Thread by @GeeDee215

So, maybe we should do a little explanatory comma for the one-and-done rule in the NBA for the people who aren't basketball fans but who do care about race and politics.

So.

The typical way people end up in the NBA is that they go to college to play ball, then declare themselves eligible for the NBA Draft, where they get picked by a pro team.

And for most of the history of the NBA, players went to college for 3 or 4 years before they entered the draft. There were some exceptions: Magic Johnson declared for the NBA after just one season at Michigan State. But those cases were exceedingly rare.

Even rarer still: a few players even jumped to the league directly from high school, but it was always controversial, and the first dude who tried it basically had to sue the league to be allowed to do it.

Anyway, in 1995, Kevin Garnett — this gangly, hyper-athletic kid from Chicago who was the best high school player in the country — had trouble with his college entrance exams and was basically like: "Fuck it, i'm going pro."

And it was controversial because it was some shit people just didn't do. There was a lot of talk about the importance of a college education, and how 18-year-olds couldn't compete with grown-ass men.

But KG did it. He got drafted by Minnesota, and would eventually become MVP.

But KG opened the floodgates. All of these highly touted high school players started saying that they were ready to go pro as well. Some of them were among the greatest players in the history of basketball (Kobe Bryant, LeBron James) and some of them washed out (Korleone Young).

The thinking from players was simple: you could always go back to college, but NBA money might not always be on the table.

Randy Livingston, who played at LSU and and was a surefire NBA player, blew out one of his knees during a pickup game in the summmer. The next year, he blew out the other one. He barely made the NBA; those injuries in college cost him and his family tens of millions of dollars.

Livingston became a cautionary tale about the dangers of plying your trade in college for no compensation.

And this is important, because what college athletes do is undoubtedly labor.

An old colleague of mine was a hurdler in college — she was ranked #9 in the nation.

Practice was Mon thru Thurs at 6 am. Meets were on Saturday. Sundays were for rest.

She said she pledged AKA her second semester in her senior year — the first time she had time.

She also didn't go to a single party until she was a senior.

Did she have fun? Probably! Did she have anything that looked like the typical college experience? Nah.

so yes, we're absolutely talking about uncompensated labor. Some people will say that an athletic scholarship is compensation, buuuut...

bit.ly/2BUXUMG

And mind you, in the case of the big money college sports — basketball and football —  these unpaid players are making tens of millions of dollars for their universities. Their coaches are, in the cases of big public univs, the highest-paid employees on the state's payroll.

and since the NCAA STRICTLY forbids players from any kinds of compensation. You can imagine how this plays out for poor athletes.

Chris Porter, a star at Auburn in the 1990s, lost his eligibility to play college basketball after he was given $2500 to keep his mother in rural AL from being evicted from her home.

it's...uh, not a fair system, is what i'm saying.

And so in the late 90s and early aughts, theblue chip players were making the jump to the NBA as soon as possible — if not out of high school, then after their freshman year in college.

That freaked out college coaches, who obviously, knew that if they could land one of these wunderkinds, they wouldn't have them for very long.

And lots of (well-meaning!) people argued that requiring kids to stay in college would be better for those players' emotional growth and also for their games. Bc players *were* coming into the league with a lot of raw talent but not a lot of experience.

(The NBA's commissioner actually blamed the influx of young, inexperienced players with why NBA scores were so low and the basketball of the late 90's/early aughts was so ugly.)

When David Stern, the NBA commissioner started toying with the idea of an age limit, things got real heated. Some NBA players thought it was a good idea, some of them thought it was a bad idea. Lots of college coaches loved it.

Of course, race coursed through all of these conversations.

Remember Evil Martina Hingis? She went pro as a tennis player at 16. Top baseball players get drafted into the minors out of HS all the time.

But when it came to the NBA, with its overwhelmingly black player base, people were *vehement* that college attendance was a necessary good.

Here's Jermaine O'Neal, one of the dudes who jumped from HS to the NBA and became a star in the league.

The league eventually instituted what we call an age limit: originally, i think you had to be a year removed from your HS graduation to enter the draft? But anyway, you have to be 19 to enter the league.

That decision in 2005 had all sorts of far-reaching implications.

Some dudes just said, "fuck it: then i'll play for a pro team in Europe or China for a year and get paid instead of playing for a college team for nothing."

And some schools, like the Univ of Kentucky, have pointedly given up on the charade around NCAA amateurism. John Calipari, Kentucky's coach, has said repeatedly that his job is to get his players NBA-ready so they can take care of their families.

bit.ly/2BSixJ9

(This has been great for Kentucky basketball, btw! There are currently TWENTY-EIGHT players in the NBA who are former Wildcats — there are 450 total players in the NBA — and their rep as an NBA feeder system means they land highly sought after high school players every year.)

But as it stands, the age limit is kind of a mess that doesn't satisfy anyone — 19 was a compromise, but it doesn't fix the problem of NBA players coming in too raw and inexperienced and while short, it still exposes them to a year of unpaid work where they might get injured.

This is coming up now because the NBA's amateurism rules are in the news again. The FBI — the motherfucking FBI — was investigating a bunch of colleges with wiretaps for paying players under the table. Those schools face all manner of NCAA sanctions. abcn.ws/2BUghkv

It's not clear why the FBI is involved here — paying basketball players is against NCAA rules, but it isn't illegal and certainly not a federal crime.

Doesn't that seem weird? Like an awful lot of forces being marshaled to keep players from being paid for their labor? 🤔

Here's Taylor Branch, via the dude @t_mcallister:

"Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene...is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation."

theatln.tc/2wsik9c

-30-

corrections: the homie @elmcitytree pointed out that Magic went pro after his sophomore year at Michigan St. Appreciate that correction, man.

That still means Magic won a HS championship, an NCAA championship, and and an NBA championship over just four years. (!!!!)

Another cxn: The NBA's age limit went into effect in 2006, not 2005. My bad.

Oh, one other note: it's worth pointing out that NCAA basketball fans and NBA basketball fans have different politics, which is another part of this story and race. College hoop fans are more Republican (read: whiter) than NBA fans, who lean Dem. bit.ly/2BUtoCA

also worth noting how diff these things are arranged elsewhere. Whereas college has been the farm system for the NBA/NFL, soccer players in Europe are signed, at very young ages, to academies run by football clubs. That's not without its own problems. bit.ly/2EXtSKA

okay, done for real.

wait: an old ABC story on Randy Livingston, once the #1 HS player in the country: bit.ly/2ou8en4

And this is why that matters: washingtonpost.com/amphtml/sports…

This is from 2014:

Some more context: white people don’t want to pay college athletes. POC do.

Poll: Majority of black Americans favor paying college athletes; 6 in 10 whites disagree

washingtonpost.com/amphtml/sports…