Hot Potato: How Washington and New York Gave Birth to Black Basketball and Changed America's Game Forever

"The players today are much better than we were.... But there is one thing that we could do better. We could pass the ball better than they can now. Man, we used to pass that basketball around like it was a hot potato."--Sam "Buck" Covington, former member of the Washington Bruinsn a nation distinguished by a great black athletic heritage, there is perhaps no sport that has felt the impact of African American culture more than basketball. Most people assume that the rise of black basketball was a fortuitous accident of the inner-city playgrounds. In Hot Potato, Bob Kuska shows that it was in fact a consciously organized movement with very specific goals.When Edwin Henderson introduced the game to Washington, D.C., in 1907, he envisioned basketball not as an end in itself but as a public-health and civil-rights tool. Henderson believed that, by organizing black athletics, including basketball, it would be possible to send more outstanding black student athletes to excel at northern whi