Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America (American Ways)

From its early days as a sport to build “muscular Christianity” among young men flooding nineteenth-century cities to its position today as a global symbol of American culture, basketball has been a force in American society. It grew through high school gymnasiums, college pep rallies, and the fits and starts of professionalization. It was a playground game, an urban game, tied to all of the caricatures that were associated with urban culture. It struggled with integration and representations of race. Today, basketball’s influence seeps into film, music, dance, and fashion. Hoops tells the story of the reciprocal relationship between the sport and the society that received it. While many books have celebrated specific aspects of the game, Thomas Aiello presents the only contemporary cultural history of the sport from the street to the highest levels of professional mens and womens competition. He argues that the game has existed in a reciprocal relationship with the broader culture, both embodying conflicts over race, class, and gender and serving a s public theater for them. Aiello places cultural icons like Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant in the context of their times and explores how the sport negotiated controversies and scandals. Hoops belongs on the bookshelf of every reader interested in the history of basketball, sports, race, urban life, and pop culture in America. Contents 8 Prologue 10 1: Muscular Christianity 14 2: Professionalizing the Amateur Game 30 3: The Negro Leagues 46 4: Early Collegiate Basketball 62 5: The Growth of the Women’s Game 78 6: Midcentury Scandal 94 7: The Birth of the National Basketball Association 108 8: Integration 124 9: Race and Civil Rights 140 10: The American Basketball Association and the Merger 156 11: Magic and Larry 172 12: The Jordan Rules 186 13: College Basketball at the Millennium 200 14: The Rise of Women’s Basketball 218 15: The NBA in the Twenty-­First Century 234 Epilogue 248 Bibliographic Essay 256 Index 284 "From its nineteenth-century roots to its position today as a global symbol of American culture, basketball has been a force in American society. This book presents the first cultural history of the sport from the street to the highest levels of professional men's and women's competition, chronicling the relationship between the sport and American society"-- Provided by publisher