a pissing contest. And guess who will win. Not my perpetually outnumbered, outvoted, outgunned side. Huh-uh. No way. My noncolored colleagues will claim one of their own, a white college kid on such and such a night, in such and such an obscure arena, proved by such and such musty, dusty documents, launched the first jump shot. Then they'll turn the session into a coming-out party for the scholar who invents the inventor. Same ole, same ole aggression, arrogance, and conspicuous consumption. By the end of the seminar's two hours they'll own the jump shot, unimpeachable experts on its birth, development, and death. Rewriting history, planting their flag on a chunk of territory because no native's around to holler, Stop, thief.
And here I sit, a colored co-conspirator in my lime-colored plastic contour chair, my transportation, food, and lodging complimentary, waiting for an answer to a question nobody with good sense would ask in the first place. Even though I've fired up more jumpers than all the members of the Association for the Study of Popular Culture combined, do you think anybody on the planning committee bothered to solicit my opinion on the shot's origins. With their linear, lock-step sense of time, their solipsism and bonehead priorities, no wonder these suckers can't dance.
Let's quietly exit from this crowded hall in a mega-conference center in Minneapolis and seek the origins of the jump shot elsewhere, in the darkness where my lost tribe wanders still.
Imagine the cramped interior of an automobile, a make and model extant in 1927, since that's the year we're touching down, on a snowy night inside, let's say, a Studebaker sedan humping down a highway, a car packed with the bodies of five large Negroes and a smallish driver whose pale, hairy-knuckled fingers grip the steering wheel. It's January 27, 1927, to be exact, and we're on our way from Chicago to Hinckley, Illinois, population 3,600, a town white as Ivory Snow, to play a basketball game against Hinckley's best for money.
Though he's not an athlete, the driver wears a basketball uniform under his shirt, you know, the way some men who are not women sport a bra and panties under their clothes, just in case. In any case, even if pressed into playing because the referee fouls out one of us, the driver's all business, not a player. A wannabe big-time wheeler-dealer but so far no big deal. Now he's got a better idea. He's noticed how much money white people will pay to see Negroes do what white people can't or won't or shouldn't but always wanted to do, especially after they see Negroes doing it. Big money in the pot at the end of that rainbow. Those old-time minstrel shows and medicine shows a goldmine and now black-faced hoofers and crooners starring in clubs downtown. Why not ball games. Step right up, ladies and gents. Watch Jimbo Crow fly. Up, up, and away with the greatest of ease. Barnstorming masters of thin air and striptease, of flim and flam and biff-bam-thank-you-mammy jamming.
Not the world-renowned Globies quite yet, and the jump shot not the killer weapon it will be one day, but we're on our way. Gotta start somewhere, so Mr. Abe the driver has rounded up a motley squad and the Globies' first tour has commenced humbly, if not exactly in obscurity, since we headed for Hinckley in daylight, or rather the dregs of daylight you get on overcast afternoons in gray, lakeside Chicago, 3:30 P.M. the time on somebody's watch when Pascal Rucker, the last pickup, grunts and fusses and stuffs his pivot man's bulk into the Studebaker's back seat and we're off.
Soon a flying highway bug
splat
invents the windshield. The driver's happy. Open road far as the eye can see. He whistles chorus after identical chorus, optimistically mangling a riff from a herky-jerky Satchmo jump. The driver believes in daylight. Believes in signing on the bottom line. Believes in the two-lane, rod-straight road, his sturdy automobile. He believes he'll put miles between Chicago and
And here I sit, a colored co-conspirator in my lime-colored plastic contour chair, my transportation, food, and lodging complimentary, waiting for an answer to a question nobody with good sense would ask in the first place. Even though I've fired up more jumpers than all the members of the Association for the Study of Popular Culture combined, do you think anybody on the planning committee bothered to solicit my opinion on the shot's origins. With their linear, lock-step sense of time, their solipsism and bonehead priorities, no wonder these suckers can't dance.
Let's quietly exit from this crowded hall in a mega-conference center in Minneapolis and seek the origins of the jump shot elsewhere, in the darkness where my lost tribe wanders still.
Imagine the cramped interior of an automobile, a make and model extant in 1927, since that's the year we're touching down, on a snowy night inside, let's say, a Studebaker sedan humping down a highway, a car packed with the bodies of five large Negroes and a smallish driver whose pale, hairy-knuckled fingers grip the steering wheel. It's January 27, 1927, to be exact, and we're on our way from Chicago to Hinckley, Illinois, population 3,600, a town white as Ivory Snow, to play a basketball game against Hinckley's best for money.
Though he's not an athlete, the driver wears a basketball uniform under his shirt, you know, the way some men who are not women sport a bra and panties under their clothes, just in case. In any case, even if pressed into playing because the referee fouls out one of us, the driver's all business, not a player. A wannabe big-time wheeler-dealer but so far no big deal. Now he's got a better idea. He's noticed how much money white people will pay to see Negroes do what white people can't or won't or shouldn't but always wanted to do, especially after they see Negroes doing it. Big money in the pot at the end of that rainbow. Those old-time minstrel shows and medicine shows a goldmine and now black-faced hoofers and crooners starring in clubs downtown. Why not ball games. Step right up, ladies and gents. Watch Jimbo Crow fly. Up, up, and away with the greatest of ease. Barnstorming masters of thin air and striptease, of flim and flam and biff-bam-thank-you-mammy jamming.
Not the world-renowned Globies quite yet, and the jump shot not the killer weapon it will be one day, but we're on our way. Gotta start somewhere, so Mr. Abe the driver has rounded up a motley squad and the Globies' first tour has commenced humbly, if not exactly in obscurity, since we headed for Hinckley in daylight, or rather the dregs of daylight you get on overcast afternoons in gray, lakeside Chicago, 3:30 P.M. the time on somebody's watch when Pascal Rucker, the last pickup, grunts and fusses and stuffs his pivot man's bulk into the Studebaker's back seat and we're off.
Soon a flying highway bug
splat
invents the windshield. The driver's happy. Open road far as the eye can see. He whistles chorus after identical chorus, optimistically mangling a riff from a herky-jerky Satchmo jump. The driver believes in daylight. Believes in signing on the bottom line. Believes in the two-lane, rod-straight road, his sturdy automobile. He believes he'll put miles between Chicago and
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