3-24-05, 11:42 am

Something stinks in Cleveland, and it ain’t the Richie Sambora wing of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Cleveland Cavaliers coach Paul Silas was fired with a mere 19 games left in the season and the upstart Cavs in control of the fifth playoff spot in the east, on pace for a respectable 43 wins. The official word from GM Jim Paxson was, 'We believe in our players, and that progress just wasn't being made.'

It is certainly true that the Cavs were on a mini-skid, having lost 9 of their last 12 games. But it was still a shock to see Silas, one of the most respected coaches in the game, unceremoniously dumped after only a year and a half at the helm. He had pushed the team toward playoff contention for the first time in almost a decade, despite having to simultaneously mentor 20-year-old phenom LeBron James while coaxing a roster with more flotsam than the Cuyahoga River.

When Silas was fired, many tongues wagged that this was just the modern NBA, where coaches are as disposable as a used diaper on a summer day. As Steve Kerr put it, 'The message to NBA coaches is simple: ‘don’t rent, buy.’'

The fact that Silas is Black was never mentioned. In the NFL, where Black coaches come along about as often as a lunar eclipse, or in college football, where Division I coaches could comprise a Million White Guy March, the racial dynamic of the Silas dismissal would be debated throughout world of sports but it just didn't happen. After all, this is the NBA, where African-American and white coaches seem to come and go in equal numbers. We have been led to believe that in a world where the color of your skin is a greater indicator of your life expectancy than whether you smoke, drink, or bungee jump, the NBA had succeeded where all other aspects of our society has failed, independently forging Martin Luther King’s 'beloved community.' Yet a brilliant article in the New York Times recently showed that you can't judge this book by its color. In examining hiring practices over the last ten years, the Times computed that Black NBA coaches are given a far shorter chance to succeed than their white colleagues. The tenure for a Black coach runs at 1.6 seasons, while a white coach gets 2.4, almost an entire year longer to turn a team around. This cuts across every team, no matter if they are a perennial winner, loser, or in a middling purgatory [Celtic-land]. As the Times wrote, 'Winning black coaches have been replaced sooner than winning white coaches on average, and experienced black coaches have served shorter tenures than experienced white coaches. The same is true among losing coaches, among rookie coaches and among coaches who played in the N.B.A. and those who did not.'

Al Attles, assistant general manager for the Golden State Warriors, who in 1969 became the third Black coach in NBA history, commented on the tenure disparity, saying, 'Does race have anything to do with this? Now I'm sure the people who do the hiring say no. But it surely has to be something more than wins and losses. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, eventually you have to say it's a duck.'

The racial disparity grows to NFL-esque proportions as one examines the coaches who actually have a degree of job stability. Of the 14 coaches who have held their jobs for at least five years since 1989, only one was Black – Lenny Wilkins, when the all-time winningest coach in NBA history was in charge of the mid-90s Atlanta Hawks. As former New Jersey Nets coach Butch Beard said bitterly to the Times, 'For black coaches, you have to be a Jesus miracle worker. With a bad team, ownership wants you to do more than what the team is capable of doing. If you don't pull it off right away, they think it is the coach's fault.' Beard added: 'This won't get me another job, but that's the truth. It's very disturbing to me.'

Even Silas himself ironically spoke of this in January saying, 'Our white counterparts are given more the benefit of the doubt. Things have changed dramatically in our society, but it still has a long way to go.'

This is not, of course, what NBA commissioner David Stern wants to hear. 'I believe that right now each coaching decision is based on a fierce determination made by the owner and general manager that they want to win - and that that decision has become color blind,' Stern retorted. He then called the League 'the best example of equal-opportunity employment…' This is Stern at his most myopic, seeing what he wants to be the truth even when faced with opposing facts. The only way to deal with this issue is to discuss it openly, and force the near lily-white owners society of the NBA to actually confront their own hiring practices.

We are often told that racism is a figment of the past, a hangover from the days of slavery and Jim Crow. But NBA owners are not 'hungover.' They in fact are still drinking heartily at the trough.



--Dave Zirin's new book 'What's My Name Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States' will be in stores in June 2005. You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by e-mailing edgeofsports-subscribe@zirin.com. Contact him at whatsmynamefool2005@yahoo.com.