Former Chicago Condors GM Allison Hodges, wife of Craig Hodges, the former Bulls 3-point specialist and now a volunteer assistant for the Condors. ( AP Sports 11/3/98 )
President & co-founder Three Point, Inc., sports marketing & promotions firm in Chicago. Prior to her marriage, Hodges worked for the William Morris Agency, Inc. Before moving to California, Hodges worked for Chicago's first black mayor, the late Harold Washington. She served in special events and cable communications. Last fall, the Hodges introduced a basketball training camp for women, Hoops for Fitness, to Chicago and met an overwhelming response.
ChiCondors (ABL) 322 S. Green St ste208 Chicago IL 60607 312.492.8800
Fan Club Marc Himelstein

black bottom pyramid


Hodges takes leave to fight NBA
Terry Foster Detroit News 4/13/97

Hoop Schemes?
Jason Gray Zengerle ( asst ed. New Republic )
The American Prospect issue32 May-June/97

In fact, Hodges now contends in a federal lawsuit that it was his politics, and not his jump shot, that brought an end to his basketball career. Hodges is suing the NBA for "blacklisting" him from the league because he is "black and Afrocentric." While it remains to be seen whether Hodges can convince a jury that NBA owners colluded and actively conspired to keep him out of the league, the circumstances surrounding the end of his career are unusual enough to lend credence to his allegations that his controversial politics were an issue.
After the 1992 season, a season in which Hodges won his third straight NBA three-point shoot-out and the Bulls won their second consecutive championship, the Bulls declined to offer Hodges a new contract. This, in itself, is not that odd. Hodges was 32 at the time, his skills were considered to be in decline, and the Bulls had signed several younger three-point shooters, making Hodges expendable. But what is odd about Hodges's case is that after being released by the Bulls, not one other NBA team ever sought his services. Teams routinely bring marginal players— to say nothing of ones with championship credentials—to training camp, just to have enough warm bodies for scrimmages. Teams also covet experienced, respected players like Hodges for the wisdom they might pass on to younger players. In light of these personnel needs, Hodges's inability to secure a mere tryout invitation, even after offering to sign a non-guaranteed contract and play for the league minimum, is hard to explain.

Did Hodges fail to attract an offer because of his politics? It would make some sense. As a trip to any professional basketball arena will demonstrate, the racial dynamics of the NBA are unusual: 80 percent of the players on the court are black, while 80 percent of the fans in the stands are white. While the NBA has certainly come a long way in the last 10 or 15 years toward accepting the racial realities of its sport—it wasn't that long ago that teams leery of having an all-black squad practiced a sort of affirmative action program for white players, making sure to have a few on hand, usually on the end of the bench—the league takes great pains to present its black athletes as unthreatening cartoon superheroes. [See Scott Stossel, "Who's Afraid of Michael Jordan?".] The NBA has embraced hip-hop styles without embracing hip-hop politics, because the latter, which would undoubtedly be a form of racial politics, might threaten the league's white fans.
Thus Hodges's dashiki-clad activism may have been a political eruption the league felt it was better off without. Some players have demurred from political involvement for obvious business reasons. As Michael Jordan once explained with regard to his refusal to endorse Democrat Harvey Gantt in his race against North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms: "Republicans buy sneakers too." But sometimes players without concern for their own merchandising have been persuaded to abandon their political stands because of the NBA's overriding concern with its marketability. In the 1995-1996 season, the NBA threatened to suspend Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, then a guard with the Denver Nuggets, who had been refusing to stand for the playing of the national anthem before games.
Hodges contends that his ordeal, like Abdul-Rauf's, serves as a cautionary tale. "From a job security standpoint, I think a lot of athletes are scared to say what's on their minds," Hodges says. "During my career a lot of players would tell me behind closed doors that they supported what I was saying, but they would never be forthright and come out publicly with their support. Players are afraid of having what they've earned taken away from them." As Chris Webber, an All-Star forward with the Washington Bullets, says, "I don't know if the NBA has a 'black list,' but they definitely have people that they like."

Curiously, the only genuine NBA star with public politics, Charles Barkley of the Houston Rockets, is a Republican. Perhaps the league figures that Barkley's occasional confrontational comments about race—he once reduced his critics in the media to "white boys" and jokingly claimed to hate white people—are acceptable be cause he maintains friendships with white or white-friendly conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Strom Thurmond, Clarence Thomas, and Arm strong Williams.
Below the superstar strata, the political stands that do get taken, if not punished, are actively downplayed. Webber recently broke his lucrative endorsement contract with Nike when the company refused to list his signature sneakers at a price more affordable to the inner-city kids who idolize him. But Webber's socially conscious and principled gesture went largely unnoticed because the NBA's vaunted public relations machine failed to call attention to it. Instead, the NBA sends out press releases touting safely inoffensive hospital visits as evidence of its players' "mak[ing] a difference in the lives of others."

It is arguable whether African-American athletes have a responsibility to use their money and power to affect change off the field—it is, after all, unfair to hold them to a higher standard than white athletes. But professional sports leagues should not stand in the way of those African-American athletes, like Hodges, who have a desire to speak out on political issues. The NBA is frequently celebrated as a color-blind meritocracy, and on the court, this is certainly the case. But when the league tolerates blandly apolitical outlandishness like Dennis Rodman's but not political and racial activism like Hodges's, it's clear that the league's vaunted color blindness takes a back seat to its profit motive.

"Donating X amount of dollars to a charity, all that's superficial. Right now, how many athletes we got out here from the hood? How many entertainers? and I ain't just talking about rap... I mean actors, and all that. It's got to be over thousands, right? [Former Bull and current 76er] Scott Williams came down and we did something next to the Chicago Stadium, the old one, at the Hoover Projects, and [the residents] said nobody from the team had ever come to the projects. It was me, Craig Hodges, and Scott Williams, and Craig had to drag Scott down. "
Chuck D, Public Enemy, 1996 promo junket for his book, Fight the Power "To see him walk away, not limp away, not be dragged away, to know he could still go out and get his 40 if he wanted to, that's a great thing," said former teammate Craig Hodges.
Driving off into the sunset
Kent McDill Chicago Daily Herald 1/14/99 on M.Jordan retirement

Condors general manager, Allison Hodges, credits, of all groups, the Chicago Bulls for coming to the aid of the fledging ABL franchise. The team will play in the 7,800 UIC Pavilion. Interesting that one of the NBA's flagship franchises is supporting a property the WNBA is in direct competition with. A further note, the Condors media reception, was held at Michael Jordan's Restaurant in Chicago, another direct link to the Bulls.

Hot Air The Case Against Michael Jordan
Michael Crowley Boston Phoenix 1/25/99

In thinking about what kind of basketball player Michael Jordan was, it's useful to begin at the end. Slow-motion replays of the last shot of Jordan's career, the buzzer-beating, championship-winning swish against the Utah Jazz in the NBA finals last spring, were unavoidable on television last week. To the Jordan-worshipping world, that shot represents all that is good and great about the man: here is the noble competitor in the clutch, rising to victory as his faked-out defender slips haplessly to the floor. Writing in the New Yorker this week, Remnick called it "a move so exquisite that even his defender stumbled in mystification."
But a closer look reveals that something a bit less majestic had taken place: Jordan got away with a foul. Driving to the basket to set up his jump shot, Jordan gave a subtle shove to the Utah defender, Byron Russell, with his free hand. It was Jordan's push-off, not a lightning-fast move, that caused Russell to slip and left Jordan with an open shot. That push-off became a signature of Jordan's later years, when his speed and leap had waned a bit, when he needed a little extra help to get a clear look. It is a patently illegal tactic. But Jordan, whose star power was so valuable to the NBA, clearly received special treatment from the referees. They turned a blind eye to his cunningly discreet infractions even as they whistled his opponents for any hint of a foul. … Though he plays aggressively, in his 13 years in the league Jordan fouled out of just 10 games -- and none since 1992. "The way the game is officiated is basically a caste system," Jordan's longtime teammate Steve Kerr told New Jersey's Bergen Record in 1995. "If this were India, guys like Michael and Alonzo [Mourning] would be members of the Gandhi family and guys like me would be peasants. That's the way the NBA works. Michael and Alonzo get calls. Me and [journeyman center] Joe Wolf don't."

Jordan's exit from basketball last week didn't prompt balanced journalism so much as hagiography. The Boston Globe compared him to William Shakespeare. And the author David Halberstam, after following the Bulls for several months, has concluded that Jordan "is the most charismatic player ever in his sport." But Halberstam, like so many other worshipful writers, has lost perspective. Charles Barkley, Magic Johnson, Jason Williams, heck, even Dennis Rodman, all were more colorful, more engaging, and more imaginative than Jordan. Indeed, all the lyrical praise has only underscored what a bore Jordan is. For someone who had reached a pinnacle in his life experience, he always seemed a little vacant. Jordan never showed any real sense of humor or imagination. He spoke in clichés and hollow jock jargon. He didn't even have especially deep insights about the game itself. At his brief farewell press conference last week, Jordan was typically banal, using some variation of the word challenge 20 times. Jordan is worse than just boring, though. While his public-relations machine has built up an all-American image of a kind and easygoing guy who loves golf and his kids and pursued the American dream, that façade is a partial truth at best. … He has a stable family life (even if his love story has been idealized: in fact, Jordan married at a cheapo Las Vegas chapel 10 months after his first child was born, and after his wife-to-be was preparing to slap him with a paternity suit).
But he certainly hasn't always been the cartoon superhero marketed to us by his corporate patrons and the NBA. Jordan's dark side was most famously memorialized in Sam Smith's 1992 book The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of a Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls (Pocket Books), which depicted him as selfish, arrogant, obsessed with statistics, and disparaging to his teammates. That image was reinforced as recently as last spring, when, late in game one of the 1998 NBA Finals, Jordan shouted at Bulls forward Scottie Pippen for not passing him the ball -- after Pippen had made a game-tying three-pointer. Despite his humble Everyman image, Jordan can't suppress his ego. He refers to himself in the third person. He is known for talking arrogant trash on the court. He once called his teammates "my supporting cast." He even skipped an honorary team appearance at the White House in 1991 without giving an explanation. Any slight or criticism is cause for massive retaliation, as Sports Illustrated learned after it published an article in 1993 calling on him to abandon his ill-fated stint as a baseball player. For years, Jordan refused to talk to the magazine; SI editors are apparently convinced that a still-resentful Jordan intentionally leaked word of his retirement last week just after the magazine had gone to press.
On the court, too, sometimes Jordan's competitive drive seemed alarmingly excessive. As his former coach Doug Collins once said, "He wants to cut your heart out and then show it to you." His teammate Luc Longley described Jordan to Halberstam with one word: predator. That insatiable need to win explains the one real blotch on Jordan's squeaky-clean reputation: a taste for high-stakes gambling. In 1992, Jordan admitted to paying $165,000 in poker and golf debts to a pair of unsavory characters, one of whom was later murdered. The following year, Jordan was seen lingering late at an Atlantic City casino the night before a major playoff game. … "My son doesn't have a gambling problem," Jordan's father said before his death. "He has a competition problem."

In 1990, America watched a neck-and-neck North Carolina Senate race that was as close to a morality play as an election gets. Republican incumbent Jesse Helms, a spiteful right-winger and a barely reconstructed segregationist, was running a racially tinged campaign against the up-and-coming black mayor of Charlotte, Democrat Harvey Gantt. It was clear for weeks leading up to the election that the race would turn on a narrow margin, and it occurred to Gantt's backers that a certain beloved native of the state could make a huge impact on the race with a single quote or a brief photo op. So they approached Michael Jordan. Declining to get involved, Jordan offered this explanation: "Republicans buy sneakers too." … Jordan has remained devoutly apolitical. He has never used his platform to pursue social or political change; indeed, he's gone out of his way to play it safe. This is, of course, precisely how the corporations he endorses want it. Politics and marketing don't mix: a loose cannon like Muhammad Ali could forget about big endorsement contracts. … With his net worth of $500 million and his near-universal popularity, he could start redefining his times tomorrow.
There are signs that Jordan does indeed have a social conscience. Less well-known than his refusal to back Gantt is the fact that Jordan contributed $2000 (the maximum allowed by law) to Gantt's rematch campaign against Helms in 1996. There is no sign, however, that Jordan cares to enter the political arena. Asked last week whether he would become more active, Jordan answered: "I can't save the world by no means." Jordan has donated millions to charity and to his alma mater, the University of North Carolina. Every year he visits with dozens of dying children whose last wish it is to meet him. When asked in 1992 about the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, for instance, Jordan lamely replied: "I need to know more about it." Yet Jordan has also dodged matters over which he has a more direct influence. For instance, Jordan has never complained about the $150 price tag on his Nike Air Jordan sneakers, which are targeted at the inner-city kids who can least afford them. By contrast, in 1996 NBA forward Chris Webber publicly feuded with the company over the cost of shoes sold in his name.
Most famous, however, is Jordan's great shoulder-shrug over Nike's allegedly exploitative labor practices in Southeast Asia. When the company first became the target of activist ire, Jordan said it wasn't his problem. Then, in 1997, he changed his tune. "I'm hearing a lot of different sides to the issue," Jordan told the Sporting News. "The best thing I can do is go to Asia (in July) and see it for myself. If there are issues . . . if it's an issue of slavery or sweatshops, [Nike executives] have to revise the situation." Yet even after acknowledging the specter of "slavery," Jordan never made the trip.

… Black stars as Arthur Ashe, Jim Brown, and Hank Aaron -- have knocked Jordan for being politically aloof. "He's more interested in his image for his shoe deals than he is in helping his own people," Brown said of Jordan in 1992. … When Jordan was skipping that 1991 White House visit, for instance, his outspoken teammate Craig Hodges showed up in a dashiki with a letter for George Bush on the plight of the inner cities. "I can't go and just be in an Armani suit and not say shit," Hodges later told the Village Voice. In 1993, NBA forward Olden Polynice staged a hunger strike to protest US policy toward his native Haiti. A second-rate player, Polynice nevertheless drew national coverage. Imagine what a Michael Jordan could do with one press conference. "If [sports stars] can sell these wares with the power of their personas," Jesse Jackson told the Washington Post in 1996, "they also can sell civic responsibility with the power of their personas."
… a recorded message at Jordan's personal office informs callers that "the majority of Michael Jordan fan mail and autograph requests will be acknowledged by Nike, Inc."

Vince Carter
Pamela Swanigan Saturday Night Vancouver 3/2000

During the Vietnam draft era, the black people who came here sent word back to their communities in the States that it would be better to go underground in a large city, perhaps even get sent to Vietnam, than to come to Canada, where every day was a crucible of alienation and self-consciousness. Of course, it's a touchy subject, American race relations being what they are, so nobody talks about it, including Vancouverites. We've been unwittingly engulfed in that wonderful capacity for denial and avoidance that Americans developed when they founded their country on a libertarian philosophy and a slave economy, on an exaltation of free-market capitalism and an abundance of unpaid labour. I daresay the disinclination to discuss it is exactly what the league was banking on when they were honing their plans for world domination, or global expansion, or whatever they call it.
They probably figured, and rightly, that it would never occur to Vancouverites to think of their dozy little postcard of a town as a purgatory. They knew that they have so thoroughly sanitized and merchandised the players that the rest of the NBA demographic - otherwise known as the world population - no longer thinks of the players as human beings who respond to their surroundings and circumstances like anyone else. And as for the players themselves - well, league officials could count on their keeping quiet, under the ever-present threat of being banished from the league, as happened to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Craig Hodges, and other players who have spoken out on racial issues. The players here have kept quiet (for the most part), but that doesn't mean they don't think of it. In fact, it was probably the first thing they thought of after they'd stopped looking around for the dogsleds.

Back in 1995, when the Griz were trying out their first candidate for the position of The One (i.e., the Neo-Michael Jordan), in the form of the talented and personable Ed O'Bannon, I asked him if he would be lonely so far away from the black American community. His media-friendly demeanour instantly dissolved into an intent confidentiality.
"Yeah," he said eagerly, "where are all the black people? I've been here since ten this morning and I haven't seen one." When he learned that there basically weren't any - or none that you'd notice, anyway - a kind of suppressed horror crossed his face, and it took him a minute to get his affable persona back. His expression in that moment foretold the fate of the franchise. The Steve Francis refusal. The Othella Harrington outburst. The ongoing subversions and underachievements, the subterranean murmur of requests for transfers. The sense that playing for the Vancouver Grizzlies was a punishment, that only psychologically transcendent players like Shareef Abdur-Rahim would be able to achieve more than half of what they might achieve elsewhere. And so, accordingly, a virtual guarantee that even in the unlikely event that a player of Vince Carter's calibre agreed to play for Vancouver, he would quickly cease to be a player of Vince Carter's calibre. Thus it has all unfolded, and there's really not much we can do about it. Except try not to think about Vince Carter much.

• " … coming off the bench Houston can just focus about providing instant offense, & in term make him more aggressive in looking for his shots or drive to the hoop. I don't know, but it certainly won't hurt to give it a try."
• " Or it could just as easily render him into a 6-6 version of Craig Hodges. Houston isn't the "change of pace" type of player that Sprewell is, or Starks was before him. He doesn't bring instant energy into the game; in fact, you almost have to stick his ass with a pitchfork to get a reaction out of him. " from the newsgroups

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