Researcher Stands by Study; NBA Racial Balance Skewed

When the Boston Celtics began recruiting college superstar Larry Bird, there was speculation among some observers that the team was hoping to boost lagging ticket sales in a predominantly white city with a basketball version of "the great white hope."

Now a pair of Harvard researchers believe they have documented a bass among many NBA teams towards players whose race matches that of the majority of fans in their city.

"The person is unmistakable" David Karen a sociology graduate student, said in an interview yesterday. The study, published in the Chicago weekly newspaper in These Times, found that the NBA racial pattern "is to showed" that it "would be very difficult to explain if racial factors were not operative in at least some cities," according to co-author Jerome B. Karabel, an associate of the Sociology Department.

Karen declined to discuss specific teams such as the Celtics, but General Manager Arnold Auerback denied that racial factors were a consideration in NBA personnel decision. "Teams have Black players because that's the way it comes out and that's what's available." Auerback said, "They can turn the numbers around say way they went," he added.

Karabel and Karen did not conduct interviews with NBA or team officials, relying strictly on a statistical analysis of the racial men of teams and the general population. Yet the pair are confident that the pattern they observed cannot be explained by coincidence. "As observers we went in expecting to find a pattern, but we were quite surprises at finding out how strong the pattern was," Karen said.

Both researchers are longtime NBA fans and their interest in the sport was a primary motivation behind the study. But Karen stressed that simply because the analysis focuses on prejudice in athletics does not mean that its results should be viewed as trivial.

On the contrary, Karen believes that racism in the Black-dominated NBA is far more worrisome--because it is less understandable than in a parochial, largely white community. "One way of looking at the study is to ask, [seeing that] in an institution that is three fourths Black there is evidence of racism, what does this say about the other, more central institutions in American society," which are dominated by whites."

The study does not single out specific instances of racial prejudice in personnel decisions, but it does mention several anecdotes that support the author's conclusion.

Current Celtics attendance figures of 40 plus sellouts under the Bird's leadership are compared to the less impressive attendance statistics during Bill Russell's championship teams of the 1960s.

The study notes that the Atlanta Hawks once benched Jot Caldwell when he was averaging 20 points per game apparently because the team was "desperate for starting whites."

And the report includes Cleveland owner Ted Stepien's comment prior to purchasing the Cavaliers that "I respect them [Blacks], but I need whit people. It's in me. And I think the Cavs have too many Black players, 10 of 11. You need a blend of Black and white. I think that draws, and I think that's a better team."

The Harvard researchers also analyzed the commonly used technique of employing whites who might help fill stadiums, but might also be likely to sit on the bench while Blacks dominate playing time.

On teams in the league's whitest cities: benchwarmers were 37.5 percent whit, while in predominantly Black cities, where there is less need for white drawing cards, the percentage of white bench warmers was zero.

In NBA sites with populations that are less than 10 percent Black-Boston, Denver, Phoenix, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego, Seattle and Utah--63.6 percent of the players were Black. In cities that are more than 20 percent Black, 87.3 percent of the players were Black. The Celtics employ six Black and five white players