SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
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(I'm breaking this up into separate posts due to length)
The Search for Excellence
Pro football had been the big story of the 1960’s. That sport challenged baseball for the status of America’s #1 sport and won. It’s an explosive sport played on a smaller field and is easier to televise. People wondered what other sports could explode on TV. Basketball is also an explosive sport with dunks and shots form downtown and spectacular athletic moves performed by athletes in abbreviated uniforms in an even smaller field of play with fewer players, which allows the fan to focus on each player as an individual. And, while players have different roles, we can easily follow any player on the court and see how well he is doing what is assigned to do. There are no right tackles in this sport. Basketball seemed a natural to go to the center of the American scene in the 1970’s.
But it didn’t happen. Pro basketball pushed its way into a corner of the American sports scene but never made it to the center in the 70’s. I recall there being a gap in the yearly sports calendar between the Super Bowl and the opening of the baseball season where nothing that important seemed to be happing and I used to watch ABC’s Wide World of Sports during that time to see what all the other sports out there looked like. It was actually nice to have a little ‘down time’. A lot of other people apparently felt the same way as the failure of pro basketball to really go “big time” was the talk of the decade.
Why did this happen? There were a lot of theories, the most common was that basketball was a sport dominated by black players and the suburban white audience couldn’t relate to them. Football and baseball had black players, too, but they were a minority there. They were becoming a majority in basketball. I recall Bill Russell being incensed by the notion that a sport dominated by black players was unmarketable. Subsequent events have certainly proved him right. The NBA did eventually make it big and who was ever better marketed than Michael Jordan?
So why didn’t pro basketball become the big hit of the 70’s? One reason was that it’s most spectacular player, Julius Erving, “Doctor J” was playing in the ABA that had no TV contract. But the other reason was that the sport lacked a definition of excellence.
A sport needs a definition of excellence. Even if a performer or team dominates a sport to the point of making it seemingly boring, we admire their excellence and wonder who could and will challenge them. Look at golf. Tiger Woods has never been seen to be a nice guy but his excellence brought the sport to new levels of popularity and people keep want him to make a comeback so it can be like the old days. During the era of his dominance, people wanted to see a rival emerge and had hopes for David DuVal, Sergio Garcia and Phil Mickelson. Phil has done very well but he never became a serious rival to Tiger in his prime. Golf has had some great rivalries in the past, often resolving themselves in to triumvirates: Vardon Taylor and Braid, Jones, Hagen and Sarazen, Nelson, Hogan and Snead, Palmer, Nicklaus and Player. Something like that may eventually happen with McElroy, Spieth and Day or maybe one of the other talented young players in the sport. What the sport does not want is a different winner every week, which suggests mediocrity more than great completion in the mind of the sports fan. They may be wrong but that tends to be their response.
Pro basketball had had a definition of excellence for much of its history: George Mikan’s Lakers won 6 titles in 7 years, then after a two year interregnum, Bill Russell’s Celtics won 11 championships in 13 years. But the time was not quite right for the sport to go big-time. But when it was expected to, the NBA had a different champion for 18 seasons in a row. The latter part of that period was a brilliant era for the league because of the competing dynasties of Magic Johnson’s Lakers and Larry Bird’s Celtics, who won 8 titles in 9 years between them, facing off three times. That would be followed by the era of Jordan’s Bulls that put the league on the pedestal upon which it currently sits. But the 70’s were all about teams seeming to establish themselves as the sport’s next definition of excellence but then failing to follow up on it. No team or individual really captured the imagination of the public and so the league languished in a sort of marketing purgatory.
The Search for Excellence
Pro football had been the big story of the 1960’s. That sport challenged baseball for the status of America’s #1 sport and won. It’s an explosive sport played on a smaller field and is easier to televise. People wondered what other sports could explode on TV. Basketball is also an explosive sport with dunks and shots form downtown and spectacular athletic moves performed by athletes in abbreviated uniforms in an even smaller field of play with fewer players, which allows the fan to focus on each player as an individual. And, while players have different roles, we can easily follow any player on the court and see how well he is doing what is assigned to do. There are no right tackles in this sport. Basketball seemed a natural to go to the center of the American scene in the 1970’s.
But it didn’t happen. Pro basketball pushed its way into a corner of the American sports scene but never made it to the center in the 70’s. I recall there being a gap in the yearly sports calendar between the Super Bowl and the opening of the baseball season where nothing that important seemed to be happing and I used to watch ABC’s Wide World of Sports during that time to see what all the other sports out there looked like. It was actually nice to have a little ‘down time’. A lot of other people apparently felt the same way as the failure of pro basketball to really go “big time” was the talk of the decade.
Why did this happen? There were a lot of theories, the most common was that basketball was a sport dominated by black players and the suburban white audience couldn’t relate to them. Football and baseball had black players, too, but they were a minority there. They were becoming a majority in basketball. I recall Bill Russell being incensed by the notion that a sport dominated by black players was unmarketable. Subsequent events have certainly proved him right. The NBA did eventually make it big and who was ever better marketed than Michael Jordan?
So why didn’t pro basketball become the big hit of the 70’s? One reason was that it’s most spectacular player, Julius Erving, “Doctor J” was playing in the ABA that had no TV contract. But the other reason was that the sport lacked a definition of excellence.
A sport needs a definition of excellence. Even if a performer or team dominates a sport to the point of making it seemingly boring, we admire their excellence and wonder who could and will challenge them. Look at golf. Tiger Woods has never been seen to be a nice guy but his excellence brought the sport to new levels of popularity and people keep want him to make a comeback so it can be like the old days. During the era of his dominance, people wanted to see a rival emerge and had hopes for David DuVal, Sergio Garcia and Phil Mickelson. Phil has done very well but he never became a serious rival to Tiger in his prime. Golf has had some great rivalries in the past, often resolving themselves in to triumvirates: Vardon Taylor and Braid, Jones, Hagen and Sarazen, Nelson, Hogan and Snead, Palmer, Nicklaus and Player. Something like that may eventually happen with McElroy, Spieth and Day or maybe one of the other talented young players in the sport. What the sport does not want is a different winner every week, which suggests mediocrity more than great completion in the mind of the sports fan. They may be wrong but that tends to be their response.
Pro basketball had had a definition of excellence for much of its history: George Mikan’s Lakers won 6 titles in 7 years, then after a two year interregnum, Bill Russell’s Celtics won 11 championships in 13 years. But the time was not quite right for the sport to go big-time. But when it was expected to, the NBA had a different champion for 18 seasons in a row. The latter part of that period was a brilliant era for the league because of the competing dynasties of Magic Johnson’s Lakers and Larry Bird’s Celtics, who won 8 titles in 9 years between them, facing off three times. That would be followed by the era of Jordan’s Bulls that put the league on the pedestal upon which it currently sits. But the 70’s were all about teams seeming to establish themselves as the sport’s next definition of excellence but then failing to follow up on it. No team or individual really captured the imagination of the public and so the league languished in a sort of marketing purgatory.
