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Fantastic long-read: How black NBA players have embraced SLC

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How black Utah Jazz players have embraced Salt Lake City

After catching a rare sight of a black man pumping gas in Salt Lake City in 1980, Utah Jazz guard Darrell Griffith felt the need to approach his fellow ...

Full Story...
 
https://theundefeated.com/features/...ave-embraced-salt-lake-city/?ex_cid=tutwitter


There is a ton of great quotes in there from Jazz players both past and present. I thought it was fascinating, and one of the better national stories on the Jazz that I've ever read. Here's an excerpt from Ron Boone:

“We don’t have the ghetto. If you’re a player and you have a problem with living here, look at the NBA schedule,” Boone, 70, said. “Out of the season, how many days are you in town? If you’re a professional basketball player, you want to be a professional basketball player. You can dedicate yourself to being that player in a city like this for the short period of time you’re going to be here.”
But Boone certainly is very sensitive to any black player who finds it difficult to live and work in lily-white Salt Lake City.
“What I don’t like from people here, especially white people, is when they say they don’t understand why blacks don’t want to come here to play. They don’t have any right to speak on that,” Boone said.
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There's also a very cringe-worthy story about a family ordering fried chicken on MLK day
 
“A white family of four came in after they searched on the internet for the best fried chicken in Salt Lake City. They ordered four fried chicken dinners in honor of Dr. King,”
 
“I used to go to Southern Plantation. That was the spot,” Bailey said. “When other NBA teams would come in, they would go to Southern Plantation. It was like home."

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PG_AB said:
This is probably the best Jazz article I've seen.. so many zingers.. I'm laughing my *** off.
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It was nice because you got a different side to all of the general media sound bites of "I thought it would be so bad but it turned out to be heaven!" that the SLC media tends to get out of the players. There's always another side to the story, and credit to the journo for getting such a wide-ranging cohort of responses from many aspects of the life of black men in Utah

Catfish quotes were also hilarious
 
“There are places to go out on the weekends. There is a few that play hip-hop. You see more black people there. It just depends on what you like. As long as I like the music and the girls, I’m OK,” Gobert said.
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Lmao Rudy prolly sleeps with so many women
 
Bernard King, 5 sexual assault charges? Wasn't he in Utah for like 9 months?

Sucks to know this - today he's treated like a elder statesman in the NYC area.
 
“I brought chocolate to ‘White City.’ I put on concerts,” Russell said. “I put on events. I had people saying, ‘Well, damn, Utah is not bad at all.’ It was about having fun while you were playing there and having a great atmosphere. We had a ball. Everyone was looking forward to the next one.

“Karl came out to the concerts and the comedy shows. All of the players used to come to my shows. Even John Stockton came to my shows. No, I’m lying. He didn’t come. But all the brothas were there.”
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I literally LOL'ed.
 
Thurl Bailey's wife's family disowned her for dating a black man. Thats cold.

I now see why Thurl Bailey puts up that mormon front. She gave up everything to be with him. He seems like a genuinely good dude.
 
I do always wonder why people don't like signing with Utah. Always very frustrating to just hear people say 'no one wants to sign in Utah' and not understand why. This made for a pretty interesting read, nice to get some new perspective on the team that I really have no reason to support, and the associated city and state.

I'm pretty sure I'm one of the very few diehard Jazz fans in the world who have never been to Utah, didn't start being a fan till after Stockton/Malone, and don't have people on the team from my country (I guess I'm technically Australian, but I've never lived there and I'm ethnically from HK, so really no connection at all). Anybody else that doesn't fit into those categories?
 
SLC area has very few blacks no doubt.... but West Valley and SLC proper both rank fairly highly for cultural and ethnodiversity (polynesians, asians, latino cultures)... and UTAH as a whole, which outside of Ogden and SLC is as white as it comes, is still not even in the top 10 whitest states in the union.
 
jope said:
SLC area has very few blacks no doubt.... but West Valley and SLC proper both rank fairly highly for cultural and ethnodiversity (polynesians, asians, latino cultures)... and UTAH as a whole, which outside of Ogden and SLC is as white as it comes, is still not even in the top 10 whitest states in the union.
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Really?
 
It's true ^

With regard to the article, though, Utah has the 3rd/4th lowest percentage of black people of anywhere in the country.
 
NUMBERICA said:
It's true ^

With regard to the article, though, Utah has the 3rd/4th lowest percentage of black people of anywhere in the country.
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Ya, not many blacks around here. The company I work with got around 600 employees, of which MAYBE 10 are black. Half of those are Africans, not black Americans. That said, I work in the West Valley area, and it looks to me like half of the area's residents are non-white.
 
Utah has a larger than expected Latino, pacific islander and native American populations. I think that is a good thing, bring that diversity in.

Edit: I do think that the white residents of Utah arte pretty open to accepting those of other "races" and cultures. Generally speaking of course. Something brought on by foreign mission service.

In my family alone we speak English, Spanish, Russian, Austrian (Austrian-German) and French.

Of course it is entirely possible that is a bunch of crap and only my limited perspective.
 
SlC proper is like 75% white but most of the children are not. There are almost no single black people in my neighborhood but there are black families. Conversely most of the white people in my neighborhood don't have young families. There's a lot of single and older white people. SLC is going through an interesting demographic transformation. The neighborhood I live in is completely different than the one my children live in demographically. My neighborhood is mostly white their's is mostly not.(we live in the same house)

My kids class
21 kids
9 Hispanic 3 or 4 will probably identify as white Hispanic
6 white kids
3 black kids
1 Indian subcontinent?
1 Pacific Islander
1 I don't know
 
♪alt13 said:
SlC proper is like 75% white but most of the children are not. There are almost no single black people in my neighborhood but there are black families. Conversely most of the white people in my neighborhood don't have young families. There's a lot of single and older white people. SLC is going through an interesting demographic transformation. The neighborhood I live in is completely different than the one my children live in demographically. My neighborhood is mostly white their's is mostly not.(we live in the same house)

My kids class
21 kids
9 Hispanic 3 or 4 will probably identify as white Hispanic
6 white kids
3 black kids
1 Indian subcontinent?
1 Pacific Islander
1 I don't know
Click to expand...

Nobody self identifies as a "white Hispanic." It isn't a thing.
 
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