"Chairs. Chairs. You remember the chairs being thrown. Last summer in the high school Rucker Tournament.... The all-star game. Everybody in Harlem is out there. They have chairs—the folding wood chairs—lined up along the out-of-bounds lines.... 

"Game gets started and everybody is running his ass off.... You run down court while looking back. Pass hits you in the stomach right at the top of the key. Three big dudes have fallen back to guard. They are like guards, too—big dudes, over six-eight—with two on either side and one in the middle. Later someone tells you it was Val and Vaughn on both sides. Big Thing in the middle. No time to set up, so keep going straight down the lane. You hear somebody yell, 'Behind you,’ but you won't hardly pass off now. The three stand there, get set to pulverize you. There's no way you can get even close to the basket without them banging you around at least a little. Get strength from somewhere. Feel that you can do anything. Feel lifted by the crowd. Begin your leap. Go up, Goat. Palm the ball, hold it back by your hip. They all go up too. You can't even see the basket, but for a split second it seems that you have gone an inch higher than they, that you are still up there as they begin to fall back to earth. A tangle of wet brown and black faces, arms, palms, chest. It's all arms and hands in front of you, but you are still higher than any of them, so you sling the ball in an arc from your hip, up to the sky and then finally down through the white cotton strings that are so clean and new for this game. Blam lam. The beautiful shaking of the backboard. Noise that everyone understands. 

"Now come crashing down to the ground, the hard concrete, with the three defenders stumbling and falling over you like the time you were in a play at PS 119 and you got all mixed up and wound up bumping into each other. Nobody falls but everybody is off balance. Now the part you remember so clearly and will remember for the rest of your life. Chairs. Chairs are thrown on the court. Scared the hell out of you at first. You don't know what the crashing noise is on the side until you turn to see a chair a few feet away from you, legs folded up. People on the sidelines are throwing chairs on the court because they can think of no other way to show their amazement. 

"'It is the Goat, ladies and gentlemen. He has done a throwdown on three of the giants of New York and lived to tell about it,' shouts Motorman, now having taken over at half-court with a portable megaphone. 'Have you ever seen anything like this? History is being made. It's the Goat, ladies and gentlemen. Let the name stick in your minds. The Goat has done it.' 

"They say later the game is stopped for ten minutes. You only recall the hands slapping your back, phrases like 'damn nice,' 'out of sight,' 'hellified.' You can't distinguish any faces, any voices. It's confusion, a beautiful confusion. Jitteriness in your stomach. Chairs. You wonder when was the last time somebody threw chairs on the court. People talk about it for days. Little kids point at you and mention they were there when you did it. 'I heard about those chairs,' an old lady taking numbers would say. 'Turned out the park, huh?' asks a barber.” 
(from Double Dunk, a biography of Earl [The Goat] Manigault, by Barry Beckham) 

This is basketball—city playground basketball and basketball, period—at its loftiest. Earl (The Goat) Manigault—a legendary playground basketball player in New York City in the 1960s, so talked about he had a chapter devoted to him in Pete Axthelm's book The City Game—it was Earl Manigault who flashed through my mind as I watched Clyde (The Glide) Drexler of the University of Houston gather and take off ten feet from the basket, rear back, ball in his right hand... hold it there, poised as he reaches the summit and then... smash it down, exploding into the net: Slam, Jam. It was only in watching the replay that I realized that Drexler had sailed over and around the opposing defender standing there waiting for Drexler to land on him, so the striped-shirted, whistle-toting enforcer could tarnish it all with the call to order and decency: "foul, offensive foul." But they were frustrated, this time: Drexler had avoided the trap and glided back up court triumphant. 

Could Drexler's thing of beauty here, in this regional semi-final game against Memphis State, really match the moves of Earl Manigault, and especially Manigault's piéce de résistance, the double dunk, where he would throw it down with one hand and then, still high in the air, grab it with the other hand and jam it through again!? Well, maybe not quite, I finally decided, but when I saw the move Drexler pulled in the national semifinal game against Louisville I wasn't so sure. Racing down court, Drexler took a pass from teammate Benny Anders and, faced this time with one of Louisville's quick leaping big men, 6'8" Charles Jones, Drexler (who is 6'7") again reared back, raised the ball up in his right hand, cocked it, and... pulled it back down again, sailed past the frozen Jones, and then... raised it back up again with two hands and rammed it down through! Phi Slama Jama for real! The crowd exploded with tremendous appreciation—as much as it could, because this was not the Rucker Tournament, this was a different class of people in the stands, the seats were bolted down and the game wasn't stopped for ten minutes. But it should have been. 

Clyde Drexler was the heartbeat of a Houston team that turned the NCAA basketball championships into something quite different than what they had been programmed to be. As Sports Illustrated commented, "The Phi Slamma Jammas had commanded attention as no team in the recent history of the Final Four" (the four teams making it to the national championship level). For Houston's team this year was something very rare in college sports, even in college basketball. Take their starting five as a unit: five Black players—well, it's not that it's unusual to see that at the college level at this point, but four of these are from Texas, three from Houston's inner-city high schools, and the fifth is a 7' center from Lagos, Nigeria, Hakeem Abdul Olajuwon. Olajuwon is playing only his fourth year of basketball (two in Nigeria and two at the University of Houston), and he has already forced the "experts" to recognize him as one of the greatest big men ever to play college basketball (or any basketball) in the U.S. This was just not exactly your typical all-American team. 

At guards were freshman Alvin Franklin—bad-mouthed as a weak link on the team by the commentators because of alleged "freshman mistakes" (too much youthful, free-wheeling spirit is what is meant by this) and generally because he didn't fit their image of "the extension of the coach on the court"—and Michael Young, who is from Houston's Yates High School and who was described by Sports Illustrated as "a quiet killer" (this is a metaphor to indicate his style of play, but the imagery is consciously chosen). Then, at forward, there was 6'9", 220-pound Larry Micheaux (also known as "Mr. Mean"), who came to UH from Worthing High School in Houston but more to the point from some of the city's hardest ghettos. Micheaux bears on his arm tattoos which were "explained" by CBS commentator Billy Packer by saying, "people might be wondering about those tattoos Micheaux has: those are marks of the neighborhood he comes from that he put on when he was growing up." Mr. Mean, not exactly Mr. Clean, and you can begin to get an idea of why the people who make decisions and mold public opinion might not be too thrilled about a guy like Micheaux serving as a "model for the youth." They tried to salvage something out of this when Gary Bender, the CBS play-by-play announcer, said at one point about Micheaux: "They say he's the kind of guy you'd like to have in a foxhole with you." Well, I don't know about Larry Micheaux personally, but I got news for the Gary Benders and the people who write their scripts: when it comes down to foxholes, the Larry Micheauxs of this world will be in ours, facing yours, before it's all over. 

Finally, at the other forward, was Drexler, whose soul seems to be the soul of an artist. He does not move with drilled and programmed precision, he really does glide—and soar; he does not "produce," he creates; he is involved in the game, even intense, but he is not a jerking, grunting "Charlie hustle"; he plays with an obvious love for the game and, if you're with him, he makes you think not only of basketball but of things beyond. 

These players, plus others, especially Benny Anders, coming off the bench as reserves, gave the Houston team its rare quality. But it was not the mechanical adding up of different abilities and characteristics, it was the forging together of something higher than any or all of that by itself that made Houston's team what it was. Its measure could not be taken with mere statistics, there was a spirit that could not be calibrated on a calculator. It came to be known as Phi Slama Jama—perhaps a joke at first, or a clever publicity gimmick by local media and college officials—but before long the players themselves had transformed it into something for real, something with a life of its own, whose trademark was the dunk—not just any dunk—the spectacular, emphatic dunk. 

The dunk itself arose as an act of defiance, conscious or unconscious (and this, by the way, is why many—though not all—white basketball players don’t put much emphasis on the dunk; it's not that they can't jump, as conventional racist wisdom often has it, chalking leaping ability up to genes peculiar to Black people; instead, it's just that those whites don't have much to feel defiant about). But by now the dunk itself has been institutionalized to some degree, and it is necessary to differentiate between different dunking styles. 

There is the dunking of a team like the Boston Celtics—the New York Yankees of professional basketball—which is done rarely and most often done routinely when done at all; there is rarely any feeling, any excitement. 

On the other hand, there is the dunking of "Dr. J.," Julius Erving (given the name "The Doctor" or "Dr. J." because people liked to go to the playgrounds to watch him "operate" on the court), whose style of play in general and of dunking in particular is characterized by graceful, spectacular moves. But even with Erving something has been lost as he has become an accepted, an established figure: the flair is still there but the defiance is faded. 

And then there is the dunk where, for the moment, from the time of the initial spring into the air, there is the sense of rising free, and everything that surrounds and hems in life at every turn is focused into the round ball and is stuffed back to wherever it came from. It was this that was still alive in the Houston team that Phi Slama Jama—now written across their warm-up uniforms for all to see—came to stand for. It was this that caught the sports authorities by surprise (none of them had predicted that Houston would be at or even near the very top of college basketball) and, before they had time to fully reckon with it, Phi Slama Jama had captured national attention—and captured the imagination of millions, especially of youth in the inner cities. 

It was this that had to be "put back in its place." And for this it was necessary to create public opinion. First came the double-edged praise, the sugar-coated insult. Houston has "the greatest group of athletes around," the experts suddenly discovered—but only to imply, or sometimes openly state, that they still did not have the best team. Why? Because they didn't play enough of a "disciplined" type of game: they can run and jump, they have lots of "natural ability," yes sir, but they play too much "out of control." 

And where are "discipline" and "control" expected to come from? From THE COACH. Coaching, for these authorities, consists in restraining the impulses of the players—and in basketball these players are increasingly Black—and reprogramming them to become functioning parts of a machine and to perform, on command, the strategies and tactics directed or literally sent in from the sidelines. Not at all unlike basic training in the military. In this regard, college-level sports plays a pivotal role. With the lure of a big-money professional contract in a few years and with the threat of being "flushed back to where you come from," athletes out of high school are trained with the future in mind. But the training is, above all, social and ideological training—shaping and preparing them, rounding off the "rough edges," molding them into the desired model—so that they can be counted on to play the proper role when the spotlight is shined on them. 

It is very interesting that professional basketball rules allow for—indeed demand—a much more up-tempo, faster-paced style of play as compared to the college level, where the rules allow and everything encourages much tighter restraint, control, by the coach. It is through the college experience—and, again, the prospect of the large salary that awaits those who make it—that the athletes are to be made safe and their game sanitized, before they can pass on to the pro ranks and be trusted to perform at high speed and yet not get "out of control." That great athletes such as Moses Malone and Darryl Dawkins could go directly from high school into the professional basketball leagues and soon become big stars shows that the vast majority of top high school players could develop the basketball ability necessary for the pro level within, say, five years after high school, by playing informally and in leagues on the playgrounds, without going through college. That Darryl Dawkins was clamped on a few years back because he still exhibited too much of "where he came from" (he wore an earring, he gave names to his dunks, putting down the opposing players they were done over, and finally he started smashing backboards and tearing down rims when he dunked) shows why the setup is kept where, as a general rule and with few exceptions, players have to pass through college and receive the proper "preparation" before they can be allowed into the pros. 

It is thus ironic that much of the attack on Phi Slama Jama has come in the form of attacks on the coach, Guy Lewis. Lewis has been coaching for some twenty-seven years and in that time he has had an excellent record, compiling something like 530 wins at Houston. Yet at sixty-one years old he is not referred to by the sports commentators as a "dean" of college coaches, praise that is given instead to younger men like Bobby Knight of Indiana University and Dean Smith of North Carolina. Knight, you see, openly patterns himself after General Patton and he coaches like it, while Smith has distinguished himself by instituting, or at least institutionalizing, a stalling pattern whereby his team may hold the ball without attempting to shoot it for minutes at a time. Lewis, on the other hand, whatever his overall philosophy may be, has a very different coaching philosophy than the Knights, Smiths, et al. Lewis not only prefers and coaches a high-tempo style of play, he has actually tried to build on what his players do best, adding to it, seeking to temper it somewhat but not to suppress it. Lewis does go along with the idea of having "an extension of the coach on the court," but that is not good enough for those deciding who does and doesn't become a "dean" of college coaches. Because, as the New York Times acknowledged in a rare concession, "Guy Lewis talks about 'control,' a euphemism for 'discipline,' but he has been wise enough not to stifle the Phi Slama Jama fraternity." This was while Houston was flying high and the common rap against Lewis—that his coaching amounts only to rolling the ball onto the court and letting 'em play—had to be put on the back burner and a kind of praise became a necessary part of the arsenal with which to bring Phi Slama Jama down.

Because, again, Phi Slama Jama was definitely not what had been programmed and not what was needed by those in charge of "discipline" and "control." To the bitter end, almost all of the authorities and "experts" either came out openly with predictions of Houston's downfall or else hemmed, hawed, and half-stepped about who would win the NCAA championships, still refusing to pick Houston as winners even after it had become clear they were the team to pick. For example, the day before the championship game between Houston and North Carolina State, Al McGuire (former basketball coach at Marquette University, where one of his teams won a national championship) showed little enthusiasm for—in fact had very little to say about—the upcoming game on his sports program, even though that program was supposed to be about the NCAA championships. And, instead of predicting a winner, McGuire simply repeated the rather safe formula that if the winning team scored more than seventy points it would be Houston that won, if less than seventy points won the game, it would be North Carolina State that prevailed. 

But, then, perhaps it's not fair to blame Al for almost totally ignoring the game itself—he was preoccupied with other things, like petting (yes, literally and affectionately stroking) models of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (What's the connection with the basketball game?—well, it was being played in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the atomic bombs were developed in New Mexico, and the models are on display there, you see—and they accuse us of crude propaganda!) When McGuire wasn't praising defense production in New Mexico, he was giving us definitions for his own sports terms—things like "aircraft carrier" to describe a dominant big player in basketball, or "prime time" player: that's the one who wants the ball, wants to take charge of things, when the decisive moment comes; it's like Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand performing in the spotlight, McGuire explained. You see, basketball (and sports generally) is controlled and disciplined by people whose position in the world and whose values and models have been rooted in the American supremacy achieved as a result of triumph and conquest made possible through World War 2. What a contradiction that they must now "coach" youth drawn from where all that is completely alien and where the great mass of youth are being prepared not for the National Basketball Association but for the foxholes. 

No, Phi Slama Jama was not what they had programmed. It was not the likes of Larry Micheaux, Michael Young, and Clyde Drexler they wanted as models, it was not a Nigerian (who can't even play on the U.S. Olympic team next year, for god's sake!) who was supposed to be the dominant big man, snatching seemingly every rebound, slapping down opposing players' shots, starting the Houston fast break and often racing to the other end to jam in the coup de grace. No, this was to be the year of the long-awaited triumph of Ralph Sampson, Inc., at the University of Virginia. 

Sampson, who at 7'4" is also a genuinely talented athlete, is a major force on the basketball court with a big future in the pros, and he is the respectable, "responsible" model they want. From the beginning of his college days he has willingly gone the road of business-executive-in-finishing-school, "refining" himself to prescribed standards and, you can't help feeling, ringing it all up on his pocket calculator as his technical proficiency at basketball improves and his image becomes more polished. But Sampson could not deliver. Perhaps, ironically, being able to count for several years on becoming a millionaire when he left college, he just wasn't hungry enough. In any case, when his Virginia team was knocked out of the championships by North Carolina State, the shifting of gears could be heard in the background, as North Carolina State came increasingly to be called "a team of destiny"—even the expression ''America's team" was run up the flagpole a time or two, it seems. 

But before North Carolina State would meet Houston in the championship game, they each had to win a semifinal contest. North Carolina State fairly easily defeated Georgia—which, unlike NC State, was not really cast in the role of "Cinderella," nor certainly of a "team of destiny," even though Georgia upset powerful basketball institutions, like North Carolina University and St. John's, on their way to the Final Four. But then, Georgia relied on speed and quick leaping ability on the one hand, but on the other hand it almost certainly didn't have enough of this to match up against Houston. 

The other semifinal game, between Houston and Louisville. concentrated everything that Phi Slama Jama raises. Houston won, surging from behind in the second half and clearly establishing its superiority over another great team that has been known as "the Doctors of Dunk." If you love the city game, as it is best played by those who play it best, you went crazy over this game. Even the "experts" had to tip their hat to it—it was exciting, thrill-packed, etc., etc.,... but—but, they complained, it was not a model for coaching, it was too much a player's game, things were getting out of hand. Billy Packer, the CBS commentator (and himself a former coach), was forced to say: you can draw up all the "X's" and "O's" you want (to diagram strategy and tactics), but these players just have so much ability they have taken the game beyond that. 

But again, it's not that there wasn't any coaching. Without getting into too much detail here, a key aspect of Houston's surge from behind was Lewis's tactic of switching in the second half from the more static zone defense to the more fluid and intense man-to-man defense, and he made a number of other good coaching moves as well. But the point is that these moves precisely unleashed what the Houston players do best—or as Lewis himself put it, "Phi Slama Jama got rolling." This was coaching that was directly opposite to the "expert commentary" given by Bobby Knight when he was interviewed at halftime and was asked what Houston, then trailing by five points, would have to do to get back in the game. 

This, as I said, was a game where the chairs should have been thrown onto the court in appreciation. There were repeatedly great plays, and on both sides, because Louisville too thrives on its quickness and leaping ability. But Louisville has become something of the acceptable institutionalized version of this—they are a very disciplined team, Billy Packer was quick to remind us—while Houston remained the upstarts. And the upstarts won. They won with a display that not only shook the backboards in the "pit" (the gym in Albuquerque where the game was played); it reverberated much higher as well. Pete Axthelm, writing in Newsweek, reported that during this game, “As usual, CBS had a microphone on the backboards to catch the sounds of bounces and tickled twine; the network didn't use it when Phi Slama Jama sounded too much like gunfire." Well, it seems that, as with Earl Manigault's game-stopper, the dunks of Houston resounded with "noise that everyone understands." 

Interviewed by Billy Packer after the game, Clyde Drexler was asked about his double-pump (raise it up in one hand, bring it down, raise it up again in two hands) jam—which Sports Illustrated referred to as "your basic play of the century." Drexler replied, "Oh, it's just one of those things I've been working on." This response, coupled with Drexler's wry smile, meant two things: first, Drexler was saying, that was a "bad" move and I know it, and to top it off I'm gonna play like it was no big thing; but second, moves like that are not a simple spontaneous expression of "pure ability," they have to be worked on just like everything else—and it's all a question of where you're coming from what you choose to work on and develop to new levels. It is this that Guy Lewis was referring to when he hit back, in his own way, at attacks on his team: "Hey, it takes discipline to dunk," he retorted. 

This, among other things, was thrown back in the face of Houston—and of everyone whose hopes rode and whose spirits rose with them—when Houston lost the championship game, at the last second, on a dunk shot by a North Carolina State player. And it was remarkable to see how far things went, to what lengths those in control went, to bring about the defeat of Phi Slama Jama. 

First there was the North Carolina State coach, Jim Valvano, playing a cross between Rocky and a Mafia lawyer. Beginning literally right after the Houston victory over Louisville in the semifinals, Valvano—with more than a little help from his friends—protested and protested that Houston was too awesome, that the only way his team would have a chance would be to slow the game way down, to make Houston's key players commit fouls, to force the game to be completely different than the Houston-Louisville game had been. The whole point of this riff, including the part about how Houston was so overpowering, was to create public opinion and a favorable atmosphere where just about anything that was done that helped North Carolina State beat Houston would seem justified. Despite Valvano's humble pie routine, I couldn't help thinking, as North Carolina State was cast in the role of the "underdog," of those neanderthals during the "Iran hostage crisis" who kept bellowing, "No more Mr. Nice Guy, we've been pushed around too long"—underdogs with nothing but the U.S. empire and its military might behind them! 

North Carolina State, the "team of destiny," would show that discipline can bring the forces of chaos to order, can stuff the genie back into the bottle. "We made them take ordinary shots and they couldn't make those," a North Carolina State player is reported to have said in summing up how his team won. How many times I've heard that!—but in the past these were the words of a smug suburban white brat boasting of how his team showed "them" up and "put 'them' back in their place." Yet North Carolina State's starting line-up was all-Black, like Houston's—and here was one of North Carolina State's starting team repeating this same line. It seems that at this point the city game—like the cities themselves—can't be run with just the old white power structure: they need a Black contingent in the superstructure to help do it. 

Judging from all events, these kinds will be found spewing forth every manner of worn-out reactionary drivel. Certainly no disappointment in this regard, Thurl Bailey, one of the heroes of North Carolina State's victory over Houston, went out of his way in an immediate postgame interview to "thank god... without him on our side we wouldn't be here." Even that one—"god on our side"—found its way into this year's NCAA basketball championships! 

I was reluctant to say so—in fact at first I didn’t even think it was true—but after reviewing the tape of the Houston-North Carolina State game, it seems very clear that direct steps were taken to straight-up cheat Houston out of the victory. How this was done was as simple as it was deadly: Clyde Drexler was charged with three fouls very quickly in the first half and then with his fourth foul several minutes before that half ended. Since the fifth foul puts you out of the game, these early fouls on Drexler struck a crippling blow to his whole style of play and thus to the Houston team as a whole. It disrupted their flow and specifically broke down the rhythm between Drexler and Olajuwon, which was the basic beat of the Houston team. 

Olajuwon had to go all out early to keep Houston in the game, and this came back to haunt them later, in the second half, when they had forged into the lead. Olajuwon was then exhausted and forced to go to the bench for a rest with about ten minutes of play left. It was seemingly this, in part at least, that tempted Lewis into trying a slowdown tactic, to enable Olajuwon to catch his breath and not to become worn out again when he returned to the game. This in turn made it easier for North Carolina State to pick and choose when and who to foul, to force Houston to win or lose the game with free throws and with whoever was proving to be their least effective free-throw shooters (Valvano later said straight up that they would have kept on fouling whoever missed free throws and that they would have used this tactic eight, nine, or more times, whatever it took to "be in a position to win"). 

The end result was that North Carolina State was able to catch up and, at the final buzzer, to win. Again, the early fouls called on Drexler were key in this: without those fouls Houston would almost certainly have built up a considerably bigger lead than they did have, despite everything, with ten minutes to go in the game; and had their lead been, say, twelve points or more at that stage, North Carolina State's deliberate fouling tactics would not have worked. They would have been forced into a faster tempo to try to catch up, thus turning the game even more to Houston's advantage. And, in reviewing the tape, it is very clear to me that only one of those calls against Drexler (the second foul called on him) was legitimate (the first was no foul, period; the third and fourth ones should have been called on the North Carolina State players who made contact with him, one actually grabbing his legs, before other contact was made, on the fourth foul). 

Even though a review of the tape strongly convinced me of this, I remain reluctant to focus too much on it, because the much more profound "fixing" of the game was the social atmosphere that was built up. Houston came into that gym carrying a tremendous weight, far beyond the normal pressure of a big basketball game. On the one hand, they were not prepared to deal with what was somehow at issue, in its larger implications, and on the other hand they had a sense of it to a certain extent. This is revealed by a comment by Clyde Drexler quoted in the New York Times in an article written the day of the game. Asked if he thought that the winning of the national championship would lead to Phi Slama Jama being recognized as one of the greatest college basketball teams ever, Drexler replied, "I'm hoping we will, but they'll probably say we were lucky." 

Given the whole atmosphere that was created and the way things were almost bound to go, given the whole setup, it was going to come down to Houston having to shoot free throw after free throw and make enough to hang on for the win. (If this had been at the Rucker Tournament, and Valvano had tried his tactics and the officials had made the kind of calls they did, chairs would have been thrown again—but for a different reason and at definite targets!) It is not accidental that Houston is not a very good free-throw shooting team. Free-throw shooting is the antithesis of everything Phi Slama Jama is about: It is static—standing on a line with everything at a standstill while you shoot with no one in your face and no one's face to put it in—it is the forté, as Axthelm himself once acknowledged, of kids in small towns (and the suburbs) who "develop accurate shots and precise skills" but not "moves" and definitely not the defiant dunk. This is not to say that city kids cannot learn to shoot free throws—or that the Houston players were bound to miss the free throws they did or to lose the game that night, even with everything they were up against—but dunking and "moves" take discipline, take working on them, just as free-throw shooting does. And it's not accidental that different kinds of players, from different worlds, devote their time and effort to different styles of basketball. Let the NCAA hold a free-throw shooting contest next time and see how exciting it is, how aesthetically pleasing, and how many people come to see it! 

It is these NCAA officials who have continued to resist the adoption of a shot clock in college basketball to limit how long a team can hold the ball without even taking a shot at the basket.^* And generally the rules they have adopted, especially as they are actually applied, are geared to keeping the players from breaking loose and "playing out of control." One of the biggest instances of this, one of the biggest fetters on the productive force of creative, liberating basketball, is the rule on offensive fouls and specifically what is called "taking the charge." This refers to a situation where a defensive player moves to a spot where he can anticipate an offensive player will be running, or jumping, and then stands there ("establishes position") so that the offensive player runs into or lands on him, thus committing an offensive foul. 

Well, I say the way it should be is this. If you're playing defense, and you're trying to guard somebody, and they just try to run over you or push you aside, okay that's a foul on the offensive player; but if you aren't trying to guard them, you just run to a spot and wait for them to run into or land on you, then it's a foul on you, motherfucker, and get out of the way next time so somebody can play basketball like it's supposed to be played, like people are capable of playing it nowadays. Such a rule change would really strike a subversive blow. The whole point of the rule as it now stands is to put a shackle on the bustin' loose style of play, especially on moves to the basket and above all the jam: After somebody does a truly beautiful move, maybe capping the whole thing off with a thundering slam, there is some chump in the way, who apparently can't do anything else to stop it but wait to be landed on when everything that matters has already been done anyway.

Let us remember that it is the rule makers who, in their infinite wisdom and love for the game of basketball, made the dunk itself illegal in college and high school basketball for a number of years (but interestingly enough, not the pros) and who continue to make dunking illegal in the warm-ups for college and high school games. It is no accident, I think, that the years the no-dunk rule was in effect were in the 1960s and early 1970s. A common rationalization for why this rule was instituted was that it had become too easy for tall players to dunk the ball, with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) cited as the worst "offender." But the following comment reported by Pete Axthelm in his book The City Game is much closer to the mark:

"'Look, if a guy is seven feet tall, he is going to score from in close whether he stuffs or just lays the ball in,' explained Robert Bownes. 'That rule wasn't put in to stop seven-footers. It was put in to stop the six-foot-two brothers who could dazzle the crowd and embarrass much bigger white kids by dunking. The white establishment has an uncomfortable feeling that blacks are dominating too many areas of sports. So they're setting up all kinds of restrictions and barriers. Everyone knows that dunking is a trademark of great playground black athletes. And so they took it away. It's as simple as that.'"

While there is much that is true and profound in these comments, today it is not quite as simple as that. Now the "white establishment" is especially concerned to distinguish between different kinds, different classes, of Blacks, in sports as well as in other spheres, and even between different kinds of dunks! This is why North Carolina State's victory—achieved by going against the whole spirit of the game of basketball as it is played today and forcing the game into something lifeless and ugly—is useful to them and they declare this putrid perversion a game of high drama capped off with a thrilling finish, a dunk that is... perfectly acceptable. And this is why they had to smother, to extinguish the example, the spirit of Phi Slama Jama: through a defeat of Houston if at all possible without showing their hand too blatantly; or if somehow Houston won, then it could be loved to death, squeezing the life out of it that way. But there is no question that the preferred method was to leave Houston defeated and its followers demoralized. 

In the chapter on Earl Manigault in The City Game the story is told of how somebody who couldn't play on Manigault's level at all loudly challenged him to a game, and 

"'Earl quietly agreed to play him one-on-one. The word went out within minutes, and immediately there was a big crowd gathered for the drama.

"'Then they started playing. Earl went over the guy and dunked. Then he blocked the guy's first shot. It was obvious that the man had nothing to offer against Earl. But he was really determined to win himself a rep. So he started pushing and shoving and fouling. Earl didn't say a word. He just kept making his moves and beating the guy, and the guy kept grabbing and jostling him to try to stop him. It got to the point where it wasn't really basketball. And suddenly Earl put down the ball and said, "I don't need this. You're the best." Then he just walked away. 

"'Well, if Earl had gone on and whipped the guy 30 to 0, he couldn't have proved any more than he did.'" 

Imagine if, after Houston had established its clear lead, and once North Carolina State started in with its fouling routine, taking things even more clearly to the point where it wasn't really basketball, Houston had walked off the court and left North Carolina State to collect its honors, if things could have been gotten together for such a ceremony. That would have been by far the best way that Phi Slama Jama could have triumphed—and that would have been the nearest thing to a real revolution that you could ever hope to see on a basketball court! Which is why something like that will happen only when things all over are heading toward revolution for real. 

"What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice there is in these Parisians!" Marx wrote about the Paris Communards a month before they were brutally crushed. Even if they should be defeated, he wrote then, even if the Commune "should be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile dogs of the old society," what the Communards had achieved and the legacy this left could not be wiped out. "Just compare those Parisians, storming heaven," Marx said, "with those slaves to heaven of the German-Prussian Holy Roman Empire, with its posthumous masquerades reeking of the barracks, the Church, the clod-hopping Junkers and above all, of philistinism... " Am I stretching things a bit here? Yes, but if you know what I'm talking about you know what I mean when I say I couldn't help thinking of this in the aftermath of the NCAA basketball championships and the impact of Phi Slama Jama despite its final defeat. Who will even remember North Carolina State? Already now they are only of importance for their negative role, as the despoilers of Phi Slama Jama, for their willingness and ability to serve in their mediocrity as a model of discipline—a discipline that serves self-righteous world-order americana heading toward its eventual extinction with god on its side. The spirit that was reflected in Phi Slama Jama will live on and soar again... and again.