Review: Hard Labor: The Battle That Birthed the Billion-Dollar NBA

Hard Labor: The Battle That Birthed the Billion-Dollar NBA by Sam Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sam Smith is my favorite sportswriter, period. He also answers my fan mail, and he considerately inscribed this copy to me and included a thoughtful, handwritten note. So, while I can’t claim him as a friend, I also can’t pretend to be unbiased here.

Still, I’m impressed with Smith’s ambition and narrative solution here. If you know your baseball, you know that the notorious reserve clause – the system that prevented players from exercising their free agent rights – was broken when Curt Flood refused to sign the contract he was offered and took his case to court. Flood eventually won, but it came at the price of his career. Fingers crossed, Flood will get into the baseball Hall of Fame in the current old-timers reconsideration; he was a hero, and subsequent players have come to recognize that.

The story in basketball is more complicated and, as a result, I’m not aware of anyone who’s managed to tell it before. There, Oscar Robertson – who was one of the two best players in the world (alongside Wilt Chamberlain) – agreed to become the lead plaintiff in a case that would do away with the basketball analogue of the reserve clause.

Robertson is at the heart of this book, then, but there’s more to it than that. Unlike Flood, Robertson didn’t suffer professionally for his leadership – or, at least, he didn’t suffer any more than he already did given that, despite averaging a triple double for a season (and doing so cumulatively over the first five years of his career), he could not negotiate even a $10,000 raise for himself.

So, as it unfolds, this book is a collective biography of the players who challenged the league and eventually opened up the system of free agency that’s produced arguably the most successful sports league in the world.

We get capsule biographies of Robertson, Chamberlain, Bill Bradley, Wes Unseld, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Archie Clark, Tom Meschery, Chet Walker, and others whose names I’d heard (or sometimes not) but whose careers I didn’t know all that well. As Smith sees it, that generation of players was as naturally talented as the one we see playing now, but limited television – and sometimes a tacit racism that kept Black players from being marketable – kept them from becoming either the household names they might have been or as present in the history of the game as they should be. There are some great stories about how they learned the game and about how they came to put their careers at risk to win the economic and personal freedom to become free agents.

As all of that suggests, Smith has long pushed against a collective sense that the NBA essentially “began” with the 1979 arrival of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. (This narrative has been tweaked in recent weeks as various tributes to long-time commissioner David Stern have underscored the role that he played in the same era.) Instead, Smith has long argued that we ought to be aware of what the various non-Celtic greats of an earlier era represented.

No one is bigger in that version than Robertson – a staggeringly talented player who labored under bad management and alongside sub-par teammates – but Chamberlain, Baylor, West, and many others matter who are largely forgotten when we consider the history of the league. It was, Smith tells us in his easygoing and anecdotal way, their “hard labor” on the court and off that created the platform that Bird, Magic, and Michael Jordan used to build the league we know today. And notice what is perhaps not a coincidence: the league exploded in the early 1980s, just a few years after the courts decided in favor of Robertson and the players association.

In any case, I am always glad to read Smith whether he is writing a game report or answering his mailbag inquiries. He’s funny and, without losing the perspective that he’s writing about a game, thoughtful and insightful. I went into this with him as my favorite sportswriter, and I walk out of it the same way.


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