I ain’t hard to find you catch me front and center
At the Knick game, big chain and all my splendor
Those words come from Jay-Z in “Welcome to New York City,” but if David Stern and his NBA suits have their way, the days of hip-hop basketball will be gone faster than R. Kelly can get to lunch-hour recess. The latest incarnation of the NBA’s attempt to distance itself from the hip-hop culture, with which it has been entangled for the past decade, has arrived in the form of a league-mandated dress code. Out are doo-rags and hats and in are jackets and ties. Jewelry, out. Turtlenecks, in. Freedom of self-expression, gone. Corporate sponsors, pleased.
Stern and his suits in the league offices have been systematically trying to water down basketball’s hip-hop alliance since Ron Artest went LAPD in Detroit last year. First came the 20-year age requirement for draft eligibility, an obvious attempt at reducing the number of young, and mostly black, millionaires. Now comes the newest step, a move designed to strip the players of their sense of identity.
Now, you’re probably asking yourself what the big deal is. On some level, I’ll concede that professional athletes should be professionals first and athletes second. There are many out there who think this move is a long-time coming. Unlike many jobs, however, we don’t really have expectations about how NBA players should dress. Technically, their work attire is a tank-top, shorts and sneakers.
Obviously, players who do press conferences and interviews in suits look classier and appear more erudite than some of their colleagues simply because of their appearance. Are we so shallow that we discount players dressed in “prison garb,” as Phil Jackson told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune? And if that is the case, doesn’t it get straight to the point that the NBA thinks that somehow these players devalue the league?
The NBA, currently, has an image problem. That problem is not, as many think, that the NBA is too aligned with hip-hop culture, but rather that the NBA itself wants it both ways. In the post-Jordan era, the NBA has loved to embrace guys like Allen Iverson and Tracy McGrady because they were good enough on the court to appeal to basketball fans paying $75 a ticket and street enough off the court to appeal to kids paying $75 a shoe. That was all okay when the league was struggling to find a new image post-MJ.
Now, though, we are in the LJ era. The league seems to have found their next generation of poster children in bubblegum stars such as LeBron James and Dwayne Wade. They wear suits, albeit Sean John ones, and carry themselves with the class and dignity that we remember from Jordon, Magic and Bird. Is this a bad thing? No, it’s a great thing, but it doesn’t accurately represent the reality for the rest of the players.
The reality is that a lot of these guys like to wear chains worth more than most houses and clothes that represent their lifestyle. The NBA, however, has decided that’s not very marketable to their clientele, which is a shame. It only reveals how shallow we are, that we need to be pandered to in order to watch a sport we otherwise enjoy. Show me someone who won’t pay to watch Iverson drop 30 points if he puts on a diamond and platinum necklace after the game, and I’ll show you a bigger problem than an NBA dress code.
