alcalloway.jpgI wouldn’t put my dream up there with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s.

But my dream also precipitates a cascade of social change, including ramifications spread, ameba-like, throughout ghettos, jails and prisons everywhere. My dream causes the devil to gnash his teeth, and white nationalists to seethe like they do about our duly elected President Barack H. Obama.
At least many of you who crave the fast-paced, high scoring, running, leaping, diving game of basketball appreciate the fact that the world’s greatest player ever, Michael Jordan, has become majority owner of the Charlotte, North Carolina Bobcats, a National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise. (The team’s previous majority owner, Bob Johnson, is the black founder and former owner of Black Entertainment Television.)

LeBron James, a.k.a. “King James,” now universally touted as the best basketball player in the world, is a free agent, meaning he can negotiate a contract with any NBA team and leave the Cleveland Cavaliers. Then there is Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat, also a free agent. After Most Valuable Player (MVP) Kobe Bryant of last year’s NBA Champion Los Angeles Lakers, Dwyane “Flash” Wade is the best shooting guard in professional basketball.

So, here’s the dream.

Both King James and Flash negotiate a lifetime pact with Jordan, (without white agents) that includes management and ownership interests following their playing days. Within one year, the Charlotte Bobcats would vie for the NBA championship amid talk of a new, larger arena. Tourism would blossom, and businesses would locate there, or expand while unemployment, poverty and crime shrink.

Charlotte would become a key destination, complete with substantive social change that blunts undemocratic white nationalist revisionism throughout the South. And every good basketball player will want in. The game of basketball takes on the Jordanesque mystique: Excellence is not an option, and the pursuit of perfection and winning are the goals.

With LeBron James and Dwyane Wade in the fold and with that drive, the message will reverberate all the way back to the basketball courts in or near the projects everywhere, that it is the mind that takes native ability and develops it into a skill. If the mind is not right, the native ability can’t take you too far.

If only this were not a dream!

Of course, the usual detractors would come out against a Jordan/James/Wade deal – covertly thinking they are too black. True, none of these three appears to have an ounce of European anything in them. These three black men exude ancient African warrior blood, brains and brawn. In the dream, I could hear white nationalists screeching about a black takeover of the NBA, twisting reality to make it appear dangerous to that specious mindset.

But money talks, and the league of NBA owners would salivate at the specter of sold-out arenas, more TV revenue worldwide, and a burgeoning D League in smaller venues across America. Jordan basketball would cause the game’s popularity to soar to new heights around the world.

Ha! Then Jordan/James/Wade would also buy the Harlem Globetrotters.

My dream also focused on some bad basketball stuff that has to be corrected in the very near future. How is it that apparently no one cared about NBA Washington Wizards standout Gilbert Arenas’ immaturity, which finally manifested in a foolish and dangerous, albeit outlawed, act of bringing guns into an NBA locker room and brandishing them?

What about the Miami Heat’s young Michael Beasley, who sometimes appears totally lost? A monstrous natural talent, Beasley has been to several high schools, but does anybody care if he can actually read and write well enough to develop his mind?

How many sad stories are there, like the one about former NBA star Derrick Coleman, broke and in debt for millions, having to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy?

Perhaps the biggest catastrophe waiting to happen is to the otherwise skill-less basketball sensation, Allen Iverson.  In recent years, Iverson has developed a gambling habit that has gotten him barred from casinos in several states.

He is also known to be a drunkard. During all those splendid years as an NBA super star, Iverson developed what? Now, no longer in the NBA, Iverson looks forward to what?

Jordan basketball would change all that. If only this were not a dream!

Al_Calloway@Verizon.net