Black voice of Grey Lady makes wrong call

AMERICA AT LARGE:The New York Timescolumnist should not be allowed to get away with his attempt to ascribe racial motives to the NBAS's globalisation

'REVERSE QUOTAS, in search of a more diverse NBA, are not far-fetched: It's called globalisation, a code word for more white players on rosters' - William C Rhoden, the New York Times, May 25th. When I broke into this business 38 years ago you could have counted the number of black sportswriters working for American newspapers on the fingers of one hand.

Diversity, fortunately, was not long in coming. Today it is the rare metropolitan sports section that doesn't employ at least a few African-Americans, many of whom function as the principal beat writers covering professional teams, and I can think offhand of more than a dozen major newspapers on which a top sports columnist happens to be black - though in many cases, you wouldn't even know that if the fellow's photograph weren't incorporated in his column logo.

The New York Timesdoesn't use pictures of its columnists, but there's never much doubt about where Bill Rhoden is coming from. In the two decades since be began writing the "Sports of the Times" column (a venerable institution initiated by John Kieran in 1927 and subsequently authored by three Pulitzer Prize-winners) Rhoden has apparently interpreted his brief to be that of the black voice of the Grey Lady.

In regularly using his pulpit to argue for racial justice, he has over the years occasionally found himself on dangerous ground with what seemed at least half-hearted attempts to defend the likes of Mike Tyson, Barry Bonds, and Michael Vick, but never has he been more wrong-headed than in Monday's preposterous assertion that the increasingly international make-up of the National Basketball Association is about image, a ploy to keep more white bodies in uniform.

The likes of Manu Ginobiii (Argentina) and Pau Gasol (Spain) aren't in the Western Conference finals because they're white. They're in the NBA because they are first of all great basketball players, and because they bring aspects of the team-oriented international concept that makes everyone around them better players, too.

The black-and-white issue that had Rhoden seeing red had its roots in a phone call to a satellite radio program last week.

The listener suggested the Chicago Bulls, having earned the rights to the number one pick in next month's draft, would "keep a few white players on the roster in deference to a predominantly white ticket-buying fan base". When the hosts of the programme dismissed the argument as "ridiculous," they invited the wrath of William C Rhoden.

Now, it is true at one time NBA teams worried about offending their clienteles by having an over-abundance of black players on their rosters. Thirty years ago, one could almost take it for granted the seldom-used ninth through 12th spots on a 12-man roster would probably go to those of the Caucasian persuasion in a league increasingly, though by no means exclusively, dominated by African- Americans. (In their dynasty run of the early 1980s, for instance, the Larry Bird-Kevin McHale-Robert Parrish era Boston Celtics won multiple championships with three white players in the starting line-up.)

The present trend toward globalisation in the professional game had its roots a generation ago in the emergence of foreign-born players like Nigerian-born Hakim Olajuwon (Houston Rockets) and the Croatian Toni Kukoc of the Chicago Bulls, but what truly kick-started the process was not commissioner David Stern's effort to tone down the league's gangster image, but the fact American professionals were getting their asses kicked in international competition with alarming regularity.

The US failed to win a medal at the 1990, 1998, and 2006 FIBA championships, and barely eked out a bronze at the 2004 Athens Games, in which an all-star collection of pros was beaten by Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and the eventual champions, Argentina.

Three members of that gold medal-winning Argentinian squad are employed by the four surviving teams in this year's NBA play-offs - Ginobili and Fabricio Oberto by the defending champion San Antonio Spurs and Walter Hermann by the Detroit Pistons.

The mid-season acquisition of Gasol (the Most Valuable Player of the 2006 World Championships, in which he led Spain to victory) is widely acknowledged to have been the turning point in the Los Angeles Lakers' transformation from also-rans to bona fide contenders. Last season's NBA MVP was Dallas's Dirk Nowitzki, a German. Steve Nash, a Canadian, won the award in each of the two seasons before that, and it 2001-03 Tim Duncan, born in the Virgin Islands, was another back-to-back MVP.

But an examination of the ethnic make-up of the four NBA teams still battling for the championship suggests Rhoden's arguments are ludicrous. In the East, Boston and Detroit, two teams bucking the globalisation trend, each fields a play-off roster consisting entirely of African Americans. (The injured Hermann is not on the Pistons' active 12-man play-off roster, nor are Brian Scalapine and Scott Pollard, two white players sidelined earlier in the season, on Celtics'.)

An analysis of the teams competing in the West only further undermines the Timescolumnist's attempt to turn this into a racial issue.

The Spurs and the Lakers each have five foreign-born players all right, but half of them are white and half of them black. The Spurs' two Argentinians, Ginobili and Oberto, are Caucasians, but Duncan and Frenchmen Tony Parker and Ian Mahinmi are not. Three of the four white Lakers (Gasol, Serbian Vladimir Radmanovic, and Slovenian Sasha Vujacic) are foreign-born, but so are black reserves Ronny Turiaf (France) and DJ Mbgenga (Congo).

And these numbers don't include LA's Ume Udoka, who though US born has a Nigerian father and represented Nigeria in the FIBA championships two years ago, and this year's NBA MVP, Kobe Bryant, who spent his formative years growing up in Italy.

It is probably also worth mentioning in passing that but for a season-ending injury to Yao Ming, the Rockets and not the Spurs or Lakers might be playing for the Western title right now. I don't know how many ethnic Chinese there are in Houston, but it's not many. Yao sells tickets (and replica jerseys) not because of his ancestry, but because he produces 22 points and 10 rebounds a game.

When he dismissed Bill Rhoden as "the Times' token quota hire", the race-baiting talk-show host Don Imus was rightly excoriated by columnists all over the country, including this one. All the more reason Rhoden should not be allowed to get away with the same thing in his attempt to ascribe racial motives to the NBA's globalisation.

As Sigmund Freud himself once noted, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".