NBA: Black and White Problems (part two)

I referee basketball games at many different levels of competition in different leagues. One of these leagues is a City of Seattle youth league, involving teams from area community centers.

On Saturday, Jan. 13, an all-black team from a predominantly black area in Seattle played a white team from a more well-to-do part of town. The black players were bigger and more athletic across the board, so, in accordance with basic officiating principles, I reffed their actions a little more tightly than I did the lesser-skilled and skinnier white team.

The few seats in the gymnasium--which was in the white neighborhood--were occupied by enthusiastic (others might say tenacious) parents of the black team's players. Some of them ran up and down the whole sideline during the entirety of the game, and as it became clear that I was whistling more fouls and violations on the Rainier team, even though they were winning comfortably, I got some pretty severe commentary--no profanity, but with a level of emotion that was higher and more intense than anything I usually get at the high school or junior high level.

After the game, a young, attractive black woman--a parent of a black player--came up to me and coolly told me--with a steely, grim look that bore into my face--that I was terrible and that I flat-out cheated her team. She repeated the same thing and explained why she thought I was terrible a few more times. The lady then turned to my partner and warmly shook his hand, saying, "How ya doin'?" The lady then, for good measure, told me a few more times how terrible I was, not showing any remote sense that she was divorcing her opinion of my job from her opinion of me as a (non-) person.

The game had ended, but I had no legitimate reason to believe that she was joking, exaggerating or, at the very least, at peace with what had just happened to "her" team--which had won decisively.

My head swam with thoughts about the recent election, and with recollections of how sad I felt about the deep divisions that plague this country in many ways, but particularly with regard to race. They all came flooding back.

I remembered why I worked so hard to support Bill Bradley--an NBA player who lived and roomed and ate with black playground legends on the New York Knicks in the racially explosive '60s and 70s--in his somewhat quixotic but transcendently noble and honorable campaign. I remembered all that Senator Bradley had done and said to promote racial understanding at very deep levels: beyond the superficial and the geographic, and inside the core of each individual. I remembered all that Bradley had said in his books, speeches and lectures to teach us about something that went far beyond our own natural, comfortable spheres of existence.

And so, having always been a believer in giving people second chances (I'm an unabashed classic liberal, after all--I supported Bill Bradley!), and in giving people opportunities to reclaim or rediscover their human dignity, I caught the lady before she left the gym and told her, with a tense but slight smile (presented as genuinely as I could muster under the circumstances), that I hoped she'd have a good MLK holiday the following Monday.

I had hoped that this lady, who had treated me like a non-person, would finally snap out of her "raving mad parent/obsessed fan" mentality and become a normal person again, put in a restored frame of mind by the evocation of Dr. King's memory.

She told me, with that same steely look and even a hint of a dismissive laugh, "Yeah, I'll have a great King Day, because I won't be seeing you."

It hurt me a lot, but it hurt even more because it manifested the deep racial divide that cuts through our country. This game was the fifth of six games which I officiated that day, and the final game--the one after this just-completed game--featured two all-white teams.

Subconsciously or not, I breathed a huge interior sigh of relief. And really, as a white person, how could I not, after incidents like this (which have evolved somewhat differently, but with some recognizable parallels, in previous city of Seattle community center contests)?

From the presidency to the NBA; from a lack of economic opportunity to a lack of people seeking out and establishing solidarity with people different from themselves; from opinions on basketball culture to assessments of proper officiating; and from black and white, there's a lot of hurt and division over race in this country, and so much of it, as it extends to different reaches of our society, is tied in with the games we play, particularly basketball.

I am going to write to the director of the community center where the all-black team plays. I am going to ask what I can do to work with black youngsters. I'm also going to try to re-start my efforts to tutor at a predominantly black elementary school, which I did last year. All of us need to get past the spoken and unspoken barriers that run very deep in our land. Then, and only then, can all of us truly consider ourselves worthy of being American, and of saying that we really honor the life and memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.