Hard Labor: The Battle that Birthed the Billion-Dollar NBA, By Sam Smith (2017) Chicago, Triumph Books, 351 pages. ISBN: 978-1-62937-278-5

Professional team sports need to co-operate for teams to play against each other to derive income in what are known as league competitions. By definition, such leagues operate as cartels or monopolies. Economic theory and public policy abhor cartels/monopolies because they are inefficient/waste resources and provide rents for insiders. They pass on problems they experience to consumers in the form of higher prices, or inferior products, or to their workforce and suppliers in lower payments, or not paying them at all, are ‘lazy’ and antipathetic to change and innovation. Economics postulates that breaking up cartels, making them more competitive, will enhance economic welfare; it will provide a better product for consumers, increases in production and income. How does one go about taking on and breaking up a cartel? This is a problem, which has confronted the players of professional team sports across the globe. They have been subject to a variety of labour market rules, which have restricted their economic freedom and income earning ability. In American basketball, for example, the two major rules historically utilised were the draft and option or reserve clause. The draft precluded players from negotiating with clubs for their services when they were first employed; clubs selected (drafted) players in turn. Players, once selected, signed a contract, which contained an option clause, which could be exercised by the club to employ the player for an extra year, thereby ‘reserving’ their ability to employ the player in perpetuity. These ‘rules’ denied players the ability to test the market and obtain employment with other clubs. There were also rules that said that clubs could not draft players from college/university until they had completed college, denying younger players the ability to obtain income. Leading players of the 1960s and 1970s were dissatisfied with their lot and turned to collective action to take on the basketball establishment. They saw themselves as pioneers who would improve the income and welfare of players to come. Sam Smith’s focus is on the players associated with the Robertson litigation, which sought to block a merger between the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the American Basketball Association (ABA) as a breach of the Sherman Antitrust Act 1890. The ABA commenced operations in 1967. This rival league provided both additional employment opportunities for players and a source of leverage in contract negotiations with NBA clubs. A merger between the two leagues would reduce such leverage. This period in basketball’s history is also complicated by the issue of race; but then again race is and always has been an issue in any aspect of American history! The period after World War II was associated with the emergence of black or African American players. Colleges in the South slowly began to overcome their reluctance to recruit talented African American schoolboy players. As African Americans worked their way into the game, clubs operated unofficial quotas on how many they would recruit, would start a game or be on the court at one time. Some clubs experienced problems with white players ‘accepting’ African Americans, with the ‘smart’ clubs who ‘simply’ choose players on the basis of talent being the most successful. This was a period or racial slurs, African American players being denied access to hotels, restaurants and experiencing problems with obtaining housing in white neighbourhoods and so on. Smith refers to an incident where Celtic players were given ‘keys to the city’ by the Mayor of Marion, Indiana which they returned when African American members of the team were denied entry to a local restaurant (p. 56). Sam Smith was a child/teenager in the 1960s and spent …