Sportswashing and The Secret Game
“I thought I was fighting a war for democracy, but I guess it doesn’t work that way down here.”
Private Booker T. Spicely said the above on July 8, 1944, a month after D-Day and four days following America’s 168th birthday — and minutes before bus driver Herman Lee Council shot and killed Spicely for refusing to move back one seat on his ride in Durham, North Carolina.
Council followed Spicely off the bus to murder the private on a roadside not far from the campus of North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central), where that same year, the first integrated basketball game in the South was held.
As covered in Scott Ellsworth’s terrific book The Secret Game, revolutionary coach John McClendon oversaw an outstanding North Carolina College team that dominated all comers in the 1943-44 season. The Eagles would have been Black national champions were it not for the gambling corruption that ran rampant in New York during this era1 costing them a game in Harlem against Lincoln University.
In the same city, Duke boasted an outstanding medical school basketball team. In much the same vein as the military academies’ dominance over football in the same era — Army especially — the war effort made for unlikely powerhouses in sports. Duke’s outstanding medical school attracted a variety of young medical students to meet demand for the war, including several undergrad basketball standouts.
With two historically great teams just miles from each other, it only made sense to play — despite the game defying all rationale and logic.
The Secret Game is so named because NCC and Duke Medical played in a locked gym after the Blue Devils’ arrival early on a Sunday morning when they were unlikely to be seen. Such intermingling of Black and Caucasian wasn’t merely frowned upon, but could quite literally endanger the lives of those involved. This predated the Civil Rights Movement by two decades, and was 23 years before Dean Smith fielded death threats over his recruitment of Charlie Scott.
What’s more, there was little hope of justice in case of retaliation. To wit, an all-white jury found Herman Lee Council not guilty of Private Booker T. Spicely’s murder — in spite of witness testimonies and the involvement of nothing other than Thurgood Marshall in prosecuting the case.
Part of why Ellsworth’s book is so fascinating, infuriating and important is how expertly he balances the backdrop of World War II with Jim Crow America. For example, John McClendon’s mentor and supporter James Naismith — yes, the James Naismith who invented the sport — was a guest at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. These were the first Games to sponsor basketball, but are rightly more known as Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi political machine’s efforts to sportswash Adolf Hitler for an international audience.
At the same time a lavish Olympics laundered the Nazi image, the brutal regime targeted citizens like Ernst Manasse, a Jewish professor who migrated to the United States. Manasse found work teaching at North Carolina Central, where as Ellsworth details, he taught members of the Eagles basketball team. And, where he was barred from having his own colleagues over for dinner because of Jim Crow laws.
I share all the preceding not just to pique your interest in reading Ellsworth’s book — though I highly recommend it — but because it weighs on me. I finished reading The Secret Game in its entirety on Friday. Some 24 hours later, my phone buzzed with a news later from the LA Times app reporting the murders of 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo.
Plenty has changed in the eight decades since The Secret Game and Booker T. Spicely’s murder. Just last month I covered a Final Four featuring a Duke team with an all-Black starting five playing rival North Carolina with Black head coach Hubert Davis.
Unlike Lee Council, the Buffalo murderer almost certainly will not walk free. It’s tragic that could be considered progress, but such is the place from which we started. Just as tragic is that the hate fueling Jim Crow laws remains generations later.
The Buffalo gunman’s actions are the ultimate extreme, but also mark a logical endpoint to the hateful rhetoric that still permeates through media in 2022 — including through sportswashing.
I wrote two weeks ago of the positive social changes that began with sports. Sportswashing is the competing attempt to use games in the same way but to the opposite ends; either a covering up of or outright encouraging hate based on creed, race or beliefs. As much as I’d like to ignore it, to write about something like Power Five brokers pushing to dismantle the existing football landscape or examine the role of the traditional 5 in modern basketball, I’d feel complicit not saying something.
And it’s still very much prevalent in today’s ecosystem, from golfers dismissing the Saudi government’s targeted execution of journalist Jamal Khashoggi as an oopsie on-par with a distasteful tweet; WWE exploiting post-9/11 patriotism then a generation later, taking staggering paydays from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to launder its image2; and the staging of World Cup in Qatar, where slave labor built the venues.
This isn’t a far-flung issue in nations half-a-world away, either. I can’t reconcile as a mere difference of opinion FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff allotting time for a supposedly jokey segment featuring the manager of a website that pushes distorted Black crime rhetoric, baselessly accuses Black athletes of lying about discrimination, and dismisses the protests of Black athletes against discrimination as the ignorance of a monolith incapable of think for itself.
Sportswashing only works if we allow it. Part of combating it includes recognizing the nuance and complexity of our past; like that the heroism of World War II, a time called Our Finest Hour, isn’t any less true because we acknowledge the paradoxical treatment of a portion of citizenship in the same era.
Meanwhile, in our own time, we can take a stand against injustices in our own, individual ways — like North Carolina College and Duke Medical did in The Secret Game.
I wrote in some detail about the scandals involving CCNY and Long Island in the post-War years for this Awful Announcing article, but a few years before that, NCC’s Black National Championship Game against Lincoln wasn’t a case of point-shaving by players: The game’s officials called it a final with time remaining the underdogs from Pennsylvania leading.
I recommend The Lapsed Fan podcast’s deep dive into the Sept. 13, 2001 episode of WWF SmackDown even for those with zero interest in wrestling. Wrestling merely provides a backdrop for post-9/11 jingoism and paranoia, its metamorphosis into war, and the brazen ways in which some have capitalized off of pain and suffering in the 21st Century.