An Economist Goes to the Game by Paul Oyer

Author:Paul Oyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Who Is Racist: Fans or Front Offices?

The Minnesota Timberwolves’ 2012–2013 season was not especially memorable, though the team’s thirty-one wins (against fifty-one losses) were, depressingly enough, its most in six years. Those Timberwolves, however, will leave a lasting legacy not for their on-court performance but for the composition of their roster. Not since Larry Bird’s Celtics teams of the 1980s had an NBA franchise fielded as many white players as that year’s Wolves, who rostered white guys ranging from superstar forward Kevin Love to Montenegrin big man Nikola Pekovic to redheaded former volleyball standout Chase Budinger.5 In a league that was 78 percent Black, the Timberwolves were two-thirds white. If you had distributed all of that season’s NBA players at random among the teams, the odds of having one team end up with ten white and five Black players were one in ten thousand.

Confronted by reporters, the Minnesota front office denied that the team’s racial makeup was at all intentional. But few thought it a coincidence that the Timberwolves play in the NBA’s whitest market, and one with an ugly history of taste-based discrimination by its sports team owners. Calvin Griffith, the owner of baseball’s Washington Senators, moved the team to Minneapolis in 1961 and renamed it the Minnesota Twins. In 1978, Griffith told a crowd at a local Lions Club event that he had chosen to relocate there “when I found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. . . . We came here because you’ve got good, hardworking, white people here.”6 Griffith, a holdover from the pre–Jackie Robinson era when, as the journalist and podcaster Josh Levin put it, “owners hated Black people more than they liked money,” moved his team from a city with a majority Black population to a smaller and potentially less lucrative market to keep his fan base white.7

The Timberwolves, denying any preference for players of a certain color, claimed that the team’s demographic makeup was a consequence of the organization’s global scouting efforts, which had hauled in five international players, all white, to the opening-day roster. And, admittedly, nobody knows for sure whether the Wolves were going out of their way to sign white players. The team did become slightly less white by the 2013–2014 season’s opening night. But it was by no means unreasonable for civil rights activists to call attention to the roster’s skewed racial makeup; the Wolves’ whiteness was unprecedented by recent NBA standards.

Implied in these allegations was a charge that the Timberwolves were suffering from employer discrimination, customer discrimination, or both. If the whitewashing was deliberate, then either Minnesota fans were demanding a whiter team and ownership was responding, or ownership simply preferred white players. This phenomenon appears to have haunted the league on a larger scale for decades.

The NBA offers a microcosm of larger patterns of discrimination in the United States. After the NBA was integrated in 1950, a legion of Black stars quickly inundated the league. By 1965, six of the ten All-Star Game starters were Black;

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