The NBA Forces a Fit Check

10/19/22 • 29 min

October 17, 2005. The NBA is going through massive changes. Michael Jordan is retired (again), and the league is getting younger. Stars like Allen Iverson represent the rise of hip-hop culture, which David Stern blames for the league’s dwindling viewership. His solution? Today, Stern enacts a dress code, including collared shirts and sports coats – an unprecedented rule in American sports history.

What provokes Stern to make this move? How does the league react? And despite the initial outrage and backlash, how do the players eventually win this fight?

Special thanks to our guests: Dave Zarum, author of NBA 75: The Definitive History; Jordan Ligons, NBA and WNBA writer and co-host of the Spinsters basketball podcast; Kesha McLeod, personal stylist to the stars, including Serena Williams, PJ Tucker, Chris Bosh, and Giannis Antekounmpo; and Dr. Todd Boyd, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

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What provokes Stern to make this move? How does the league react? And despite the initial outrage and backlash, how do the players eventually win this fight?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Jim Thorpe's Lost Gold (w/ History This Week)

October 13, 1982. The announcement came from Switzerland, across the world from where Jim Thorpe was raised on Indian territory in Oklahoma. In his time, Thorpe was the most popular athlete in the world, winning two gold medals at the 1912 Olympics. But for a variety of reasons—including his Native American heritage—those medals were stripped away. But today, though Thorpe passed away years earlier, his children will receive the medals that their father rightly won.

In a special collaboration with our sibling podcast, History This Week, we seek to answer: how does Jim Thorpe rise from an Indian boarding school to become “The Greatest Athlete of All Time"? And why was his legacy almost destroyed?

Special thanks to Sunnie Clahchischiligi, freelance journalist and PhD candidate in Cultural, Indigenous, and Navajo Rhetoric at the University of New Mexico; and David Maraniss, associate editor at the Washington Post and author of Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe.

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Next Episode

The Blue Jays Take On America

October 24, 1992. It's Game 6 of the World Series: Atlanta Braves versus the Toronto Blue Jays. The Canadian Squad is just a few outs from winning their first-ever major sports championship outside of hockey. Can they pull it off?

The Toronto Blue Jays have gained a reputation in the past decade as chokers. After its rocky early years, the lovable underdogs from up north have become perpetual division winners that can't quite get over the hump.

Today, the Toronto Blue Jays have a chance to create a new reputation. Will they get it done? And to a nation defined by hockey, what would a baseball championship really mean?

Special thanks to our guests Frank Condron, lifelong Blue Jays fan, Adrian Fung, author of the book “We Are, We Can, We Will: the 1992 World Champion Toronto Blue Jays, Pat Gillick, former General Manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, Pat McDonald, comedian, and lifelong Blue Jays fan, and Bob Elliott, longtime Blue Jays writer for the Toronto Sun.

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