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Is this crop of white stars a fluke or a trend?
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By Pat Forde
ESPN.com
You cannot argue with Jerry Bruckheimer's timing. Releasing "Glory Road" on the 40th anniversary of Texas Western's championship season added to the movie's tremendous box-office appeal and helped teach a valuable history lesson to young America.
But here's the ironic context for the film that celebrates the first all-black starting five to win a college basketball national championship: The year of "Glory Road" on the screen has coincided with a season in which the two best college players in the nation happen to be white.
In a startling spasm of inverse desegregation, this season has been dominated by Duke's J.J. Redick and Gonzaga's Adam Morrison. They don't come from overseas (such as last year's player of the year, Andrew Bogut) or north of the border (reigning NBA MVP Steve Nash). The two high-scoring upperclassmen are neck-and-neck for the national scoring title, they're the only realistic contenders for national player of the year honors, and their bicoastal competition has captured the country's imagination.
Beyond Morrison and Redick, players like Michigan State's Paul Davis are enjoying very good seasons.
This occurs at a time when today's college kids seem encouragingly unburdened by The Race Thing. There appears to be less obsessing over race, less distrust between races in today's youth, more melding of black and white music and dress and vernacular. That's societal progress.
Still, anyone who says they haven't noticed that Redick and Morrison are white hasn't been paying attention. And anyone who shrugs it off as nothing unusual hasn't checked the history books.
Last time two white guys stood atop college hoops? Try 1970, and even that's debatable. LSU's Pete Maravich won the player of the year awards, but you could have a healthy debate about who was second-best: white players Dan Issel of Kentucky and Rick Mount of Purdue, or black players Bob Lanier of St. Bonaventure and Calvin Murphy of Niagara. Prior to that, you have to go back to the early 1960s -- before Lew Alcindor and after Oscar Robertson -- to find a white tandem comparable to Redick and Morrison.
"I was with an NBA scout at the Maryland-Duke game and we started our NBA talk with two guys: Redick and Morrison," said Washington Post columnist and "PTI" co-host Michael Wilbon, one of America's most astute commentators on race and sports. "When is the last time two white kids led the NBA draft conversation? And the scout is black."
And this is not just a two-man production. Meet the supporting cast:
• There is a chance that the first-team consensus All-America team will be a majority-white affair for the first time in 36 years. Those who could join Redick and Morrison include North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough, West Virginia's Mike Gansey and Kevin Pittsnogle, Michigan State's Paul Davis and possibly Nevada's Nick Fazekas.
• Hansbrough is the prohibitive favorite to sweep national freshman of the year honors.
• The nation's No. 1 team, Duke, has started a majority-white lineup for the first time in a decade. Four other AP Top 25 teams start majority-white lineups as well (Gonzaga, West Virginia, North Carolina and Iowa). Last year, there were two teams in the final AP Top 25 with majority-white starting lineups. No team has won the national title starting three or more white players on championship Monday since Duke in 1991.
• In America's best league, the Big East, white players led the conference through mid-February in eight of 12 statistical categories (rebounding, field goal percentage, assists, free throw percentage, 3-point percentage, 3-pointers made, assist/turnover ratio and defensive rebounds).
• In America's second-best league, the Big Ten, white players led the conference in five categories (scoring, rebounding, assists, blocked shots and defensive rebounds). White players ranked third or better in 10 of 12 categories.
Some of the best white athletes can be found in Morgantown, W.Va. The Mountaineers' top four scorers are white, and at times they can see the skepticism on the faces of opponents and hear it in their voices. Before one game, point guard J.D. Collins, who is black, poked his head in the huddle and told his teammates about it.
"J.D. said in the huddle, 'These guys aren't giving my white boys any respect! They just think they can run over my white boys!' " guard Patrick Beilein said. "And he was probably right. ... We look like a high school team."
What's the conclusion? At minimum, this is a cultural trend break (however temporary), and a challenge to a widely accepted sports stereotype. Remember Sports Illustrated's 1997 cover question, "What ever happened to the white athlete?" Answer: He's alive and well and raining down jumpers in college hoops.
Peter Roby of the Center for the Study of Sport and Society at Northeastern University said that white players' success "doesn't surprise me at all. If you've been around basketball, you know kids can play no matter what they look like."
But he also brought up the whites-can't-play-basketball stereotype.
"You know the old comment, 'For a white boy, he can really play,'" Roby said. "It's unfortunate, but it has been [the case]. We've gotten too used to defining everything by race. Our position at the Center for the Study of Sport and Society is that sports brings people together and makes race irrelevant.
"I hope the way we'll get beyond that is by having these discussions. Things like this article can get us beyond the emotion involved with race. If you get past skin color and stereotypes, Redick and Morrison probably have a lot more in common with [black] players than not."
African-Americans are still the dominant racial-cultural force at the high end of the college game, and Morrison and Redick don't necessarily represent a new trend. But if nothing else, this season can serve as a reminder that basketball is an inclusive sport. It can be played on a virtuoso level by kids with braids and buzz cuts. They can come from major metropolitan areas and from Midwestern cornfields, and they can come from places like Roanoke, Va., (Redick); Spokane, Wash., (Morrison); Martinsburg, W.Va., (Pittsnogle); and Poplar Bluff, Mo., (Hansbrough).
"I think it's healthy," Wilbon said. "The only way white parents and coaches and media people and mainstream culture at large are going to stop sending the message of, 'You can't possibly play because you're white,' is if folks see white kids play. It's the same kind of necessary reinforcement as black kids seeing a black man work as a scientist.
"My position on this, consistently, is that white folks talk white American kids out of wanting to play basketball, just like black folks talk black American kids out of pursuing science or technology or the law or literature. So I love this Morrison-Redick thing. And Pittsnogle, too, for that matter."
So now the natural question: How do you explain the Morrison-Redick phenomenon? There are various theories:
• It's a fluke, a demographic hiccup, a statistical blip that will correct itself when this group moves on to the pros. There is no definitive evidence that teenage America is teeming with future Morrisons or Redicks. This may just be cyclical and not a statistically valid sample from which to draw a conclusion.
• Early entry to the pros has been a largely black vehicle. And white players are the ones filling that vacuum.
If there were no early entry, for example, LeBron James would be a junior in college and Dwight Howard would be a sophomore. And Redick and Morrison would have just a little competition for player of the year honors. In many cases, players most likely to stay in college longer and develop their games are white. The list of recent white early entrants is short: Chris Mihm of Texas; Mike Miller, Jason Williams and Matt Walsh of Florida; Michael Bradley of Villanova; Troy Murphy of Notre Dame; Mike Dunleavy and Shavlik Randolph of Duke; Joel Przybilla of Minnesota; and Robert Swift, straight from high school.
Of the All-America candidates mentioned above, Redick, Gansey, Pittsnogle and Davis are seniors. Morrison and Fazekas are juniors. All but Gansey either considered going pro last year, or could have considered it. All stayed in school.
"I don't think it's a coincidence that Morrison and Redick are junior and senior," said Roby, the former basketball coach at Harvard. "J.J. Redick isn't anything now like he was as a freshman."
• Give the devil its due: the AAU/travel team circuit, rightfully blamed for so many of the problems in youth basketball, has a positive side. It's been a powerful integrating force.
Redick didn't spend his teenage years solely shooting jumpers on the gravel court outside of his rustic home near Roanoke. His family drove him across the state of Virginia to play with Boo Williams' highly acclaimed (and mostly black) AAU outfit out of Hampton Roads. The Memphis Grizzlies' Miller didn't stay home in Mitchell, S.D., either. He traveled the national circuit, playing with and against kids from every metropolis. Same with Hansbrough.
If you're going to be somebody in basketball these days, you must play on a traveling team -- no matter where you're from. To do that, you must travel to bigger cities to play on better teams and against better teams.
"Don't underestimate the influence of the AAU programs here," said author Charles P. Pierce, who has written frequently and insightfully on race and basketball. "Even white kids from white suburbs, segregated most of the time by the invisible barriers of class, have to play, travel and live with black kids from harder circumstances."
• Hip-hop. Don't underestimate its impact on basketball. Or on white America.
Redick has said that he likes the lyrics of Nas and Tupac, and much of his publicized poetry is written in a hip-hop cadence. It's a chicken-and-egg debate as to which came first for many young white players -- immersion in hoops or immersion in hip-hop -- but there is a synergy between the two.
"What we are seeing now coming through the college basketball pipeline are the white children of the hip-hop culture," Pierce said. "These are the kids who took the music and the style back to their suburban homes the way the kids of the '50s brought jazz to the upper West Side and, pretty soon, you had white musicians sitting in with the best of them.
"These are the crossover kids, who have defined their game within the black cultural forces at work in music and, especially, in basketball. ... Redick is a classic trash-talker, and he didn't learn that from Chris Collins or Wojo [Duke assistant coaches Collins and Steve Wojciechowski]."
On this point, Roby disagrees, saying, "Last time I checked, basketball was here before hip-hop. We've had interracial teams since the '50s. ... When a white kid walks into a group of black folks and shoots the lights out? He gets accepted a lot easier than if he likes hip-hop."
• The kids who kept playing basketball through the white flight from the sport are made of sterner stuff. They had to be to survive and thrive in an era when the repeated message what that white men can't jump, can't play and don't belong.
"I think, or hope, what we're seeing is that the white kids we're talking about were simply too strong of mind to be talked out of playing basketball," Wilbon said. "And that takes guts. It really does."
Said Pierce: "I think, but cannot prove, that the change that came over basketball in the 1980s and 1990s scared off a great number of white kids, made them feel alien within the culture of the sport. The brave ones stayed, and I think you're seeing the results of that today."
The result is a cultural curiosity, as Morrison and Redick lead a group of white players trying to rejoin their black colleagues on the Glory Road paved 40 years ago.
_________________
"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."
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