The NBA has always been home to great legends, great losers and unknowns about the futures of various players, such as the case of Craig Hodges, who won the NBA Finals on July 11, 1992. His career ended 16 days after two championships, and despite being a key figure in cementing the Chicago Bulls dynasty, he’s generally not remembered by many.
For many people, this was a very strange decision because he was already 32 years old and had a lot of career ahead of him, but no team was interested in recruiting him, even though just a few months ago, he won It was his third three-point game, a situation that coincided with the start of his career.
The mystery of the sudden end
Hodges has struggled with racism nearly his entire life, from his childhood to his school days and now in his career, as he recounted in his autobiography, “Long Shot.” His upbringing was marked by the African-American struggle to defend civil rights, which inspired his own struggle to succeed.
In his final year of college, with the NBA on the horizon, he watched one of his closest friends die in a police attack. While there were no obstacles in his career, his social commitments got him into trouble. While with the Milwaukee Bucks, he was criticized for attending a meeting with Louis Farrakhan in which he attempted to bring several teammates to the meeting.
For the above reasons, the team decided to transfer him to the Phoenix Suns without further explanation, coinciding with his year in which he had the highest three-point shooting percentage in the NBA. In 1988, he joined the Chicago Bulls and contributed to the team’s first two championships in the 1990s (1991 and 1992).
Persistence above all else
Despite these changes, Hodges never gave up his activism and even represented the team in the Players Association, where he tried to convince several stars to participate, although without much success.
“Magic Johnson told me he thought it was extreme, Michael Jordan almost laughed at me, and Scottie Pippen was too young to be responsible for something like this,” the former player said in his book. Later, when the championship team was received at the White House, he admitted that he was tempted to do something too controversial.
“I was going to see Bush wearing a dashiki[a typical African garment]but I didn’t write anything. The night before visiting the White House, I was playing table tennis with a friend and I thought: What if You “get to meet someone so important, you have to take the opportunity to send them a message, you have to try to leave a mark of your time there. I have to do this for all those people I will never get the chance to meet. “It’s right there,” Hodges told The Nation.
Ultimately, he chose to write a letter to the president asking for greater engagement with the country’s racial issues and a rethink of foreign policy, a move that ultimately made him a pariah in the NBA.
dire consequences
In his final season with the Bulls, he lifted a championship and won the three-point contest again, but when his contract expired, no one wanted to play for him. “I had just won an NBA championship and three consecutive three-point contests, but I couldn’t continue my NBA career.”
“It seems strange to me that no teams have inquired about his situation. Normally I get at least one call about a player we decide not to renew. Yeah, he can’t make too much defensively. Contribute more, like many other players on the team, in the game, but few can match their shooting percentages,” his coach in Chicago, Phil Jackson, said at the time.
This led to Hodges filing a lawsuit against the league, asking that the league not allow him to continue playing. Afterwards, a Bulls assistant coach confessed to him that the game cared so much about his ideology that he had to leave for Europe, where he stayed until the end of his career in 1998.