NBA Hall of Famer rips 'very racist' March Madness for being like 'slavery'
Pro Basketball Hall of Famer Spencer Haywood is no stranger to the controversies surrounding the NBA eligibility of collegiate athletes.
Haywood successfully sued the NBA in 1971. A federal court sided with him, ruling that it was illegal for the NBA to prohibit college underclassmen from declaring for the draft.
While another player might have taken up Haywood’s fight in his absence, it’s hard to imagine players like Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett or LeBron James having the careers they’ve enjoyed without Haywood’s landmark legal action.
Haywood, 68, said in an interview with Sporting News that he’s been ostracized from the NCAA ever since he won his lawsuit.
“To this day,” he claimed, “I can go to the games, I can go to the Final Four, as a Hall of Famer, and they treat me like s—.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Haywood’s general feelings toward the NCAA seems to mirror its feelings toward him.
“But let’s think about [collegiate rules governing players]. If you have 11 blacks on your team and you are say, in Kentucky, and they’re creating all this wealth but not getting paid? It does have a tinge of slavery,” Haywood said. “It is what it is. It is very racist because they’re not helping the communities where those kids come from, Chicago and Detroit and so on.”
In fairness to the NCAA, Haywood’s second criticism seems misplaced. The NCAA is just as much a business as a body governing collegiate athletics. It is in no way obligated to help poorer communities. An athletic department’s responsibility is to the school itself, first and foremost.
Now, the topic of collegiate athletes deserving a slice of the multibillion-dollar pie is much more debatable.
Haywood, for his part, doubled down on the comparisons between the NCAA and slavery.
“[The NCAA] just got a contract from CBS [and Turner], $8.8 billion, and if you are making that, I think you have to share some revenue,” he argued. “You can’t expect people to continue to work for nothing on a false hope of, ‘Well, this is about education, we are getting you an education, we will feed you.’ It sounds a little like 400 years ago, like slavery. ‘Stay in your hut. Stay in that little house. We’ll give you some food. You do all of the work. All of it. And I am telling you that I will take care of you.'”
It’s certainly a contentious point for college sports fans. Traditionalists argue that the free tuition, room and board offer scholarship athletes the opportunity to earn a degree without ever having to worry about student loans. Opponents to that idea argue that the free education guarantees nothing and that a very select few are getting extremely wealthy off the backs of teenagers.
Both sides share their valid points and criticisms.
But to equate the NCAA to modern-day slavery seems like a bit much. By definition, slaves were forced to do the bidding of their slave owners. There is literally nothing preventing college athletes from walking away from their sport and pursuing a career in engineering or business.
“It sounds like my life in Mississippi. And I will just use myself as an example. We picked all of the cotton, from sunup to sundown. We did all of the work that had to be done on the farm, chopping cotton, planting cotton, tilling the soil — all of this work. We were making so little money that we could not survive. We would go to the big boss and say, ‘Hey can we borrow $50 so we can celebrate Christmas?’ The birth of our Lord and Savior. Then we had to pay that $50 back all year long. We were relegated to that same system, we couldn’t leave, we couldn’t leave that farm,” Haywood recounted.
While his specific situation sounds horrible, he stressed the key difference. Haywood and his family couldn’t leave the farm. College athletes can leave their school.
Haywood turned a 16-year career spread across the NBA, the ABA and Italy into a 2015 Hall of Fame induction. He also won a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics.
Since retiring, Haywood has been an ambassador for the NBA.
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