The following is excerpted from Mike Sielski’s Magic in the Air, a narrative romp through the history of basketball, culture, and race in America. In this exclusive excerpt, Sielski details some of what led to one of the most infamous decisions in sports history: the banning of the dunk in high school and college basketball from 1967 to 1976.
In a halting voice over the phone, the old man asked if I would call him back in 10 minutes. He needed a moment to ruminate on the topic we would be discussing. David Lattin had turned 79 less than two weeks before, and there is no telling how many times someone has asked him to travel, in his mind, back to March 19, 1966. To the championship of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. To Texas Western, the first team with an all-Black starting lineup to reach a championship game, with Lattin as one of those starters and one of the team’s stars. To Kentucky and head coach Adolph Rupp, the archetypes of blue-blooded and white-skinned basketball. To the Miners’ 72-65 victory and its ripples and implications and its status as a racial and cultural touchstone—the film Glory Road and the books and Don Haskins and all the tremors from that game that shook the sport thereafter.
“We were just youngsters trying to win,” Lattin told me, “and we had no idea how big it was going to be later or what it meant. Coach Haskins knew, but we didn’t.”
Coach Haskins was smart. Against Kentucky, he understood the weapon he had in Lattin and how to best wield him. 6-foot-7 and 225 pounds in his playing days, a Houston native, Lattin had taken a detour before landing with Haskins in El Paso. He had first enrolled, in 1963, at Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State University), a historically black college that had won three straight NAIA championships from 1957 through 1959. He left A&I after just a year; having been suspended for a minor disciplinary infraction and seeking a higher quality of basketball, he later accepted Haskins’s scholarship offer to play at Texas Western. But he made at least one lasting impression in Nashville. When Perry Wallace debuted for Vanderbilt in 1967, he became the first Black varsity basketball player in the history of the Southeastern Conference. In junior high and high school, Wallace played so much pickup ball at A&I that he came to know and admire Lattin for his combination of flair and power on the court.
“He would get the ball, and he would go down the floor,” Wallace once said, “and he would do the Michael Jordan dunk. His legs were spread apart the same way, and he’d be flying through the air. And everybody under the basket went, ‘Oooooh, shit! Time to leave. Time to go. Don’t even mess with this. Get out of the way.’”
During practices at Texas Western, Lattin would dunk the ball 100 times, and before each game, in the layup line, he would jam it six times, seven times, eight. “Just to make a point,” he wrote in his autobiography, Slam Dunk to Glory. “I brought cockiness, coolness, a certain ‘take you down’ attitude to the team.”
Kentucky was a terrific squad, entering the game with a 27-1 record, its leading scorer—at more than 22 points a game—a lean 6-foot-4 guard named Pat Riley. But the Wildcats, dubbed “Rupp’s Runts,” didn’t have a starter who was taller than 6-foot-5—or who was Black—and Haskins banked that Lattin could take them down mentally. “I knew a lot was being made of the white-Black thing,” Haskins once wrote, “and although I didn’t care about it, I wasn’t going to ignore it.” So he told Lattin: David, on our first possession, I want you to take it to the rim and dunk on someone. Just knock them over. Just dunk it like they ain’t never seen it dunked. Haskins didn’t care if Lattin was called for traveling, an offensive foul, or a felony. The instructions were to run someone’s ass over. The crude stereotype of Black players as nothing more than brutes and thugs had been prevalent throughout college basketball ever since their presence in the sport had started to increase. “At first,” DePaul coach Ray Meyer once said, “the whites seemed afraid to play against the Blacks.” Haskins didn’t subscribe to such bigotry, but with a national championship at stake, he was damn well going to use it to his and the Miners’ advantage.
After Riley sank a free throw for the game’s first point and for the only lead that Kentucky would hold in the game, Bobby Joe Hill, Texas Western’s point guard, brought the ball up court on the Miners’ second possession. The Wildcats aligned themselves in a one-three-one zone in which only one player would be guarding Lattin down low.
“Every team we played knew better than to do that,” Lattin told me with a laugh.
Every team except Kentucky, apparently.
“Yeah,” he said. “One-on-one under the basket. Don’t do that.”
Hill zipped a pass from the top of the key to Lattin. Riley, at the bottom of the zone, was the only Kentucky player to make even a passable attempt at fending Lattin away from the rim. He slid over in front of Lattin and jumped with him. He might as well have been leaping to stop a thundercloud. Lattin rose over him and, with two hands, slammed the ball through the hoop.
The reverberations, tangible and intangible, of that dunk would fan out for years in the minds of those who were involved in it and who witnessed it. Lattin’s jam was as early and as decisive a turning point as the Miners could have hoped for. In the locker room afterward, Lattin grinned and, in a soft voice, said, “I did it for psychological reasons. Did you hear that crowd? The Kentucky players heard those cheers and roars. I know they did.”
Texas Western’s victory was the first in a series of dominoes to go down around college basketball. “The reason the game was so significant wasn’t just that we beat them,” Lattin told me. “The significance was that it opened the doors for universities, especially in the deep South, for African-Americans to go to school. Once they opened the doors for the athletes, it opened them for other kids, as well. I’m proud of that.” As he should have been. But there was an opposite reaction—if not an equal one, not in the long term—to Lattin’s dunk. Yes, more Black students and more Black athletes were entering colleges and college sports, and for much of white America, that was a terrifying trend, one that had to be stemmed or, if possible, stopped altogether. “For Blacks, it was a triumphant statement of why segregation was wrong,” Perry Wallace said in 1996, after he’d gone on to become a trial attorney in the U.S. Justice Department and a law professor. For whites, “the specter of David Lattin, big, strong, dark, fantastically physical—and the ‘in-yo-face, yo-mama’ dunk was his favorite—was a scary thing.”
Not to Haskins, obviously. And not to Riley, who while at Linton High School in Schenectady, had played against and beaten Power Memorial High and Lew Alcindor on a snowy December night in upstate New York less than five years earlier. He wasn’t wired to view the Miners as anything other than his opponents, and the broader, deeper ramifications of the game revealed themselves to him only after time had softened the pain of the national-championship loss. “They were playing for something a lot more [important] than I think people realized at the time,” he once said. “I mean, it wasn’t written about much back then, but it was basically five Black players—or so the perception was—against five Southern white guys. Now, I’m from New York. So I kind of resented that.”
His head coach resented something else.
There was a time, oddly enough, when Adolph Rupp didn’t think the dunk was so bad. Through his first seven years as Kentucky’s basketball patriarch, he didn’t have a player come through his program who could or would dunk. In 1937, one did. Robert Marion “Clug” Cluggish, from Corbin, Kentucky, was 6-foot-10, with a narrow head and wide ears, and once he entered the Wildcats’ starting lineup as a sophomore, he became the central attraction of their pregame warmups, putting on a show by dunking repeatedly. When the players would charge on to the court just before game time, guard J. Rice Walker would dribble the ball the length of the floor, Cluggish going with him stride for stride. As Walker approached the basket, he would jump, as if he were shooting a layup, and loft the ball toward the rim, and Cluggish would throw it down, an early iteration of an alley-oop.
Walker and Cluggish attempted the same routine at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 31, 1938—New Year’s Eve in New York—before a big game against Long Island University. In the half-lit arena, a spotlight tracked their movements. LIU fans packed the Garden that night, and when Cluggish this time missed his dunk attempt, clanging the ball off the back of the rim and launching it 30 feet into the air, those fans “went wild,” Fred “Cab” Curtis, a Kentucky player, later said. “They laughed and stomped their feet and jeered for what seemed like an hour. Even in the semi-darkness, I could see Adolph’s face was fiery red. He was furious.”
Kentucky lost the game, 52-34, and in the team’s Pullman car on the train ride back to Philadelphia, Rupp stood up. All the starters take lower berths, he said. Any subs who played get into the uppers. He then pointed at Cluggish. And Clug, you sleep in the aisle.
“That’s the night,” Curtis said, “Adolph turned against the dunk.”
Even if the story happened exactly as Curtis told it, it’s awfully convenient to suggest that one player’s miscue was enough for Rupp to start seeing the dunk as a blight on the sport. As more Black players streamed into college basketball’s talent pool, it became clear that whatever appreciation Rupp retained or lost for the dunk was less about the act itself and more about who was performing it. A quick trip from Lexington to Louisville in 1964 to recruit Wes Unseld—the only trip that Rupp ever made to Unseld’s house—had not materialized of his own choosing. John Oswald, UK’s president, had been pressuring Rupp to bring in more Black players, an agenda that angered the coach. “Harry,” Rupp once said to his top assistant, Harry Lancaster, “that son of a bitch is ordering me to get some n—–s in here. What am I going to do?” He wouldn’t do much of anything for another three years: He didn’t sign a Black player until Tom Payne in 1969.
Those changes apparently changed Rupp’s view of the dunk from the days when Clug Cluggish was firing up the Wildcats and their fans in the layup line. By the time officials were pursuing a ban in earnest, Rupp was calling the dunk “show-off tactics.” Lattin has long believed that Rupp was directly responsible for the ban, that the first basket of that ‘66 national title game was such an affront to him, and a symbol of the changes ahead for college basketball, that Rupp couldn’t abide it and leveraged his status in the sport to rid it of the dunk. Haskins received 40,000 pieces of hate mail in the aftermath of the Miners’ victory, but poor, poor Adolph’s grasp on the levers of the game was weakening, and he knew it. It wasn’t just that players were dunking. It was that Black players were dunking. And they were dunking while they were beating his team. “He was definitely embarrassed about that,” Lattin told me. To Lattin, Rupp—his 42 years coaching Kentucky, his 876 victories, his four national championships—was so towering a figure that he could have the dunk outlawed single-handedly. But with or without his assent, the gears already were in motion. Some coaches, of course, had been lobbying for years to have the dunk removed. At a Big Eight Conference luncheon in December 1966, Oklahoma State coach Hank Iba delivered a speech in which he predicted that the height of the rim would eventually be raised from 10 feet to 11, and he called for the dunk to be eliminated.
There were two people in the luncheon audience whose attention Iba wanted to catch with his speech. One was Norvall Neve, the commissioner of the Missouri Valley Conference and, more importantly, one of the 20 members of the National Basketball Committee. The other was more influential. The other was John Bunn, the committee’s executive director and rules editor and interpreter.
Few people in basketball had stronger connections to its origins than Bunn. A former player and assistant coach under Phog Allen at Kansas, he spent 10 years as both the athletic director and head coach at Springfield College—the site of James Naismith’s fateful brainstorm that birthed the game. “What Knute Rockne was to football and John McGraw to baseball,” one Springfield newspaperman wrote in August 1979, after Bunn’s death, “John Bunn was to basketball. The importance of his presence in the game is incalculable, his contributions immeasurable … As possessor of one of basketball’s keen minds, Bunn rose to the position of absolute authority for the sport.”
There were two other figures of comparable power, official or otherwise, to greenlight so significant a change. Ed Steitz, who was the committee’s assistant rules editor in 1967 and who would become its editor in 1968, had such an encyclopedic command and recall of college basketball’s regulations that questioning him and his reams of research and data was a futile exercise. Walter Byers, meanwhile, was in his 17th year as the executive director of the NCAA, having assumed that position at age 29 in 1951, the same year the position was created, after working in the bureaucracy of the Big Ten Conference. A quirky loner from Kansas City, Byers as an older man wore a toupee and cowboy boots, and he enforced an often-peculiar set of policies within the offices of the association’s headquarters. Employees worked half-days on Saturdays, and they could neither drink anything at their desks nor take any breaks. Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post once referred to his tenure atop the NCAA as “a tyrannical monopoly under a dictator-president.” So banning the dunk, or anything else, wasn’t exactly a concept he was likely to find repellent.
And if there were ever a moment in time when an institution such as the NCAA would be inclined to crack down on anything that had even a whiff of personality, anything that gave off the scent of the counterculture, 1967 would have been it. Four years after the March on Washington. Three years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. One year before the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. All amid the Vietnam War and the Merry Pranksters and Berkeley and Wisconsin and Kent State and the Black Panthers and the Beatles and the Stones and Marvin Gaye and Norman Mailer, all as college sports and their popularity and their revenues were growing at a rate so fast that only someone blindfolded to the world could manage to see the whole enterprise as “amateurism.” In Byers’s last year as NCAA president, 1987, the men’s basketball tournament would rake in $43 million in revenue, and he’d come around to the reality that college sports was big business, that the athletes who played football and basketball at its highest levels were de facto professionals, and that the system was inherently corrupt for cutting them out of their rightful share of the profits. “Protecting young people from commercial evils is a transparent excuse for monopoly operations that benefit others,” he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, referring to the NCAA as “the collegiate cartel.” But in 1967, when the debate about the dunk was raging, he was nowhere close to that epiphany. Hardly anyone was. When a recruiting scandal was revealed or the sport seemed to be breaking away from its foundations in any regard, the impulse and instinct were to regulate college basketball back to the way it used to be. “I still see the 1950s and 1960s as a romantic era—at least in the minds of a public that was deeply shocked when coaches and young heroes it admired went wrong,” Byers wrote in Unsportsmanlike Conduct. “These ideals lived also in the minds of faculty and athletics officials who wanted to keep college sports the kind of campus and student activity they nostalgically remembered from their own younger days.”
Byers died in 2015, and some of that inherently stifling and oppressive view of college sports died with him. “My father was in many ways the face of college athletics as the place where the truest ideal of amateurism got played out,” his son Fritz told me one day over the phone. “That very much changed, and this is something that he and I talked about as it changed and then talked at length about when he was writing his book. That’s all true. Whether his view of banning the dunk was somehow to preserve a distinction between college basketball and pro basketball, I don’t know. That would be a fair inference.” Considering Byers’ intellectual journey, from the guardian of college sports’ image of lily-white amateurism to a pragmatic capitalist, it’s a bit surprising that he couldn’t foresee the manner in which college hoops was already evolving—and that he was so naive as to believe he or anyone else could stop it. But only a little surprising. The shock that Black players’ presence and performance delivered to the system was apparently so profound that all other considerations fell away.
