Author : Thomas Aiello
Publisher : Sports & Popular Culture
ISBN 13 : 9781621904632
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (46 download)
Book Synopsis Dixieball by : Thomas Aiello
Download or read book Dixieball written by Thomas Aiello and published by Sports & Popular Culture. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this book Thomas Aiello considers the special cultural function of professional basketball in the Deep South for more than a quarter century between 1947 and 1979. Next to their counterparts in baseball and football, basketball fans enjoyed a unique intimacy with their favorite players, who showed more of their bodies and had nothing covering their face and head. For this and other similar reasons, blackness simply mattered more in basketball than it did in other sports. By the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, professional basketball was 47.5 percent black and becoming known as a "black sport." That being the case, the South's relationship with professional basketball was more fraught, and made the survival of southern teams more tenuous, fan support more fickle, and racial incidents between players and fans more hostile"--