What's Wrong with my Favorite Sport

Growing up a Hoosier, how could I help but make basketball my favorite sport? From the time I was about 2, trying over and over again to hoist the little orange toy plastic basketball up to the full-size rim at the playground, I have loved the feeling of getting that ball through the hoop and hearing the little rip sound as it brushed the net.

But how my beloved sport has fallen. And I think you need not look any further than the NBA to see the fruit of a series of stupid changes in the development of the sport.

In the NBA this year, there were a number of rosters that carried not a single white or even hispanic player. But who were the stars of the NBA this year? Foreign players. The league MVP was an awesome white point guard named Steve Nash. He's from Canada. The champion Spurs had as their star players Tim Duncan (Virgin Islands), Tony Parker (France), and Manu Genobili (Argentina). They beat a Pistons team that didn't have foreign starters, and also had zero non-blacks on their roster.

When's the last time the USA Men's Basketball team won the Gold Medal in the Olympic Games? I'd have to look it up, because it's been awhile. The NBA players came to believe that if they just showed up, they would win. What they discovered was that a well organized group of fundamentally sound players playing as a team will beat a disfunctional group of superstars with their super egos every time.

Why isn't the NBA more racially and ethnically diverse? Why are the NBA teams increasingly going outside the country for their players? Where have all the Larry Birds, Bob Cousys, Pistol Petes, George Mikans, Rick Barrys, Jerry Wests, John Stocktons gone? What happened to solid fundamental basketball?

The entire development system for basketball in the United States is broken, and nobody but me seems to recognize the fact. I believe it starts at the elementary school level and gets worse through high school and college.

In about the fourth grade, kids start playing basketball in recreation leagues. That's probably the best part of the program, but only gets worse from there. By the 5th or 6th grade, the best players in the age group are selected for their school teams. And those "best" players happen to be the ones who are most coordinated and advanced at things like ball handling and shooting, not those who are tall and awkward, or are developing physically at a different pace.

By the time kids reach the 7th grade, most of them have already given up basketball. Sure, a few keep the dream alive by playing in recreation or intramural leagues, but most kids choose another sport. Once again, the 7th grade coaches choose the boys that can help their team win right now, and those are almost always the shorter and more coordinated. Then in 8th grade, a kid would have to show skills well beyond those of the legacy team members to get a chance to break into competitive basketball. Sadly, before they are freshmen in High School, most kids are already washed up when it comes to basketball.

Then there's High School. Years ago I taught in a school that had a mixed black and white population. The basketball team was made up entirely of blacks. A major source of anger for the white students, one I heard from many of them directly, was that the unwritten rule at that school said, "If you're white, don't bother to try out for basketball".

As an outside observer here, I see the local high school unable to compete in their league with the players that made the team back in the seventh grade. Nobody over 6'4", and the mostly short (sub-6') white players who were the best athletes when they were 12 are now too slow and untalented to compete with the big city schools. In the meantime, wandering the halls of that high school are dozens of talented athletes and boys above 6'4" who are capable of embarassing their varsity classmates on the basketball court. They're the same guys the 7th grade coach wouldn't even consider, who have blossomed into talented athletes in other sports.

The big city schools dominate these days, because they're full of black athletes who dream of playing for the NBA. The coaches at those schools find success much easier, given their pick of hundreds of boys who believe that basketball is their only hope for escaping poverty.

And then, what really killed basketball in Indiana was the move to class basketball. A bunch of misguided administrators decided it wasn't fair to put little schools like 1954 state champs Milan on the court with mega schools from Indy, so they broke up the single-class tournament in favor of a class system. And the famous "Hoosier Hysteria", the long-standing tournament that inspired people from all over the country, ceased to exist.

So where is the next Larry Bird? Not in Indiana. Not anywhere in the United States. He probably got cut from his 7th grade team 3 years ago and plays football instead. Besides, he and his buddies decided back in the 7th grade that basketball was a black man's sport, and there's no future in trying to play the sport. Where the playground courts when I was growing up were always full of kids playing basketball, sadly today they're all sitting empty, with the nets removed presumably so nobody will steal them.

None of this is racist, it's just pointing out the true facts of how the sport has been wrecked over the past 20 years by well-meaning but ignorant people that created this system. Nobody can blame young black boys for giving everything they have to the sport, although I wish someone could get through to them that the NBA is NOT the only way out of poverty and convince them to put some of that basketball energy into science and math.

I miss the days when I could enter a packed arena to see the Sectional Championship game, which might pit little Podunk HS against Mega HS. And everybody on the court is playing their hearts out, especially the seniors who know this is probably their last chance for basketball glory. All that is gone, with the tournament games playing to gyms less than half full with parents and some interested students.

Too bad nobody else seems to see what I see.