Sports

On an outdoor basketball court surrounded by seashell-scattered sand last month, a man coached a group of teenage girls through a drill. The staccato pounding of their dribbles alternated in the hot air with a tinnier sound in the distance: men hammering nails into wood while a bleating white billy goat looked on.

The coach, Abibou Sall, 34, instructed his players to dribble along the sideline, first with their left hands, then their right. Don’t look down at the ball, he told them, wanting the girls to learn to trust their hands.

Sall is a physical trainer for the Pikine Basket Club, which practices at the Jacques Chirac Center. About 600 children play basketball at this recreational center in Pikine, a suburb bordering Dakar. The youngest players, ages 6 to 7, are introduced to the game on mini hoops. The oldest are 18. Sall is also a die-hard fan of the National Basketball Association.

It is a picture that would delight the N.B.A. — a devotee of its league teaching basketball to youngsters on a continent in which it sees tremendous economic opportunity.

Recently, after finishing with his club duties, Sall had been staying up late to watch the playoffs — the games often start after 11 p.m. local time — even after his favorite player, LeBron James, was eliminated in the first round.

“I am passionate, I watch every game,” Sall said, playfully offended at the suggestion that he watched only James. “I never sleep,” he added jokingly.

The N.B.A. has been promoting basketball in Africa for more than 20 years, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort. The aim is to cultivate an immense potential fan base, the way it has in China, while also tapping into the rich talent pool on the continent. Much of the league’s work is concentrated in Senegal, where it operates an academy for high-school-age players, an N.B.A. Africa office and the headquarters of the Basketball Africa League. N.B.A. Africa’s investors include former N.B.A. players and former President Barack Obama (who also has an equity stake). The B.A.L. was announced in 2019 with FIBA, the sport’s international governing body. Its first season was in 2021.

Although N.B.A. Africa is not yet profitable, the investment seems to be producing results. Soccer may still be the king of sports on the continent, but basketball is becoming increasingly popular. People throughout Africa play on local club teams and in after-school programs. The N.B.A. has generated plenty of good will by building courts, libraries and homes; administering basketball camps and other development programs; and supporting gender equality. But some wonder about the league’s long-term commitment and whether the support needed for basketball to flourish can be sustained.

“As much as we are investing in Africa, the opportunity is so enormous I worry that we’re under investing,” Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, said in an interview. “There’s so much opportunity, but it’s not always easy to know how to deploy capital, which government you should be dealing with, who the honest brokers are. And so we’re learning as we go.”

The Start

The league’s — and Silver’s — connection to Africa goes back decades.

Silver, 62, spent a month in Malawi after college with a friend whose father led the United Nations’ mission there. Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics great, visited the continent on a State Department-sponsored trip in 1959. In 1993, David Stern, the N.B.A. commissioner at the time, led a trip to South Africa, where league executives and players met with Nelson Mandela.

Today, about 10 percent of N.B.A. players are either African or have at least one parent from Africa. A vast majority of its players are African American.

The league is also conscious of population growth figures, which say that by 2050, one in four people on the planet will be African.

The league’s first African office opened in Johannesburg in 2010. Eleven years later, a second was opened in Dakar, followed by others in Lagos, Nigeria; Cairo; and Nairobi, Kenya. Investors and strategic partners like Obama were tapped in 2021 to help make N.B.A. Africa a stand-alone entity that operated its offices and the B.A.L.

Beyond money, the N.B.A. emphasized connection and expertise. Most investors in N.B.A. Africa and the B.A.L. either are African or have conducted business or humanitarian work in Africa.

Luol Deng, who played at Duke University and then spent 15 seasons in the N.B.A., was among the former players who invested. Deng, 39, was born in what is now South Sudan and fled with his family to Egypt as a child. He is the president of South Sudan’s basketball federation, which earned Africa’s automatic qualifying berth to this year’s Summer Olympics in Paris.

On a recent evening, Deng was in Dakar Arena, watching as the stands filled up with fans before a B.A.L. game.

“I went from being a refugee in Egypt, never seen a basketball game, to being in the N.B.A.,” he said. “So now imagine for these kids. This is in their backyard.”

With the B.A.L., the N.B.A. accomplished something it couldn’t do in China: help establish a league that it could operate. The 12 teams in the league play in three conferences, which include the six champions from leagues in Angola, Egypt, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia. Six teams earned their spots this year through a qualifying tournament. Seeding games were played in Pretoria, South Africa; Cairo; and Dakar, with eight teams advancing to the playoffs in Kigali, Rwanda.

Silver remembers meeting with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and selling him on the positive economic impact that building a basketball arena could have on a city, citing examples from the United States in which arenas helped revitalize urban centers.

“President Kagame, he then, right in a meeting with us, made a decision to build a new arena,” Silver said.

AS Douanes, a team from Dakar, was playing the night that Deng spoke about basketball in Africa. The team won on a buzzer beater in front of a nearly full arena. Fans roared, danced and banged Senegalese drums in celebration. The crowds were more sparse when the local team wasn’t playing.

When APR Rwanda, a team from Kigali, played earlier that day, a group of women blew horns behind the courtside seats. One of them, Denise Uwase, said that her country’s interest in basketball “grew after the genocide against Tutsi. Everyone wants to join because it’s a smart game. It’s a game that healed many people.”

Amadou Gallo Fall, the president of the B.A.L., hopes that the league can one day become one of the best in the world.

He’d also like to see it be profitable.

At the moment, it’s hard to know which goal is more challenging. There have been reports of teams not paying their coaches and players. Often, the teams with the financial resources to compete are tied to national governments, which creates other complications. A team from Burundi had to forfeit its games because it refused to wear jerseys with sponsorships from Visit Rwanda. On Instagram, players on the team said the government of Burundi had forbidden them to wear the jerseys.

As for attracting young fans — who may dream of playing in the N.B.A. — Deng thought back to his own childhood.

“When I was growing up and I was back on the continent, there’s no way I would make my mom pay $10 for me to come watch an N.B.A. game,” he said. “That’s a lot.”

He added: “We’re asking Africans and people that are struggling day to day to actually spend money to come watch this, which, in the Western world and Europe and so on, it works. But in Africa it’s not going to work.”

Deng would like to see sponsors buy tickets to the games and distribute them to local families. Perhaps they could even help with transportation to games, he said.

“These companies in Africa are making so much money,” he said. “For me, I always challenge all these companies in Africa, on the continent, what’s the impact for the work they’re doing?”

Basketball Dreams

About 40 miles inland and east of Dakar, the coastal breeze disappears and gives way to a choking heat. Bougainvillea grow near the highway, like beautiful pink, orange and red flowering weeds, and goats loll around the vegetation and red sand.

This is Thies, one of the largest cities in Senegal and home to the SEED Project, a basketball center that Gallo Fall founded in 1998. Its logo is a baobab tree — also known as the tree of life — sprouting from half a basketball. Gorgui Dieng, a first-round N.B.A. draft pick in 2013, trained here before finishing high school in the United States.

“Most of our kids come from underprivileged backgrounds, and we bring them into the system and give them an education; you give them basketball skills for them to hone further in other countries like the U.S., Europe, Asia,” said Joseph Lopez, the president of the SEED Project.

He added: “After they get their degrees and their basketball experience, they come back to their home countries, where they become contributors to their systems and they create jobs.”

SEED, one of the numerous organizations whose interest in promoting basketball in Africa predate the N.B.A.’s push, opened its boys’ academy in 2002 and now also has a girls’ academy. It served as a blueprint for the N.B.A. Academy, which started in Thies before moving to Saly, a coastal town about an hour south of Dakar. In a nod to its roots, a SEED banner still hangs in the academy’s gym.

About two miles from SEED, a man rode a scooter into a teal-and-salmon-painted gym to drop off water for women participating in a camp for referees and coaches. It was 97 degrees outside and only slightly cooler inside.

Syra Sylla, a former sports journalist who is now a communications professional working to increase access to basketball in Senegal, especially for women and girls, organized the camp. She said it included 10 women from Senegal, eight from Morocco and two from Mauritania. A German governmental organization called GIZ funded the camp.

“In Morocco, it’s normal to be in sports if you’re a woman,” Sylla said. “In Senegal, it’s normal but not so normal. In Mauritania, it’s really rare. So the idea is also that they can see how it’s working in other countries, and sometimes they can see how privileged they are or how not privileged they are.”

Fatou Bintou Mangane, 19, used to hang around her brother’s basketball practices so often that finally a coach suggested she join.

“We’re taught to be leaders, having self-confidence, to be a role model,” she said. “Coming here, I thought they were only going to teach us about coaching, but it’s not the case.”

Khary Fall, 33, brought her 8-month-old son and his nanny to help care for him while she was at the camp. She started a center to promote basketball in Mauritania, and while some have told her that the sport takes away from her ability to care for her son and her home, her husband supports her involvement.

“I don’t have a problem with what people say,” Fall said through an interpreter. “The Federation of Basketball of Mauritania, the president, understands now that many women do sports, especially basketball.”

Sylla, 40, was born and raised in France, but visited Senegal regularly as a child and moved to the country five years ago.

She visits her family village of Gasse Doro, population 150, at least once a month. There is a simple basketball court there with rims attached to wooden backboards. Some children in the village do their homework under the lights on the court because they don’t have electricity at home, she said.

Sylla has “mixed feelings” about the N.B.A.’s work in Africa. She likes that its presence shines a light on the places it visits and makes children in those places feel valued. But she wishes the league would work more with the grass-roots groups spreading the game.

“When they leave, this is the organization who’s staying with the kids,” Sylla said. “And if the kids have frustrations or something, this is the organization who’s responsible. And the N.B.A. doesn’t know what is happening.”

Joel Embiid, who won the N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Player Award in 2023, grew up in Cameroon and didn’t start playing organized basketball until he was 15. The N.B.A. believes that if children play when they are younger, it will both give them a positive outlet and increase the probability that talented players develop into professionals, like Embiid.

“When we opened the N.B.A. Africa office in Johannesburg in 2010, we didn’t say, ‘Let’s launch a professional league.’ It was about making it accessible,” Gallo Fall said. He added, “We believe that when kids are exposed to basketball, if they have access, they’ll love it.”

The N.B.A.’s first official event on the continent was a Basketball Without Borders camp for teenagers in 2003. The league has since held Jr. N.B.A. programs for younger children in 19 African countries and opened its N.B.A. Academy in Senegal for elite high-school-age players from the continent.

The academy participants live on a campus they share with a soccer academy. They practice in a large gym that has two basketball courts and some workout equipment. In the summer, the air-conditioning unit doesn’t quite cool the whole space.

The players attend school, with both academic and practical lessons. Roland Houston, the technical director of the academy, said that one goal was to foster camaraderie among people from different African countries.

“I’ve made a lot of friends, brothers, these guys here in the academy,” said Khaman Maluach, a 7-foot-2 center who will go to Duke next year. “A lot of people from different places have created that bond that will last forever. It’s very special.”

Maluach was born in South Sudan, but grew up in Uganda. He played basketball in part because he became too tall for soccer.

Another academy player, Ulrich Chomche, has entered this year’s N.B.A. draft.

“We built that basketball gym on what used to be banana trees,” said Chris Ebersole, who leads international basketball development at the N.B.A. “To see that and have players go to Duke and the N.B.A. and G League Ignite, to see where it started to that, is really something.”

A Growing Footprint

Silver said that it would be “a while” before the N.B.A.’s ventures in Africa were profitable, and that the league was behind on its projections, in part because the B.A.L.’s start was constrained by the coronavirus pandemic. But he said the league was achieving attendance and viewership goals.

“We’re more focused on top-line growth, on the amount of revenue we can generate, than profitability per se,” Silver said. “Because our plan for the foreseeable future is to continue to invest any revenue we generate back into the business there.”

And the N.B.A.’s footprint does seem to be growing in Africa.

Aziz Sy, 34, grew up in Dakar and runs a business incubator. He started following the N.B.A. as a child so that he could make conversation with the cool kids at school. He soon recognized the league as an example of an arena where Black people set a cultural agenda.

“Michael Jordan in the ’90s was such a huge phenomenon,” Sy said. “With him came the idea of a Black person basically on top of the world.”

Basketball turned into an obsession while he was living in Boston for college. But it was difficult to watch games when he moved back to Senegal. He watched the 2014 finals in a nightclub that agreed to put the game on television at 2 a.m.

Now, Sy has League Pass, which is available in almost every African country. For $75 a year, he can watch every N.B.A. game from home.

As Sy watches companies and foreign governments try to establish themselves in Africa, he worries that some of them, in their efforts to capitalize on the continent’s surging population, aren’t thinking enough about the challenges African people face. The N.B.A., in his mind, has been different.

“They’ve really come in and tried to understand the country, understand the people,” he said.

But considering the league’s altruistic aims could wait for another time. It was close to 1 a.m. in Dakar. The Minnesota Timberwolves were playing the Denver Nuggets in Game 6 of the Western Conference semifinals. There was basketball to watch.

Ousmane Balde contributed reporting. Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.

A pillar of the N.F.L.’s meteoric rise over the past six decades has been its strategy of making nearly all games available mostly free to fans on national networks. The league has stuck to this approach even as Major League Baseball, the N.B.A. and other leagues moved more of their games onto cable and satellite broadcasters and subscription streaming services.

The strategy has paid off: Ninety-three of the 100 most-watched programs on television last year were N.F.L. games, according to Nielsen.

Yet N.F.L. games are not cheap and ubiquitous enough for all fans. This month, the league has been in federal court in Los Angeles fending off a class-action suit brought by millions of customers who paid for Sunday Ticket, the subscription service on DirecTV that showed all out-of-market games on Sundays.

The plaintiffs claim that the N.F.L. colluded with CBS and Fox to artificially inflate the price of the service, which cost roughly $300 a season, because the networks viewed Sunday Ticket as competition. The plaintiffs argue that the N.F.L. dismissed offers to create cheaper services that would have let fans buy games based on teams. They are seeking damages of $7 billion, which could be tripled under antitrust statutes. That could take a significant bite out the league’s annual media rights, which are now worth more than $10 billion a year.

Some businesses might have settled for far less to avoid the risk of going to trial and facing an unpredictable jury. But the N.F.L. has taken its chances in court because it wants — indeed needs — to preserve the right to cut exclusive media deals on behalf of all 32 of its teams. Congress granted the N.F.L. an exemption to do so in 1961, and it has fueled the league’s growth ever since.

The N.F.L. is now a $20 billion business, and its success is due in part to the sharing of its rights deals, which are split evenly among all 32 teams. This formula helps teams in small media markets, like the Kansas City Chiefs, compete for players with New York teams.

“This case cuts to the center of sports,” said Robert Boland, who teaches sports law at Seton Hall University. “The N.F.L. did so well under its antitrust protection that the case is a testament to how powerful the N.F.L. has become.”

The case, which has featured testimony by Commissioner Roger Goodell and the Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, is likely to be handed over to the jury this week. Repeatedly, the case has not gone well for the plaintiffs. Last week, Judge Philip Gutierrez, in a rare display, admonished them for wasting time and complicating what he said should have been a straightforward case.

“The way you have tried this is far from simple,” Gutierrez said last Tuesday. “This case has turned into 25 hours of depositions and gobbledygook.”

The jury, of course, may see it differently. If the N.F.L. loses the case, it is likely to appeal, which would only prolong a case that began nearly a decade ago. At the time, Sunday Ticket aired on DirecTV, which broadcast the service for nearly 30 years. It moved to YouTube TV last year.

However the case goes, its existence says a lot about not just the dominance of the N.F.L. — by far the biggest sports league in annual revenue — but also how fans’ expectations have changed. We live in a world of instant gratification, where viewers seek to watch whatever they want, whenever they want it, and often for little or nothing.

As millions of viewers have ditched cable and satellite TV, and subscribed to Netflix and Hulu ad hoc, the league has tried to meet fans where they are, something the streaming services also crave. A handful of games now appear exclusively on Peacock, Amazon Prime and other platforms each season. The response has been largely negative, partly because fans don’t want to have to subscribe to so many streaming services just to get games.

“This is a day and age when everyone says, ‘I want my things on my time, whenever I want it,’” said Phil de Picciotto, the president and founder of Octagon, a sports marketing firm. “But that’s impossible for businesses to deliver,” he said. “Low cost comes with mass products.”

The N.F.L. was not shy in court about defending Sunday Ticket’s premium pricing. The league, Goodell said, did not want to hurt CBS and Fox, which were each paying billions of dollars for their rights to show the Sunday games that were also fed to DirecTV.

“Well, it’s a premium product, I think, primarily because you have access to additional games,” Goodell said on the stand last week. “And that access — you know, it can impact negatively on our broadcast networks, so broadcast networks are very concerned about the impact on them in reaching the broader audience. But I think it’s a premium product because I think it’s incredible content.”

The plaintiffs produced evidence that ESPN had proposed cutting the price of Sunday Ticket to $70 and selling single-team packages. Goodell said on the stand that the league had passed on the offer because ESPN would have combined its own content with the N.F.L. games, not simply shown the games as DirecTV did.

In some ways, the business of broadcasting games has moved on from the details at question in this case. YouTube TV is entirely online, and the networks are still able to broadcast their games over the air.

Then again, YouTube has to recoup its investment, too, so consumers aren’t necessarily going to get supercheap subscriptions. The plan now costs $350 a year, on top of the subscription to YouTube TV.

Octavius Catto’s impact was mostly unknown here at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, amid the sport’s heroic feats of lore and legend, like Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak, Ted Williams’s .406 batting average and Hank Aaron’s 715th home run to break Babe Ruth’s record.

Catto, born a free Black man, turned to baseball in the shadows of the Civil War. He was a founder of Philadelphia’s all-Black Pythian Base Ball Club, which included Frederick Douglass’s son, Charles. (They lost their first game, 70-15, but improved quickly.) The Pythians applied for and were denied entry into Pennsylvania’s association of amateur baseball and the National Association of Base Ball Players.

The story of Catto, who was also a civil rights activist before his 1871 assassination, is among many that the museum is showcasing in its new exhibit “The Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball.”

“It has been documented that we’ve been playing baseball going back to the period of being enslaved,” said Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., and a member of the exhibit’s advisory committee. “Baseball has always been an important part of the African American experience in this country. It’s just the fact that it wasn’t documented in the pages of American history books.”

The exhibit is opening at a time when the percentage of American-born Black players in Major League Baseball is historically low. About 40 percent of major league baseball players last season were players of color, according to a report by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, but only about 6 percent identified as either Black or African American, the lowest since tracking started in 1991. The 2022 World Series, between the Philadelphia Phillies and Houston Astros, featured no American-born Black players for the first time in 72 years.

“It continues the conversation, which is great,” Curtis Granderson, a three-time All-Star, said of the exhibit. “And that’s what you want to have. You want to have the conversation go from one generation to the next.”

In recent years, baseball has sought to rectify previous omissions and oversights related to its history. None is more momentous than the recent incorporation of statistics from several different Negro leagues into official Major League Baseball statistics, where, for example, Josh Gibson replaces Ty Cobb for highest batting average of all time. The Hall of Fame, which is not funded by Major League Baseball, also acknowledged in recent years that the legacies of enshrinees like Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Cap Anson included maintaining the color barrier that remained until 1947.

One player the Hall of Fame recruited for its recent advisory committee was Dave Stewart, a standout starting pitcher and World Series most valuable player with the Oakland A’s, who discussed the full spectrum of his experiences to help inform the exhibition. At the start of his career, he suffered isolation as the lone Black player on a team while busing through tiny minor league towns. Once, he said, a racist tried to run him over in a parking lot in Mississippi. But he was eventually able to meet heroes from previous generations, like Bob Gibson, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, and found camaraderie.

“We talked about those experiences and what it felt like to be in that situation and how I was treated or how we were treated at that time,” Stewart said. “We talked about style of play. You look at guys like Rickey Henderson and Reggie Jackson, and the style and brand of play and what they did. Were they more acceptable or less acceptable because it was Rickey Henderson doing it versus if Cal Ripken would’ve done something like that?”

As part of the exhibit’s opening, there was an exhibition game featuring more than two dozen former Black big leaguers like Granderson, Matt Kemp and Prince Fielder.

“The reason I said yes was to get a chance to be with all those guys again,” said Granderson, who played in the majors from 2004 to 2019. “It’s the first time I’d be around so many Black ballplayers that I played against, played with, watched growing up.”

It was a reminder that even recently, Black representation on big-league diamonds was more common. Among the items in the new exhibit’s section on the modern era is a T-shirt worn by Mookie Betts at the 2022 All-Star game emblazoned with “We need more Black people at the stadium.”

TOM SHIEBER, THE HALL OF FAME’S SENIOR CURATOR, read from “De Witt’s Base-Ball Guide of 1868” during a recent tour of the exhibit. The document noted that the rejection of Octavius Catto’s team, the Pythians, from the National Association of Base Ball Players was based on the rationale that “if colored clubs were admitted, there would be in all probability, some division of feeling, whereas, by excluding them no injury could result to anybody.”

“It’s like, ‘What?’” Shieber asked. “It’s so weird to connect the dots that way, but they did. One thing we tell here is the color line isn’t drawn just with that moment or another. It gets heavier and bolder and bolder and stronger with all sorts of things going on.”

The new exhibit explores Jackie Robinson’s life beyond breaking that barrier, along with other, lesser-known thresholds. One item on display is the championship ring that a 19-year-old Hank Aaron received when he integrated the South Atlantic League in 1953.

Robinson’s story is universally celebrated as the tale of triumph and preservation that it is. But reintegration, as Shieber likes to call it, coincided with the collapse of the Negro leagues. The exhibit does not shy away from exploring those ramifications.

“It is absolutely a bittersweet kind of story,” Kendrick said. “Those owners and the older players in the Negro leagues essentially took one for the team. It reminds us that there is always a cost for what is deemed progress. And Black economy paid a dear cost for this progress.”

After reintegration, executives of Major League Baseball established an unwritten quota system limiting the number of Black players on rosters, Shieber said.

“This resulted in lopsided trades,” he added. “That’s not just a one-on-one trade. That’s a, ‘We’ve got enough Black players trade.’”

Near the exhibit’s end Shieber pointed out the locker once used by Willie Mays that Barry Bonds took over as a San Francisco Giants player.

One of Stewart’s cherished early memories was meeting Mays, his favorite player, as a 5-year-old. But Stewart could also look up to Gibson, Aaron, Frank Robinson and a host of other Black stars.

Today, he said, children probably emulate Betts. He struggled to name another current American-born Black star.

Under the surface, numbers are improving. The league has established several programs to encourage, identify and nurture young Black players. An increasing number of Black players have been among the top draft picks in recent years — 12 of the first 100 three years ago, 13 of the top 100 in 2022, and 10 of the top 50 in last year’s draft.

“We are going to have to be patient, though, and as a society, we aren’t very patient,” Kendrick said. “This trend didn’t happen overnight. The solution isn’t going to occur overnight either.”

Telling stories like those of Catto, from as far back as 150 years ago, will help those efforts, Kendrick believes. “It will,” he said, “be an awakening.”