If President Clinton is really as interested as he says he is in jump-starting his moribund "national dialogue on race," he might try using the sports pages as a conversation starter. For many of the burning racial issues of the day -- affirmative action, the conflicting claims of class and race and above all white anxieties over an aggressive black street cultural style -- are summed up in the parallel universe of athletics. And, in stark contrast to the timorousness that shrouds the discussion of Big Racial Issues, when it comes to sports, everybody's willing to speak their mind.

The Latrell Sprewell case is the latest and most ominous development -- an early warning that the sports world's carefully constructed racial utopia is a fagade that may soon turn very ugly. By now, everybody knows that Golden State Warriors all-star guard Latrell Sprewell, who is black, attacked his white coach, P.J. Carlesimo, that his team fired him and the NBA suspended him for a year, and that San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown played the race card. "His boss may have needed choking," declared Brown, who called on Jesse Jackson and Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris to investigate the incident. (Harris agreed with Brown that an investigation was needed, saying "Race is an issue.")

Brown's comments set off a firestorm. Outraged callers and letter-writers asked how a mayor who fires his employees on a whim could suggest that termination was too harsh a punishment for a man who had physically assaulted his boss? In what line of work, other than the fantasy world of pro sports, would anyone be able to ever return to work after such behavior? Realizing he had blown it, Brown tried to engage in some lame damage control, but the whiff of Al Sharpton-style racial demagoguery clung to his Armani suits like the odor of rotting fish.

It's almost incredible that leaders like Willie Brown continue to cry "racism" on the most bogus of pretexts. Following such great moments in race-card playing as the O.J. Simpson and Tawana Brawley cases, one would think that black leaders would have recognized that picking the wrong fights leads to a dismissive "boy who cried wolf" reaction from whites, one that can undercut support for real injustices. Indeed, the pious racial posturing of master bottom-dealer Johnnie Cochran (who appeared with Sprewell at a press conference Tuesday in which the player publicly apologized) probably turned more whites, including liberals, against racial preferences than the combined arguments of Dinesh D' Souza, Charles Murray and Shelby Steele.

For Brown, the fact that the league, the ownership, the coach and the fans are white and the player was black automatically meant that racism was involved -- the Man came down on an uppity brother. But what many white fans believe, whether they say it or not, is that black players who strangle their coaches aren't uppity brothers (how can you be "uppity" when you're making $7.7 million a year? Where do you go up to?) -- they're the jock equivalent of gangsta rappers: thugs who attack when they don't get their own way.

Latrell Sprewell is obviously a complicated man (there's a sweetness to him and some previous coaches say they liked him, but he also once threatened a teammate with a two-by-four) whose problems may or may not be related to an inner-city ethos. The fact is, however, that America's overwhelmingly white sports fans are just now beginning to confront a black cultural style that is antithetical to their deepest beliefs about respect for authority, teamwork and sportsmanship. The way this confrontation will be resolved -- in advertising images, in league rulings, in player-coach relations, in the hearts and minds of players and fans alike -- will help shape America's race relations well into the next century.

White America has always had mixed feelings about black style. In-your-face black artists like Miles Davis have been both loved and feared; outspoken athletes like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have been regarded with wariness. For years, a kind of truce was maintained in pro sports: Blacks might be a little more exuberant, a little more demonstrative, but they kept their blackness under check. Blackness was just a pleasant spice in the stew. Recently, however, it has become the whole enchilada in some sports -- and the clash between white and black cultural styles has become so extreme that it is impossible to ignore.

The clash has become apparent in football, where the in-your-face style of black players scared the NFL enough that it cracked down on on-field celebrations and taunting. The NFL didn't want its black gladiators to get out of control.

It's in basketball, however, that the oppositional street-black style is most obvious. A special basketball issue of the Source, a hip-hop and black music magazine, proclaims on its cover, "Hip-hop hits the NBA! Is the league ready?" The editors write, "Right now, the NBA is experiencing an influx of hip-hop heads ... seemingly every single player coming in is down (with hip-hop) ... Instead of giving some blow job to the NBA, we take on the matter of whether or not the league feels comfortable with so many young African-American males dominating its presence on and off the court. Allen Iverson or Michael Jordan -- who is defining the NBA now? Because at some point, the league has to realize that everyone can't be like Mike."

Still more telling is a feature story titled "Generation Gap," about the gulf between the old NBA guard and these new trash-talking hip-hoppers (Sprewell is mentioned as one of them). Darrell Dawsey writes, "Criticisms of young players aren't necessarily unfair. But when they are used to veil narrow-minded contempt for urban Black culture -- when Iverson has to be a 'knucklehead' not because of his game but because of the way he rolls -- then the critiques become a sorry reflection of the source."

This week, by coincidence, Sports Illustrated's cover story is "What Ever Happened to the WHITE Athlete?" -- an investigation not just of why blacks dominate football and basketball (short answer: They're better), but of why so few whites are going out for those sports in high school and college. (Short answer: See above.)

The combination of the vanishing white athlete, the overwhelming preponderance of white owners, coaches and fans and the rise of black players who are coming out of "urban Black culture" is volatile. The Sprewell incident, as University of California-Berkeley professor Harry Edwards noted, may be a wake-up call -- worse episodes could follow if the underlying problems aren't addressed, Edwards warned.

The heart of the matter is simple: When is "contempt for urban Black culture" justified, and when is it racist? When does street-black cultural style cross over the line of unacceptability? There's a lot of white hypocrisy on this issue. Winning, for American sports fans, is a higher value than decorous behavior: When Deion Sanders was a 49er, I miraculously forgave those same jive-ass prancings that drive me up the wall now that he plays for Dallas. Whites will tolerate the confrontational, boastful, aggressive posturings of black stars as long as those stars help their team win.

To criticize some aspects of inner-city black style is to invite charges of racism -- but so be it. Just as black street culture has wonderful and inspiring aspects -- its exuberance, its creativity, its deadpan, soaring linguistic virtuosity -- it also has problems. What fan, black, white or yellow, doesn't feel that the ideal of sportsmanship represented by players like Magic Johnson is besmirched by the antics of players who seem to be driven not just to defeat their opponents, but to humiliate them? Who doesn't respect a team player like Barry Sanders more than one who views the game as a stage for his gigantic ego, like Ricky Watters?

It isn't that whites can't be bad sports or colossal egotists. The great Larry Bird was one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the league; the list of white whiners and malcontents is endless. But, as former NBA forward Chet Walker has written, for players who grow up poor and black, selfishness is almost a survival skill: "In the ghetto, you often must take what you can before someone takes it away."

In the best of all possible sports worlds, black emotional fireworks would enliven white dullness (who wants to watch a bunch of repressed honkies who never celebrate?) and white restraint would temper black individualism. We don't just need an ethnic melting pot, we need a stylistic melting pot. White dudes throwing down trash, black dudes wearing the poker faces of assassins -- now that would be a league.