The Spencer Haywood Rule: Battles, Basketball and the Making of an American Iconoclast

This disappointing profile of troubled NBA star Spencer Haywood, who played for the league from 1970 to 1983, reads mostly like an as-told-to autobiography. Haywood was born in 1949 to a widowed sharecropper, and though his talent while in high school made him an NBA-ready wunderkind, a league rule prevented teams from drafting players directly out of high school. After joining the ABA in 1969, Haywood pursued a lawsuit that culminated in a 1971 Supreme Court decision overturning the NBA rule. Haywood’s own NBA career, which ran through 1983, was checkered: a cocaine addiction led to his suspension by the Los Angeles Lakers during the 1980 finals, and he abruptly quit the Washington Bullets (and the NBA) when the team didn’t support him taking time off to care for his wife, supermodel Iman, after she was injured in a car accident. Eventually, he served as chairman of the NBA’s Retired Players Association and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Haywood’s frank personality takes center stage, and he movingly talks about racism on and off court. But when the focus widens from Haywood to the bigger picture of the business and culture of the game, the authors’ analysis tends to be shallow. This attempt to put a complex career into context falls short. [em](Oct.) [/em]