Preface
Ever since I was a young boy, I have connected professional basketball, the New York Knicks, and Black culture. It began sometime in 1992, when I played the video game Tecmo NBA Basketball, in which an unstoppable Patrick Ewing was paired with sharpshooting guard John Starks and imposing forwards Xavier McDaniel, Charles Oakley, and Anthony Mason. Around the same time, I first heard Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.” For me, as a white middle-class suburbanite teenager, that song was incredibly cutting-edge. Soon after, a friend introduced me to the Beastie Boys’ “So What’cha Want,” with their music video featuring Mike D in an old school Knicks shirt, and a few years later the soundtrack for the film Friday became one of my favorite albums (thanks, Boof), and NBA Jam hit Super Nintendo. Not only was the Knicks trio of Ewing, Mason, and Starks—my favorite team—available to play in that game (lots of “Boomshakalaka” dunks), the Beastie Boys were secret playable characters too.
Then, for more than a decade, my basketball and hip-hop fandom waned. I went to college and graduate school, got married and started a family, and wrote a dissertation on a “real” history topic (nineteenth-century midwestern Independence Day celebrations). After that I won the academic lottery and landed a tenure-track position at Southeast Missouri State University teaching courses on the American Civil War and Missouri history. But when I started teaching a class to freshmen student-athletes who were far more engaged when we discussed sports in the context of history than politics or economics, I realized I could use sports to effectively contextualize American history. Within a few years, sport history became my primary academic focus.
While writing a book about the growth of the National Basketball Association during the 1970s, titled Tall Tales and Short Shorts, I stumbled across a 1979 column written by Peter Vecsey that used the term “N-----bocker” in reference to the 1979–80 Knicks, the league’s first all-Black team. I was shocked. But I also knew I had found the seeds of the next story I wanted to tell.
As a teenager, my first exposure to Black culture came by way of Dr. Dre and the NBA. But after reading Vecsey’s column and digging deeper into the history of rap, graffiti, and b-boying, I understood that this rise of intersecting Black culture—which included pro basketball and hip-hop—in New York City during the late seventies and early eighties was so important to the history of both sport and America.