Sacred Courts

IN 2000, sophomore Onaje X.O. Woodbine was Yale basketball’s leading scorer and one of the top 10 players in the Ivy League. From the outside it must have seemed like a dream come true for a young man who grew up playing street ball in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.

But Woodbine felt isolated and excluded by the white players on the team, troubled by what he’s described as “a locker-room culture that encouraged misogyny,” and hungry to focus on his studies and wrestle with deeper philosophical and theological questions. So he quit basketball.

Woodbine eventually returned to the courts of his youth as a researcher, studying the practice and culture of street basketball for his doctoral studies in religion at Boston University. Woodbine is the author of Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball (Columbia University Press) and a teacher of philosophy and religious studies at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. He spoke with Sojourners senior associate editor Julie Polter in May.

Julie Polter: What led you to study street basketball from a religion scholarship angle?

Onaje X.O. Woodbine: When I was 12 years old, I lost my coach. He was my father figure; I didn’t have my father for most of my early childhood. It was just devastating.

I went to the court the next day to look for him. I felt his presence in that space. It was really the only place, looking back, where I felt safe, I felt whole, where I felt like my inner life was valuable, where there was a whole community whose interest was in my growth as a human being.

When I ended up at Boston University, I realized that basketball was a vehicle for my transformation throughout my whole life. It’s not just about economic mobility. There’s really a quest for meaning in these spaces. Everything that makes us human, these big questions: Who am I? What happens after you die? What is my purpose?

That’s what’s overlooked in the [previous] literature about street basketball, usually written by a journalist or a social scientist who is focused on what determines black behavior, the external environment. They miss the freedom and the meaning that is being created in these spaces. Religion really gives you a language to express and conceptualize that internal life of the individual in ways that you can’t do with social science.

You write that in the early to mid-20th century, basketball became a means of uplift and cultural resistance in black communities and was especially encouraged by the black churches. Today’s street basketball is not connected to the church in the same way. Why? Pre-civil rights movement, basketball was a stylized expression of resistance against white supremacy for black people. The black church led the charge: They turned Bible study groups into basketball teams; it was a way to keep black men in the church. But at the end of the civil rights movement, as the black middle class moved outside of the black community and found opportunities elsewhere, a vacuum arose and the church no longer played this central role, especially with young African-American men’s lives. The streets filled this vacuum and different role models took the place of the church leader. The basketball court became one of those central tools where black men could affirm their humanity, despite all of the violence around.

Christianity and Islam, the beliefs and doctrines and the church, still play a role within the game today. [Young men] might write a Bible verse on their hand or their shoes. Or they might experience some kind of transcendence and attribute it to Jesus. But it is much more fluid, experiential, not dogmatic.

You believe that street basketball is a channel for individual and collective grief. What are its power and limits? First it gives access to memory, the kind that we hold in our bodies that is not necessarily conscious. There are injuries that have to do with the history of race and gender that we take for granted over time. It becomes second nature. You’re walking in the street and you have this tough look on your face because you’re protecting yourself from harm, and you just sort of embody it over time. To be able to put those assumptions in abeyance for a moment is what the game allows you to do.

One of the things that could be improved upon is the presence of elders around the space of the court. What I found is that the young people who grieved and found it transformative always had the witness of, usually, a woman on the sidelines—an elder woman who showed empathy and gave the player a reflection or a mirror that the young man possessed the qualities of love [demonstrated through his grief]. That false mask of masculinity that they carry around, the elder woman gives them permission to let it go.

Many of the times players would go on the court, have this experience, but nobody was there to recognize it—they were grieving on their own. But other times a person, usually a woman on the sidelines, would just start crying. One of the guys said, I looked over and she was in tears, and that was the best feeling of my life. It’s just so important that people provide witness to these experiences so that when [grieving players] re-enter the world, something has been accomplished.

What role do the male coaches play? The father figures give the young men a sense of responsibility, accountability, and an image of themselves, what it means to potentially be a responsible young man. There are so many false images of being a man in the industry that to have that presence is sacred. This is one of the things that really shocked me when I got to college—that coaching was like a business. You [as a player] were expendable labor at that point. As a system, it removes this aspect of coaching and teaching that was so prevalent in the inner city. That’s also one of the reasons I didn’t want to play college basketball anymore.

How does street ball serve as resistance to centuries of white people commodifying black people’s bodies? You don’t pay to play street ball. The audience members are not just observers in street ball. You go to a college game or an NBA game, it’s a spectacle. But in street ball, it’s a communal activity. The players, the boundaries are permeable. Players go into the audience; audience members go onto the court. The music is the heartbeat of everything and brings everyone together. [The community’s] not there to misappropriate your body, to treat you like a spectacle. They’re there to nurture and support the affirmation of your humanity.

Almost every tournament [I observed] was a memorial for someone who passed away. None of the tournaments are named after NBA players; none of the teams are named after NBA teams. They were all issues, existential issues, so Save R Streets Summer Classic, Community Awareness Tournament, C-Murder Tournament—which is named after this kid nicknamed C-Murder [who was killed trying to break up a fight]. They were all issues directly impacting the community.

This past spring you wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education about your experience playing for the Yale basketball team and questions it raised for you about misogyny and racism. Oftentimes we make the mistake of thinking about sports as separate from society, as being this citadel of racial brotherhood or sisterhood where it’s just recreation. In fact, it reflects the larger social world. Quarterbacks are usually white men. If you walk with a feminine body as a male in the locker room or on the field, you are considered marginalized or outcast. We had a locker room, especially in my first year, where on a daily basis guys would talk about sexual conquests. It’d be a way of identifying yourself as a man. All of those things were present in my experience in college basketball.

[But] there’s good news, there’s a silver lining there, precisely because sports are embedded in the culture: We can use the game to transform it. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. This goes back to the theme that I talked about earlier in regard to the inner city, that there’s freedom there, there’s agency there. These are human beings with the capacity to transform society. I think sports can be a powerful tool for social activism and transformation.

Some argue that college athletes in lucrative football and basketball programs should receive a share of the profits. What do you think? It’s a tough question, because on the one hand you don’t want it to turn into a business, even though it is a business. But does paying players then make it okay for coaches to treat them like employees, who can be fired? I think there has to be some sort of compromise.

In the NBA, half of the revenue goes to the players’ salaries. So if you were to do something similar in college sports, where you take half of the revenue, but instead of paying players directly you use that money to enhance their education. Also nonprofit charity, because many of these guys are coming from the inner city: Give them some power to direct some of that money back home and into their communities. Use that money to truly educate these young men, even if they’re there for [just] a year. That’s a healthy compromise that still forces schools to treat these young men as students, as amateurs, and yet recognize how much revenue they help create.

You’ve co-written a play based on your research. Why? Through this process of writing the play and then producing it, I’ve discovered that theater is much like ritual and sports. It provides young people with freedom to embody stories and to discover their own identities within those stories and express them in public. What we’re trying to do is to turn the theater into a ritual so that the audience members are not just observing. So in this play, the audience is part of the production. We want them to grieve with us in this space. We hope it’s another way to bring people into these stories and potentially rework some of their own issues around race and gender.

What gives you hope? What gives me hope is that you can find religion in strange places. In places where you would never expect to find it, in the projects and the inner city, on a basketball court, people are affirming their humanity, they’re asking big questions. It’s amazing that the resilience of the human spirit means that no matter where people are, they have some control over their inner life.