It helped launch the trend for designer trainers, baggy jerseys and chunky gold chains adopted by teenagers around the world. But now the NBA is attempting to take the bling out of basketball by imposing a dress code on players, in a move that has brought accusations of racism.
Under the code, which comes into force when the basketball season starts on Tuesday, players will no longer be able to turn up to official National Basketball Association events wearing baggy shorts, T-shirts, jerseys, trainers, flip-flops and do rags — cloth head coverings. Chains, pendants and medallions worn outside clothes are also banned, as is wearing headphones and sunglasses indoors.
Instead players will be required to wear ”business casual” — sports jackets and slacks — when on league business. Violators will be fined and repeat offenders could be thrown out of the league.
But some players and commentators have denounced the dress code as racist for targeting the hip-hop look adopted by many of the NBA’s young black players. Its purpose, critics claim, is to make a predominantly black league more palatable to a predominantly white audience. Singling out neck chains is ”definitely a racial statement”, said the Indiana Pacers star Stephen Jackson.
”They’re targeting my generation — the hip hop generation,” said Allen Iverson, the Philadelphia 76ers player.
According to the Washington Post, the spark for the new dress code was a dinner in honour of the US Olympic basketball team in Belgrade last year. While the Serbian national team wore matching sports jackets, many of the NBA players arrived in an assortment of sweat suits, oversize jeans, diamond earrings and platinum chains.
Larry Brown, the coach, was said to have been so embarrassed he considered sending some of the worst dressed players back to their hotel.
”The players have been dressing in prison garb the last five or six years… all the stuff that goes on, it’s like gangsta, thuggery stuff,” the Los Angeles Lakers coach, Phil Jackson, wrote on the website of the sports network ESPN.
Charles Barkley, the former player turned television analyst, told the Los Angeles Times there were racial subtexts connected to the dress code, but that was why he was in favour of it.
”Young black kids dress like NBA players,” he said. ”Unfortunately they don’t get paid like NBA players. So when they go out in the real world, what they wear is held against them.
”If a well-dressed white kid and a black kid wearing a do rag and throwback jersey came to me in a job interview, I’d hire the white kid. That’s reality.” – Guardian Unlimited Â