Basketball’s 'Black Magic'

Sixty-four years ago this month, on a Sunday morning in the basketball hotbed of Durham, N.C., a truly remarkable game was played. A team made up of students from Duke's medical school snuck across town to play a secret game—no spectators allowed in the gym—against a team from the North Carolina College for Negroes.

Of course, secret doesn't begin to do justice to the enormous effrontery this illegal contest represented to the segregationist standards of that era. Had news of the game reached the public, it might have provoked a dangerous response. Fortunately, only the egos of the young men from Duke wound up endangered. NCCN's basketball coach was John McLendon, an African-American who had learned the game at the University of Kansas from its inventor, Dr. James Naismith, and whose explosive, running style was a revolutionary counterpoint to the staid and relatively stationary game that prevailed in white America. And his team literally ran the Dukie doctors-in-training off the court, an 88-44 romp.

Next week America will engage in the annual ritual of college basketball and betting that has come to be known as "March Madness" or, always my favorite, "The Big Dance." But before that first dance step is taken, ESPN will devote four hours—Sunday and Monday nights at 9 p.m., without commercials—to a film titled "Black Magic" that celebrates the evolution of the game in black America, particularly at the historically black colleges and universities.

In 1961, after a long, successful college career, McLendon was hired to coach the Cleveland Pipers of the National Industrial League and won the league championship. But when the team got off to a slow start the next season, McLendon clashed with the team's young owner, a local businessman named George Steinbrenner, and was fired. Though he is in the Basketball Hall of Fame, McClendon never received the attention or acclaim that went to the game's successful white coaches, like Adolph Rupp of Kentucky and John Wooden of UCLA.

Filmmaker Dan Klores's "Black Magic" is an attempt to remedy that oversight by giving these coaches, players and schools their belated due. And there is much glory to be found in the stories of some of the basketball greats who emerged from obscurity at these schools to reach the game's highest rung and captivate a basketball nation: Earl (the Pearl) Monroe from Winston-Salem, Willis Reed from Grambling, Dick Barnett from Tennessee State, Bob Dandridge from Norfolk State, Al Attles from North Carolina A&T.

But, of course, it is ultimately a bittersweet tale. There are also tales of superstar talents who got derailed before they could grab the golden ring. In the case of Pee Wee Kirkland, it was the opportunities afforded him by a life of crime that was far more lucrative than the money offered him by the NBA. Kirkland relates his missteps—from hardwood hero to felon—rather matter-of-factly and takes tremendous pride in his basketball accomplishments, even if that meant scoring 135 points in a game playing for his prison team in a community league. John Chaney never got a shot at the NBA despite a starry career at Bethune-Cookman College. He wound up playing for pocket change, alongside a lot of talented black players, in the Eastern League. Chaney, of course, turned misfortune into triumph, becoming one of the most successful and respected college coaches in the nation at Temple. Cleo Hill did make it to the NBA, but not for long. Unfortunately, he arrived with the Hawks in St. Louis, a town with strong Southern overtones, at a time when a strict quota system limited the number of black players. The Hawks cut Hill despite his leading the team in scoring during the preseason, and his distress got him labeled a malcontent, effectively blackballing him from the league.