-reliance within black ‘self-help’ did not divest it of its transformative ethos.103 When the Topcats forged links with the American sportswear retailer, Footlocker, in 2020, this was less a matter of satisfying a neoliberal impulse than of surviving in precarious times.104 In 1995, when Jordan returned to basketball after a brief retirement, Channel 4 entered into a three-year contract with the NBA. Programming included game action, player interviews, and ‘youth oriented’ features ‘presented against a backdrop of rap music’.105 ‘Our whole thing was selling the culture, not just the sport’, said presenter Mark Webster. ‘We thought people would get basketball because they could hear it on records and see it in fashion’.106 Channel 4’s coverage coincided with the appearance of a number of NBA-centred magazines in British newsagents, as well as a rise in UK-specific branding partnerships – in 1997 the NBA logo was displayed on packets of ‘Hula Hoops’, for example.107 While viewing figures were modest, and NBA coverage on terrestrial television had ceased altogether by 2002, this was nevertheless a period in which many young people in Britain were captivated by the NBA as a cultural product, and in turn attracted to the sport.108 Professional and Great Britain player Justin Robinson was growing up on the Cowley Estate in Brixton at this time: My older brother bought me a Michael Jordan poster and, like, I’d watched basketball before but I wasn’t really crazy about it, so he bought me the poster and I was like, ‘Ah, okay’, so I started watching it. And then I used to go out on my estate, me and my friends, shoot against the wall, shoot against anything you could find, we’d use it as a basket. And then yeah, my dad, I think he kind of saw, okay like, ‘He’s interested in this, he loves this’…so he took me down to Brixton…and yeah, the rest is history.109 Robinson’s testimony hints again at the issue of access. Like Ambrosius 30 years earlier, Robinson was restricted by the facilities available to him outside of a club setting: ‘anything you could find, we’d use it as a basket’.110 The lack of accessible basketball goals in England was partly ameliorated by the Outdoor Basketball Initiative (OBI). Financed by a £10m National Lottery grant, the OBI installed more than 9,000 basketball hoops in over 4,000 sites across Britain in a ten-year period from 1995. With an estimated 317,000 separate visits to OBI sites each week (as of 2001), the English Basketball Association’s claim in 1995 that the initiative would ‘change the recreation habits of millions of youngsters across the country’ appears far from improbable.111 And yet, as an essentially indoor sport played – organizationally, at least – in a winter season, the cost and inaccessibility of both local authority and private facilities ‘remained a barrier to growth, particularly given basketball’s popularity in less affluent communities’, in the words of Skinner.112 It was a situation familiar to future NBA player John Amaechi, who began playing basketball in Manchester in the late 1980s: [L]ack of funding; second-rate, far-flung facilities; the difficulty of keeping players who couldn’t afford their own travel…My only option was the Chester Jets in Ellesmere Port, 60 miles from home. With two train connections and a bus, it took me nearly two hours to get to practice.113 In south London in the 1990s, Paul Mundy-Castle found the basketball landscape similarly difficult to navigate: I remember we used to go and break into a school in Streatham, me and my friend Eddy who also played at a high level, just so we could go and use their gym to play. And I remember we used to go to Vauxhall College at 6:30 every morning to just shoot for an hour and a half because the security guard thought we were students at Vauxhall College…the security guard was black, you could talk to him and just say we’ve come to play basketball…But we were there every morning, religiously, you know…we didn’t have the facilities in England, but here’s a college with a gym that’s empty.114 As a member of the Topcats, Mundy-Castle played weekly at BRC. Opened in 1985, the centre was one of approximately 1,200 indoor sports facilities established in England between 1969 and the end of the 1980s (about half of which, like BRC, were local authority run).115 These gains – a priority for the Sports Council – undoubtedly played a part in the growth in participation noted above.116 From the 1980s onwards, however, central government restrictions on local authority expenditure combined with a more commercial attitude to leisure management in the public sector (and, indeed, a number of privatizations) pushed what were once affordable facilities out of reach for many. This perhaps explains why England Basketball Association (EBBA) registrations grew by just 7 per cent in the 1980s compared to 82 per cent a decade before.117 In light of this shift, and indeed the obstacles described by Amaechi and Mundy-Castle, affordable facilities were clearly of great importance locally: Everybody who plays basketball knows about Brixton Recreation Centre on a Wednesday. That’s where you could come out of prison on a Tuesday and go to Brixton on Wednesday because you’ve got to play…it don’t matter, if you want to play, come and play, pay your three pounds and put in a team and play.118 While BRC had its own share of privatization battles in the 1980s (‘The centre is regarded by the community as theirs, and there is no way it could afford a price increase, let alone membership fees’) and is now managed by a private company, Lambeth Council provided the Topcats free use of the centre – a significant crutch considering the club was often ‘scrambling for resources just to survive’.119 Known as the ‘Rough House’ in basketball circles, the Topcats and BRC were a focus not only of London’s basketball community but of Brixton, too; a diverse and positive space of representation and black expression at odds with the ‘violent’, ‘criminal’ and ‘unruly’ labels with which the area was regularly stigmatized:120 You walk into Brixton Rec and you go upstairs, and you go on that court and there’s nothing but black people and you’re standing there going, ‘Wow’…it felt like family, straight away, they just felt like family.121 I started to come on board with the club and just help out in the first instance and then turning up at games, doing the commentary, commentating on their games in kind of a more hip-hop style, street style… the energy, the enthusiasm, the blackness of it…it was all for the community.122 When we were together it was fantastic, you know, the girls’ and the guys’ teams all got on well…and the atmosphere was electric, absolutely electric when we were all together, and that’s what we got, we got that.123 From 1996 to 2003, BRC was home to the Rough & Ready tournament. Founded by Hosannah and Topcats alumnus (and future Deputy Mayor of London) Matthew Ryder, the annual event was created to ‘give young British players an opportunity to have a platform’; it soon evolved into ‘the coolest thing of its sort…probably one of the biggest basketball events in Europe at the time’.124 BRC also hosted Midnight Madness, a popular summer basketball and music initiative started by Nhamo Shire in Harlesden in 1999 as a way of offering young people ‘something positive in the community’.125 ‘We was given the opportunity to play as long as we wanted’, said former GB player Pierre Henry-Fontaine. ‘It was just, wow, it was just unheard of. And we used to come religiously’.126 Like the Topcats, these programmes were prized for their cultural prominence and latent commercial value, and thus were able to expand their reach through corporate sponsorship – Adidas and Nike respectively. But ultimately it was the work of Hosannah, Ryder, Shire and others, who were themselves inspired by the care and expression of a cadre of black players and coaches, that ensured these latter-day collective ‘self-help’ projects succeeded as sites of support and identity formation. Jackson Gibbons, who founded the City of London Academy basketball programme in Southwark in 2012, and who collaborated with Shire on the running of Midnight Madness, said: I did use to idolize BBL players and want to play in the BBL – I think that was something that, you know, in the mid-90s was something to aspire to…and when I was fourteen, fifteen, the older guys at the club used to take me to the games. We’d go to Wembley…we’d go to London Arena and watch guys play and I used to look up to those guys…it was an aspirational thing for me when I was fourteen, fifteen. I really wanted to be a part of it.127 Similarly, for former NBA player Pops Mensah-Bonsu – a Rough & Ready standout who later played a supporting role with Midnight Madness – it was the influence of ‘legendary’ coach of the Hackney White Heat and Hackney’s Homerton House School, Joe White, that proved formative: Joe was more than a coach to some of us kids…He pretty much took some, well, I wouldn’t say, misguided, but kids that at the time needed direction. Not only did he teach us how to play basketball but he taught us how to be men.128 ‘THEY WERE HATERS. BOTTOM LINE THEY WERE HATERS’ In July 2014, a parliamentary group chaired by MP Sharon Hodgson published a report of an inquiry into ‘the ability of Basketball to make a difference to the social challenges affecting young people, particularly in the UK’s inner cities’. Drawing on the testimony of those involved in youth and community basketball programmes across the UK, the report shone a light on British basketball’s struggles to ‘secure vital Government funding for both the elite and grassroots levels of the sport’,129 despite the ‘extraordinary impact that basketball is having in many of the UK’s most-deprived communities’.130 While calling for a ‘radical rethink’ of the allocation of sport funding, the report did not go so far as to suggest, let alone explore, a link between the paucity of investment in basketball and the popularity of the sport among disadvantaged black people – a link that has been made forcibly elsewhere. As Robinson said: ‘I hate to put it down to, maybe basketball’s an inner-city sport, you know, it’s a poor man’s sport’.131 Certainly, the attitudes and actions of the sporting establishment – including basketball’s governing body – towards successful black-led clubs and projects are telling. Hosannah, for example, described how Basketball England was unwilling to engage with Rough & Ready: ‘They were haters. Bottom line they were haters… we reached out to people, but, you know, when people are just putting barriers in your way, and it felt like unnecessarily putting barriers in your way to stop you doing what you’re trying to do’.132 The underfunding of basketball in Britain needs to be considered in relation to political and policy approaches to black youth cultures and identities more generally. Claire Alexander has pointed out that while black Britons are positioned at the centre of contemporary cultural – ‘the cultural arenas of British sports, media and music are inconceivable without a Black British presence’ – mainstream interpretations of ‘black culture’ are built upon tropes of anomie, violence, and urban disorder, and often associated with racist notions of urban American life and culture. When framing and enacting social policy, ‘black culture’ and pathologized accounts of black youth identities have been placed at the centre of various moral panics – from ‘hoodies’ to ‘knife crime’, from ‘gangs’ to ‘County Lines’, not to mention the violence attributed to grime, rap, and drill music.133 Viewed in such a context, we may more clearly grasp why a sport with unparalleled synergies with transnational black youth cultures – ‘a strong affinity to music and lifestyle’, in the words of Hodgson’s report – has been treated as a pariah.134 Since 2010 government cuts to local authority funding have precipitated the dismantling of youth services in England and Wales, including the loss of 750 youth centres and more than 4,500 youth workers; London alone lost more than 100 youth centres and projects in this period. Predictably, these cuts hit young people from deprived districts the hardest, and disproportionately affected black and minority groups.135 Yet, as highlighted above, youth provision for black people in Britain has always been thin on the ground, and was far too often undergirded by racist assumptions about black criminality. Even the ‘radical’ 2014 report generally conformed to hegemonic representations of black urban life: Hodgson’s ambiguous claim that basketball can ‘provide a route out of gang violence and knife crime’, for example, both drew upon and reinforced a set of essentialist and stigmatizing representations of urban life.136 The rise of basketball in urban Britain was facilitated by a nexus of commercial practices, consumerist culture, and transatlantic cultural flows, drawn in particular from black America. Despite intermittent mainstream exposure, little infrastructure, and even less governmental support, it was through these processes that basketball was transformed from a predominantly white middle-class pursuit in the 1960s to a sport enjoyed by many black Britons from the 1980s onward. This hitherto underexplored story, however, cannot be extricated from a backdrop of entrenched racial inequalities – including major inequalities of provision – and popular anxieties over the black ‘inner city’, such as those that continue to inform youth policy and education today.137 To be sure, it is against this backdrop that basketball became crucial for many young black men and women: where chances for positivity and flourishing were limited, it provided everyday spaces of dignity, belonging, aspiration and self-respect, and an anchor for cultural and physical expression. Often this expression was part of a response to their environment or situation, and in this sense, like grassroots provision more generally, it cannot be divorced from other patterns of black resistance in late twentieth century Britain.138 At a time of life when questions of belonging and identity were often pressing and complex, basketball helped young black people build positive conceptions of themselves, and in turn defy or reject wider negative stereotypes: I think we always felt that the racism was what it was, we felt we were foreigners in the country regardless of our passport…and I think, yeah, having basketball allowed us to feel, actually, we’re equal and we’re meant to be here and we can achieve, and that’s really, really powerful.139 The author would like to thank Sam Neter for his Hoopsfix Podcast — an invaluable resource from which this article benefited greatly. Footnotes 1 Derek A. Bardowell, No Win Race: A Story of Belonging, Britishness and Sport, London, 2019, p. 69. 2 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, London 1987, provides a still vital examination of the damaging implications of racism and nationalism in Britain at this time. 3 Bardowell, No Win Race, pp. 2–4, 28–30. For more on the fire at New Cross, see John La Rose, The New Cross Massacre Story, London, 2011. 4 Ellis Cashmore and Barry Troyna, Black Youth in Crisis, London, 1982; Bardowell, pp. 4-5. 5 Keiran Connell, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain, Oakland, CA, 2019, p. 16. 6 Bardowell, No Win Race, pp. 3, 45. 7 Bardowell, No Win Race, pp. 3, 45. 8 Bardowell, No Win Race, p. 68. From the 1970s associations between black people and notions of criminality and crisis were both popularly and politically naturalized. See Sarita Malik, Representing Black Britain: A History of Black and Asian Images on British Television, London, 2002, pp. 15-18; Michael Romyn, ‘“London Badlands”: The Inner City Represented, Regenerated’, The London Journal 44:2, March 2019, pp. 133–50, 139–41. 9 Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”?’, in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, London 1996, p. 6. 10 In line with Channel 4’s stated commitment to highlighting minority voices and tastes, the national broadcaster invested heavily in minority interest sports. The initial two-year deal was worth between £70,000 and £100,000. Andrew Crisell, An Introductory History of British Broadcasting, Abingdon, 2006, p. 207; ‘Television Deal Signed with Channel 4’, Basketball Monthly 218, 1982, p. 4. 11 Jeff Skinner, The Development of Basketball in England: an Analysis of the Importance of Funding since the Start of the National Basketball League in 1972, unpublished thesis, University of Buckingham, 2018, p. 32. 12 Bardowell, ‘No Look Past: A Story from London 2012’, The Weeklings, 12 August 2012, https://theweeklings.com/dbardowell/2012/08/12/no-look-past-a-story-from-london-2012/, accessed 2 June 2020. 13 Joseph Maguire, ‘The Commercialization of English Elite Basketball, 1972-1988: A Figurational Perspective’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 23:4, 1988, p. 308. 14 Joseph Maguire, ‘American Labour Migrants, Globalization and the Making of English Basketball’, in The Global Sports Arena: Athletic Talent Migration in an Interdependent World, ed. John Bale and Joseph Maguire, London, 1994, pp. 233-38; Norman Watson, ‘Where Have All the Players Gone?’, Basketball Monthly 14:4, 1975, p. 26; Michael Romyn, ‘“We could be anything we wanted to be”: remembering Jimmy Rogers’, Race & Class 61: 2, 2019, pp. 62–84, 70 15 Adrian Burden, Robert Chappell, and Robyn Jones, ‘Racial Participation and Integration in English Professional Basketball, 1977-1994’, Sociology of Sport Journal 13: 3, 1996, pp. 300–310, 303. 16 House of Commons Library, The Future of Basketball in the UK: Debate Pack, 16 February 2018, p. 15, file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/CDP-2018-0034.pdf, accessed 4 June 2020. 17 Bardowell, No Win Race, p. 93. In 2018, approximately 17 per cent of Basketball England (basketball’s governing body) members lived in the country’s most deprived council wards, under the Government’s definition of multiple deprivation. House of Commons Library, The Future of Basketball in the UK, p. 15. 18 Maguire, ‘American Labour Migrants’, pp. 249-51. 19 Bruce Carrington, ‘Sport as a Side Track: An Analysis of West Indian Involvement in Extra Curricular Sport’, in ed. Len Barton and Stephen Walker, Race, Class and Education, London, 1983; Cashmore and Troyna, Black Youth in Crisis, pp. 98–103. 20 Mark Falcous and Joseph Maguire, ‘Making it Local? National Basketball Association Expansion and English Basketball Subcultures’, in Sport and Corporate Nationalisms, ed. Michael Silk, David Andrews and C.L. Cole, Oxford, 2005, pp. 17–21; Skinner, Development of Basketball, p. 17. 21 Ellis Cashmore, Making Sense of Sports, Oxon, 2010, p. 332; David Andrews, Ronald Mower, Michael Silk, ‘Ghettocentrism and the Essentialized Black Male Athlete’, in Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports, ed. David Leonard and C. Richard King, Lanham, 2011, p. 77. 22 Paul Hoggett and Jeff Bishop, ‘Clubbing Together’, New Socialist, Summer, 1987, pp. 32–33. 23 For an account of how individuals come to construct narratives of self-identity from symbolic materials, see John B. Thompson, Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media, Stanford, 1995, p. 210. 24 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London, 1999, p. 36. 25 On emotional communities and affective registers, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review 107: 3, 2002, pp. 821–45; Matt Cook, ‘“Archives of Feeling”: The AIDS Crisis in Britain 1987, History Workshop Journal 83, 2017, pp. 51–78. 26 On the rise of ‘blackness’ as a category of politics and experience, see Rob Waters, Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985, Oakland, 2019. 27 Rob Waters, ‘Thinking Black: Peter Fryer’s Staying Power and the Politics of Writing Black British History in the 1980s’, History Workshop Journal 82, 2016, pp. 104–30, 116. 28 Bardowell, No Win Race, p. 69. 29 Jim White, ‘How a group of wayward inner-city children have had their lives turned around by basketball’, The Telegraph, 11 November 2017. 30 Glyn Hughes, ‘Managing Black Guys: Representation, Corporate Culture, and the NBA’, Sociology of Sport Journal 21: 2, 2004, p. 172; Hall, ‘What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’ in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent, Seattle, 1992, pp. 21–33; Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Cambridge MA, 2001, p. 242; Bill Yousman, ‘Blackophilia and Blackophobia: White Youth, the Consumption of Rap Music, and White Supremacy’, Communication Theory 13: 4, 2003, pp. 366–91. 31 Gareth Millington, ‘“I Found the Truth in Foot Locker”: London 2011, Urban Culture, and the Post-Political City’, Antipode 48: 3, 2016, pp. 705–723, p. 713. 32 Basketball All-Party Parliamentary Group, Inquiry Report, July 2014, p. 1, http://www.appgbasketball.org.uk/resources/APPGInquiryFinalReport.pdf, accessed 23 June 2020. 33 Michael Keith, Race, Riots and Policing: Lore and Disorder in a Multi-Racist Society, London, 1993, p. 3. 34 Basketball 1:3, Summer 1960, p. 16; George Whitmore, ‘Publicity is the Life-Blood of Sport’, Basketball 1: 5, November 1960, p. 21; Basketball 1: 6, December 1960, pp. 10-11. 35 Basketball 1: 2, March/April 1960, p. 6. 36 Basketball 8: 2, December/January 1968/9, p. 14; Basketball 8: 4, April/May 1969, p. 4. 37 John Belchem, Before the Windrush: Race Relations in Twentieth-Century Liverpool, Liverpool 2014, p. 211. 38 Paul Ambrosius, interviewed 12 July 2018. 39 See for example Basketball 1: 3, Summer 1960, p. 9; Basketball 8: 1, October/November 1968, p. 7; Basketball 1: 12, December/January 1961/62, p. 18. 40 Tim Martyn-Jones, interviewed 23 July 2018. 41 In 1976, more than 70 per cent of Liverpool’s black population lived in five wards in and around Liverpool 8. National Dwelling and Housing Survey, 1976, Liverpool Data, cited in Lord Gifford, Wally Brown and Ruth Bundey, Loosen the Shackles: First Report of the Liverpool 8 Inquiry into Race Relations in Liverpool, London: Karia Press, 1989, p. 39. 42 Jimmy Rogers, interviewed on 10 July 2018. For an in-depth study of Rogers’ life and work, see Romyn, ‘We could be anything we wanted to be’, pp. 62–84. 43 Ambrosius, 12 July 2018. 44 Ambrosius, 12 July 2018. 45 Merseyside Community Relations Council, The Dragon’s Teeth, Liverpool, 1974, p. 8. 46 Ambrosius, 12 July 2018. 47 Vincent Edwards, interviewed 28 October 2018. 48 John Clarke, ‘Style’, in Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, London: Routledge, 1993, p.180. 49 Liverpool Youth Organisations Committee, Special but Not Separate: The Report of the Liverpool Youth Organisations Committee on the Situation of Young Coloured People in Liverpool, Liverpool, 1968. 50 Edwards, 28 October 2018 51 Liverpool Community Relations Council, Annual Report, 1973, quoted in The Guardian, 29 September 1973. The creation of the LCRC at the end of the 1960s was a key recommendation of the report Special but Not Separate, p. 20. 52 Edwards, 28 October 2018; see also Ambrosius, 12 July 2018; Belchem, Before the Windrush, pp. 215–219. 53 In 1968, the Liverpool Youth Organisations Committee found that of fifty youth groups surveyed in Liverpool, ‘coloured teenagers will only be found in perhaps five or six’. Special but Not Separate, p. 14. 54 Romyn, ‘We could be anything we wanted to be’, pp. 65–66. 55 Edwards, 28 October 2018. 56 Rogers, 10 July 2018. 57 Ambrosius, 12 July, 2018. The youth club, Stanley House Community Centre, was ‘Britain’s first black youth club for coloured teenagers’, according to the Liverpool DailyPost, 18 October, 1963; Belchem, Before the Windrush, pp. 199–200. 58 Mark Dunning, interviewed by Sam Neter, Hoopsfix, 3 January 2019, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2019/01/improving-basketball-coaching-in-the-uk-with-mark-dunning-ep-43/, accessed 13 July 2020. 59 Harvey Araton, ‘Erving Still Soars Above the Rest’, The New York Times, 10 February 1993. 60 Basketball 13: 3, Winter 1974, p. 13. 61 Cashmore, Making Sense of Sports, p. 238. 62 Sam Stiller, interviewed by Sam Neter, Hoopsfix, 1 April, 2019, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2019/04/becoming-one-of-the-greatest-british-shooters-of-all-time-with-sam-stiller-ep-49/, accessed 23 April 2020. 63 In what Thomas McLaughlin describes as the ‘black ball/white ball’ dichotomy, a ‘white’ style of play is understood to be rooted in an ‘ethical’ fealty to teamwork and ‘fundamentals’, while the influence of an overly flashy, individualistic, and physically dominant ‘black style’ has bastardized the sport. Thomas McLaughlin, Give and Go: Basketball as a Cultural Practice, New York, 2008, pp. 42–44. 64 Ambrosius, 12 July 2018. 65 Bardowell, No Win Race, p. 73. 66 Joel Moore, interviewed by Sam Neter, Hoopsfix, 28 February 2019, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2019/02/podcast-joel-moore/, accessed 5 May, 2020. For roughly a decade from the mid-1970s Crystal Palace was the dominant club in Britain — ‘Palace was British basketball’s version of Liverpool in football’, in the words of Bardowell, No Win Race, p. 73. 67 Roger Hosannah, interviewed by Sam Neter, Hoopsfix, 14 March 2019, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2019/03/building-british-basketball-brand-hosana-with-roger-hosannah/, accessed 5 May 2020. 68 Maguire, ‘American Labour Migrants’, p. 233. 69 In 1972-3, total NBL attendance was 7,500; by 1984-5, this had grown to more than 330,000. Maguire, ‘American Labour Migrants’, p. 238. 70 Vince Macaulay, interviewed by Sam Neter, Hoopsfix, 4 January 2018, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2018/01/vince-macaulay/, accessed 5 August 2020. 71 Bardowell, No Win Race, p. 72. 72 Basketball 14: 5, Spring 1975, p. 9. That the top-flight teams and players were for the most part situated in England’s major cities helps explain the sport’s disproportionately urban take-up. 73 Burden, Chappell, and Jones, ‘Racial Participation and Integration’, p. 302. 74 Nhamo Shire, ‘BBL Eighties Nineties: Remembering Larry Dassie’, Facebook 27 November 2016, https://www.facebook.com/BBL80S90S/posts/remembering-larry-dassie-last-friday-marked-the-30th-anniversary-of-the-passing-/712335068922911/, accessed 17 July 2020. 75 It is worth noting that clubs at this time were limited to a maximum of two foreign players and one dual national (holding both British and foreign citizenship), and that American players were generally far from ‘overpaid’. Ken Pemberton, an American veteran of the NBL, who ‘worked as a fibre glass worker and building site labourer’ to supplement his basketball salary, said: ‘Most Americans came here with the expectation of good money…But as soon as you get here the reality hit you’. Basketball Monthly 21: 6, March 1982, p. 18; Basketball Monthly 21: 7, May 1982, p. 37. 76 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh, 2014, p. 1. 77 Basketball 14: 4, Easter 1975, p. 26. 78 John Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain, Basingstoke, 1993, p. 71. 79 Peter Scantlebury MBE, interviewed by Sam Neter, Hoopsfix, 2 July 2020, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2020/07/becoming-the-bbls-all-time-leading-scorer-with-peter-scantlebury-mbe-ep-61/, accessed 23 July, 2020. 80 See for example Ellis Cashmore, Black Sportsmen, London, 1982, pp. 98–109; Maureen Stone, The Education of the Black Child in Britain, London, 1981, pp. 65–66; Carrington, ‘Sport as a Side-Track’, pp. 40–65. 81 Carrington, ‘Sport as a Side-Track’, p. 45. 82 Gus John, In the Service of Black Youth: A Study of the Political Culture of Youth and Community Work with Black People in English Cities, Leicester, National Association of Youth Clubs Publications, 1981, p. 116. 83 Sports Council Annual Report, 1979; Sports Council Annual Report, 1978, quoted in Barrie Houlihan and Anita White, The Politics of Sports Development, London, 2002, p. 34. 84 Annette Hinds, interviewed on 16 July 2018. 85 Hinds, 16 July 2018. 86 Jimmy Rogers, interviewed by Sam Neter, Hoopsfix, 14 November 2018, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2018/11/brixton-topcats-jimmy-rogers/, accessed 2 December 2018. 87 Hinds, 16 July 2018. 88 Annette Hinds, interviewed on 19 February 2021. 89 Hinds, 19 February 2021. 90 Hinds, 19 February 2021. 91 Basketball All-Party Parliamentary Group, Inquiry Report: Evidence from Brixton Topcats, May 2014, p. 1. 92 Annette Hinds, interviewed on 29 October 2018. 93 Rogers, 10 July 2018. 94 Hinds, 29 October 2018. 95 Rogers, 10 July 2018. 96 Dunning, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2019/01/improving-basketball-coaching-in-the-uk-with-mark-dunning-ep-43/, accessed 13 July 2020. 97 Dunning, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2019/01/improving-basketball-coaching-in-the-uk-with-mark-dunning-ep-43/, accessed 13 July 2020. 98 Falcous and Maguire, ‘Making it Local?’, p. 19. 99 Bardowell, No Win Race, pp. 84-6. 100 Romyn, ‘We could be anything we wanted to be’, p. 76. 101 While the Thatcher governments’ neoliberal philosophy – free enterprise and non-intervention – was articulated clearly and often in relation to the ‘inner cities’, the reality of their urban approach was often state-led. Otto Saumarez Smith, ‘Action for Cities: the Thatcher Government and Inner-City Policy’, Urban History 47: 2, 2020, pp. 274–291; Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Rob Waters, ‘“The privatisation of the struggle”: Anti-racism in the age of enterprise’, in The Neoliberal Age? Politics, Economy, Society and Culture in Britain since c. 1970, ed. Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Ben Jackson and Aled Davies, London, 2021. I would like to thank Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Rob Waters for giving me pre-publication access to their chapter. 102 These included youth clubs, hostels, The Black University, the Martin Luther King Foundation, and Keskidee Arts Centre, as well as the Topcats, and other sporting programmes like the Brixton-based Muhammad Ali Sports Development Association (MASDA). See Schofield, Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Waters, ‘“The privatisation of the struggle”’. For an account of self-help projects of the time, see A. Sivanandan, ‘From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain’, Race & Class 23: 2-3, 1981, pp. 111–152 (also published in A Different Hunger: writings on Black resistance, London, 1982). 103 Schofield, Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Waters, ‘“The privatisation of the struggle”’. 104 ‘Foot Locker celebrates Brixton Topcats’ Jimmy Rogers’, Brixton Blog, 8 October 2020, https://brixtonblog.com/2020/10/foot-locker-celebrates-brixton-topcats-jimmy-rogers/, accessed 12 March 2021. 105 Falcous and Maguire, ‘Making it Local?’, p. 19. 106 Mark Webster, interviewed on 27 September 2007. 107 Falcous and Maguire, ‘Making it Local?’, p. 20. 108 The author of this article included. 109 Justin Robinson, interviewed by Sam Neter, Hoopsfix, 6 December 2018, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2018/12/bbl-mvp-justin-robinson/, accessed 17 August 2020. 110 Robinson, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2018/12/bbl-mvp-justin-robinson/, accessed 17 August 2020. 111 Skinner, Development of Basketball, p. 25; quote in Oh Baby magazine, 1996, p. 23. 112 Skinner, Development of Basketball, p. 58. 113 John Amaechi, Man in the Middle, New York, 2007, p. 40. 114 Paul Mundy-Castle, interviewed on 4 October, 2018. 115 The Sports Leisure Legacy Project, Harlow to K2 and Beyond, 2016, https://sportsleisurelegacy.co.uk/chapter-6-the-role-of-architects-designers/, accessed 2 September 2020. 116 Sports Council, Sport for All, London Sports Council, 1981. 117 Ian Henry, The Politics of Leisure Policy, London, 1993, pp. 95-102; Skinner, Development of Basketball, p. 22. EBBA, now named Basketball England, was the sport’s governing body. 118 Mundy-Castle, 4 October 2018. 119 Quote in The Times, 11 December 1987; Basketball All-Party Parliamentary Group, Inquiry Report: Evidence from Brixton Topcats, pp. 2–24. 120 Caroline Howarth, ‘“So, you’re from Brixton?”: The struggle for recognition and esteem in a stigmatized community’, Ethnicities 2: 2, 2002, pp. 237–260. 121 Andrea Congreaves, interviewed on 22 August 2018. 122 Freddie Morrison, interviewed on 20 July 2018. 123 Hinds, 29 October 2018. 124 Hosannah, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2019/03/building-british-basketball-brand-hosana-with-roger-hosannah/, accessed 5 May 2020. 125 Nhamo Shire, interviewed by Sam Neter, Hoopsfix,19 September 2014, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2014/09/nhamo-shire-ceo-of-reach-teach-hoopsfix-podcast-ep-7/, accessed 13 July 2020. ‘There is clear synergy between basketball and music and Midnight Madness embraces this fact’, wrote the BBC’s Jadeen Singh. ‘There was a DJ playing all the latest hip hop tunes, whilst the games were being played, the music did not seem out of place. I can’t imagine this being the case in any other team sport!’ Jadeen Singh, ‘Midnight Madness’, BBC Local, 24 September 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/content/articles/2005/08/09/blast05_midnight_madness_feature.shtml, accessed 6 September 2020. 126 Pierre Henry-Fontaine, Midnight Madness: Best of 15, 2014, https://vimeo.com/99824426, accessed 13 July 2020. 127 Jackson Gibbons, interviewed by Sam Neter, Hoopsfix, 20 December 2018, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2018/12/jackson-gibbons-podcast/, accessed 13 July 2020. 128 Patris Gordon, The Unauthorised Biography of Pops Mensah-Bonsu, London 2019, p. 16. White, who played for England and Crystal Palace in the 1980s, died of cancer in 2002; The Independent, 21 December 2002. 129 ‘A struggle’, the report continues, ‘which is not shared by many better-established sports, which cannot hope to engage as many people as basketball already does’. Basketball All-Party Parliamentary Group, Inquiry Report, Foreword. 130 Basketball All-Party Parliamentary Group, Inquiry Report, 26. 131 Robinson, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2018/12/bbl-mvp-justin-robinson/, accessed 17 August 2020. 132 Hosannah, https://www.hoopsfix.com/2019/03/building-british-basketball-brand-hosana-with-roger-hosannah/, accessed 5 May, 2020. 133 Claire Alexander, ‘The culture question: a view from the UK’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39: 8, 2016, pp. 1426–1435, 1429-30; Lambros Fatsis, ‘Policing the beats: The criminalisation of UK drill and grime music by the London Metropolitan Police’, The Sociological Review 67: 6, 2019, pp. 1300–1316. 134 Basketball All-Party Parliamentary Group, Inquiry Report, p. 7. 135 YMCA, Out of Service: A Report Examining Local Authority Expenditure On Youth Services in England & Wales, London, 2020; Sian Berry, ‘London’s Lost Youth Services 2018’, London: City Hall, March 2018; Unison, A Future at Risk: Cuts in Youth Services, London 2016, p. 7. 136 Romyn, ‘“London Badlands”’, pp. 133–50. 137 Gus John, ‘Youth Work and Apprehending Youth Violence’, Youth & Policy, 20 December 2017, https://www.youthandpolicy.org/articles/apprehending-youth-violence/, accessed 3 September 2020. 138 John, In the Service of Black Youth, p. 207. 139 Mundy-Castle, 4 October 2018. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - ‘For them it was just a game but for us it was more’: Black Identity and the Making of Basketball in Urban Britain
JF - History Workshop Journal
DO - 10.1093/hwj/dbac003
DA - 2022-02-26
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/for-them-it-was-just-a-game-but-for-us-it-was-more-black-identity-and-SX545uDGLg
SP - 69
EP - 94
VL - 93
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -