Backfield in Motion

Abstract

Nearly every aspect of our national pastimes has been transformed by African American participation and protest, style and aesthetics, physical gesture and emotional expression—a social fact suggesting that African Americans create permanent changes in American sports once they attain a certain critical mass. African Americans constitute more than 80 percent of NBA players and 65 percent in the NFL. That basketball is deeply embedded in black culture is common knowledge: the sport’s transformative elements over the last forty years—the jump shot, slam-dunk, fast break offense, and defiant self-expression—make pre-1965 b-ball, with its running hook-shots and two-handed set-shots, look like a diagrammed pickup game. But football was equally transformed by black culture in the 1970s in aesthetic, athletic, expressive, and performative ways, yet this is an untold story that remains a sideline to the AFL-NFL merger and the rise of Monday Night Football. In fact, the sport seems embarrassed by the changes: How else to assess the “illegal celebration” penalty of the 1980s except as the illegal use of black culture? As historian Alan H. Levy notes in Tackling Jim Crow, “Many head coaches of the 1970s (and all were white) sought to clamp down on it [black culture],” since they were “unduly threatened by matters of identifiably and self-consciously black behavior that lay outside their ken and control.”1