Change How the Game is Played: On the Power of Labor and the Timeliness of High Flying Bird | Features

A fixture in the youth-basketball circuit on the East Coast, with a program at the South Bronx Community Gym that many of the country’s most-promising teen players pass through, Spence has been trying to shape adolescent minds for a long time. He bans the use of any slavery-related vernacular, metaphors, or analogies on his court or in his presence. If someone slips up, mentioning something like “cracking the whip” or “I own you,” he forces them to recite the words “I love the Lord and all his Black people.” (The rule applies to himself, too: When Spence disparagingly calls the NBA Draft a “modern-day slave auction,” Ray’s knowing look is a nudge for Spence to, in resigned deadpan, recite his own mantra.) Spence was involved with the Harlem Globetrotters decades ago and saw how teams and a league organized and maintained by the Black community had certain priorities the NBA does not. The institution that Black people built for themselves was swallowed up by a larger capitalist enterprise that mostly left them behind, and Spence is blunt in his regret: “We gave that up for money.” Prior to that, though, “We made decisions based on what we needed,” Spence tells Ray of the Black Fives Era before integration. “The whole game grew based on our hunger, our hunger for it.”

Could that hunger, Ray wonders, be enough to upend the entire NBA as the owners, coaches, and players know it? Could it be enough to dismantle the owners’ “game on top of a game”—how they underpay most players, control nearly every aspect of their public images, retain broadcast rights, and pocket money from TV and sponsorship deals? If audience demand was high enough to just watch players play, even in the midst of a lockout, could Ray prove that the top-down structure of the NBA is functionally irrelevant? It’s worth a try, and “High Flying Bird” follows Ray as he navigates rivalries between players—like between Erick and another hotshot young player, his nemesis Jamero Umber (Justin Hurtt-Dunkley)—in pursuit of something greater. Spence is the only person in “High Flying Bird” who seems to have an idea of what Ray is planning, of how Ray wants to maneuver the players, the players association, the owners, and the media all against each other in an attempt to do what’s best for the hundreds of young Black men caught up in the game, and he encourages it. “You care all the way, or you don’t care at all,” they agree, and the 50/50 split the owners are suggesting to the players—when the former are so few and the latter are so many—will not stand. When you want to dismantle the system, someone has to throw the first brick.

“You think these fools, these rich white dudes, are gonna let the sexiest sport fall by the wayside? Football is fun, but it don’t sell sneakers. In order to move merch and inspire rap lyrics, they need your services. Too much money at stake.”—Ray Burke

In a capitalist system, the only way to demand change from above—the only way to generate any kind of notice—is to threaten that very capital. When Ray learns that the owners are holding out on making a deal with the players because they’re engineering new contracts with TV networks for more cash, he thinks of a way of cutting out the middle men. Video of a one-on-one game between Erick and Jamero at Spence’s annual Back Court Day event in the Bronx leaks online; the clip ends before revealing who won, fueling media curiosity and gathering 24 million views. Other match-ups start popping up around the country, with ticket costs ratcheting upward into the thousands of dollars. On the one hand, the players could be violating their contracts by playing in these games during the lockout. But on the other hand, if they don’t demonstrate their worth by breaking those very contracts, and forcing the owners’ hands, could anything ever change? Fan interest is reaching a frenzy, and the potential of these games (explosively popular by the very nature of their exclusivity, and with proceeds going directly into players’ pockets) finally spurs Seton and his ilk into action. “You know what I hate about this? It’s exactly what I’d do,” says Glenn Fleshler, appearing in a cameo as one of Seton’s fellow owners, and that admission—that Ray knows exactly how the owners think, and can manipulate them as a result—is the first sign that their glass mansion might have a broken window or two.