King Kaufman's Sports Daily

ESPN documentary on black-college basketball dribbles aimlessly at times, but scores.

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March 14, 2008 | Earl Lloyd, the first black player in NBA history, is talking about his four years at West Virginia State, a historically black college.

"It's like, magical, man," he says. "At graduation everybody's crying. Sobbing, man, boo-hooing. They don't want to leave, man. They don't want to leave this place."

Lloyd is part of an amazing array of former players and coaches in the two-part, four-hour documentary "Black Magic," which ESPN is airing without commercials beginning Sunday night after the NCAA Tournament selection show. Part 2 runs Monday night. The sprawling movie is the story of basketball at historically black colleges and universities -- HBCUs -- which also makes it a story of racism and the civil-rights struggle of the mid-20th century.

"I lived right behind this white high school and of course never could go to it," says Perry Wallace of his Nashville childhood. Wallace became the first black varsity athlete in the Southeastern Conference when he joined the Vanderbilt basketball team in 1967. "And so us colored kids watched through some bushes. In effect, what we were watching was the mainstream. White America. It was everybody else, and then there was us."

"Black Magic" tells the story of pioneers such as Lloyd and Wallace, stars such as Willis Reed, Bob Dandridge, Dick Barnett and the incomparable Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, who co-produced the movie, and black-college basketball legends you might not have heard of.

One of those, and this column pleads guilty to not knowing him, is John McLendon, "the father of black-college basketball," who once had a secret meeting with legendary Kentucky coach -- and famed segregationist -- Adolph Rupp. Rupp had asked McLendon to talk to him. He wanted some basketball advice.

McLendon, who had apprenticed to the game's inventor, Dr. James Naismith, at Kansas, though of course he wasn't allowed to play there, ran a fast-break style that was a stark contrast to the plodding half-court game then popular at white schools. That up-tempo strategy became a hallmark of black-college ball as McLendon's disciples spread through the coaching ranks.

One of those disciples, Ben Jobe, is, along with Lloyd, the heart and soul of "Black Magic." A player at Fisk University in the early '50s and then a longtime coach at several schools and in the pros, Jobe, 75, is the movie's most memorable figure. He's the closest thing "Black Magic" has to the two giants at its center, McLendon and Clarence "Big House" Gaines, who won more than 800 games as a coach, mostly at Winston-Salem.

Next page: Clips from the '30s to Earl the Pearl to Big Ben Wallace