How the NBA's Great Insult Artists Outlasted a Moral Panic and Normalized Talking Trash

Photographs: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

Ostensibly, the NBA's earliest efforts to regulate trash talk in the 1990s—in combination with its stricter penalties and heftier fines for in-game fights—were meant to ward off the high-profile brawls and lower-profile “scuffles,” as former NBA referee Bennett Salvatore puts it, that seemed to increasingly interrupt the course of competition. But really, it was about business as much as anything. As a more demonstrative brand of trash talk emerged from the playgrounds, and out of the fledgling culture of hip-hop, the sports world’s rule makers fretted more than ever about what might look bad for their widening (and predominantly white) television audiences. Then NBA vice president of operations Rod Thorn explained, “It used to be that two players would be talking, and you might be able to hear it in the first row. Now, guys are jumping up in people’s faces, and you can see what they’re getting at in the top row of the building.” What forced the league’s hand from a disciplinary perspective, in Thorn’s telling, was less the trash talk itself than the fact it was becoming more visible and more enduring.

Sociologist and Yale University professor Elijah Anderson has made a comparison between the early concern over trash talk and the panic that swept the American South in the 1950s “when black soul singers were singing all these rock and roll songs.” Per Anderson, “A lot of white church-going types were really threatened by this. They thought somehow they were going to lose control of young people, that young whites would get turned on to black music.” In this sense, the penalization of trash talk was always about control, too, even if only on a subliminal level. According to American University professor Theresa Runstedtler, trash talk “gets linked into this whole racialized discussion about the changing face of basketball,” as Black athletes, starting in the 1960s and ’70s, introduced new styles of play that were seen as foreign and threats to the game. Longtime sportswriter Phil Taylor says, “I’m old enough to remember when coaches got upset when guys would dribble between their legs or throw a skip pass.” He further suggests that old-school college coaches like Bobby Knight, in particular, felt “threatened by that sort of creativity and individuality that trash talk embodies,” because it was beyond their control.

From a league perspective, the business concern—consciously or not—was whether audiences would be turned off by the rise of “Blackness that’s uncontained,” as Runstedtler puts it. She adds, assuming the attitude of league executives at the time, “What’s the future of basketball if it’s so infiltrated with Black hip-hop culture? Are fans still going to want to watch it?” The remedy to this presumed problem was to make the game “more respectable for fans,” she says. “And usually, part of that, the cleaning up of the sport, has to do with cutting down on the appearance of overzealous celebrations or open trash talking.”

But this impulse to muzzle Black athletes for commercial purposes had competitive consequences, too. Players like Gary Payton, who grew up in trash-talk traditions, had spent years cultivating their verbal abilities, along with their physical skills, in an effort to gain actual psychological advantages on the court. The rules against trash talk threatened to strip them of these aspects of their games by legislating in favor of cultural conformation—by demanding a little less noise.

There has long been a racial double standard when it comes to trash talk. Black athletes who talk during games are often cast as loudmouths, volatile, and showy, while vocal white players are lionized as leaders or scrappy hardworkers who leave it all on the floor. “It becomes a sign of his love of the game, and not, ‘Oh, he’s talking trash and gets angry,’” says David J. Leonard, a professor in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race at Washington State University, Pullman. Before his exhibition bout against Conor McGregor, boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.—whose public image is complicated by the fact that, in real life, he has done some genuinely villainous things—called out the sports media for criticizing his use of trash-talk tactics as “arrogant” and “cocky” and “unappreciative,” while Conor McGregor—also maybe not a candidate for the World’s Best Person Award—was lauded for doing the exact same things. But critiques of trash talk are almost always as much of a code as the trash talk itself. “What makes the conversation about the NBA particularly interesting,” adds Leonard, “is it becomes a way to dismiss and deny the artistry and athleticism and the intelligence of players, when it should be, in fact, evidence of all those things.”

For many players, there were also reputational concerns. In a 1994 piece in Sports Illustrated, Chuck Person suggested his notoriety as a trash-talker may have prevented him from making an All-Star team. (More recently, it’s Person’s guilty plea in a college basketball bribery scandal that’s likely hurting his image.) A reputation for trash talk similarly dogged Payton for much of his early career, as the Sonics wouldn’t draft the talented guard without first hiring a private detective to dig into his background; refs issued him regular technical fouls; the media cast him as angry and troubled, a double-edged sword of a player; and USA Basketball initially left him off its 1996 Olympic roster. “Payton’s talkativeness made him less attractive to the selection committee, which generally picked the stars least likely to cause an international incident,” wrote Sports Illustrated. But Payton refused to change his style of play—to compete as anyone other than his authentic, unapologetic self. It wasn’t always easy: Payton heard the criticism but dismissed the fallout as irrelevant—the foul calls, the bad press, the missed opportunities. “If it would have bothered me, it would have made me change my game, and I wasn’t going to change my game for nothing,” he says. Payton understood and embraced the centrality of trash talking to his identity as both a player and a person. He knew who he was and knew what he needed to perform at the peak of his abilities. “I’m doing something right,” he says. “So don’t worry about what I’m saying on the court. I took a lot of criticism. I couldn’t care less.”

In time, this uncompromising approach paid off. As his career wore on and his stature grew, Payton helped shift the cultural conversation about what it means to be a trash-talker: he made it more cool, less deviant, and laid the groundwork for a whole generation of shit-talkers to follow openly in his wake. Even referees eventually became conditioned to the point guard’s verbosity and eased up on their whistles. “They didn’t really get it at first, and they were giving me a lot of techs,” Payton says of the refs. “But I started talking to them and telling them, ‘This is my game. I just talk. That’s just me.’ And a lot of the referees, they started leaving me alone.”

Still, damage had been done. For a time, the term trash talk became so potent—so toxic—that it’s still capable of putting some people off. When I reach out to Rick Fox to see if he’d be open to an interview for this book, for instance, his rep replies, “Were [sic] not interested in anything to do with trash talking.” The stigma runs deep.

Rod Thorn was telling the truth: the NBA’s regulations on player behavior have always had as much to do with optics as anything. Over the years, the league has continued to legislate against visible acts of disrespect, like pointing, stepping over opponents, or dismissively waving off officials. By the time Eli Roe refed his first NBA game in the 2005-2006 season, the league really wasn’t even interested in anything the players were saying, as long as the cameras weren’t catching it. “The NBA generally didn’t address verbal stuff with us because they’re more concerned about how it looks on TV,” he says. Even without official mandates to this end, former NFL and NCAA basketball ref Gene Steratore tells me he felt compelled to send a message when he sensed the optics of a game might be deteriorating. “If players are talking shit every time we have a whistle, that doesn’t look good,” he says. “That doesn’t look good for anyone in the arena, and I’m sure it doesn’t look good on television. You feel that.” (In such moments on the basketball court, Steratore would issue a generalized warning by yelling to his fellow refs during a dead ball, like before a free-throw attempt. He’d say something like, “Hey, Joe, Bill! The next person to talk shit, T their ass up.”)

Steratore didn’t like giving technical fouls or otherwise flagging what he perceived to be natural reactions, like staring at or chest-bumping a defender after a slam dunk. “That was always hard for me,” he says. But those were also often the things leagues wanted to eliminate from the game—“zero tolerance”—and that occasionally forced his hand. Some players can be victims of their own body language, too. A former NBA ref who asks to speak anonymously brings up Draymond Green. “He gets very worked up, so it shows up on camera,” he says. “That puts you in a tough spot. Sometimes you’re just like, ‘Damn, I have to tech him because this is looking bad in front of the whole stadium and on TV.” On the flip side are guys like future Hall of Famer Chris Paul. The same former ref describes Paul to me as deeply dismissive and disrespectful of referees, but also incredibly subdued in his communication methods. “He knows to keep it under the radar,” he says. “You hate him for it, but you can’t really give techs.”

I confess that I find this puzzling. Why would Paul want to annoy the refs? I wonder. How is that to his advantage? “To me, it’s baffling,” says the former ref, who is careful to add that professional referees would never compromise their integrity in an important game or even an important moment, but nevertheless suggests Paul’s sour relationship with officials has otherwise cost him, like on fifty-fifty calls in the first quarters of midseason games. “It has to affect his stats,” he says. And not just that. The former ref adds that officials can easily tune him out, too. “Maybe he wants to come up and talk about the clock or whatever,” he says. “You want to be able to have conversations with refs. It just gets to the point where refs don’t even really listen to you. They’re just like, ‘Ah, it’s Chris Paul. Fuck him.’”

No other refs are willing to comment on the record about this alleged hatred of Chris Paul, although one former NBA official who asks not to be quoted by name on this point says it’s not true that Paul is universally despised and that he’s disturbed by the idea that any ref would treat one player differently than another. Though he adds somewhat cryptically, “Talk to me in another ten years.”

More so than anyone else on the field, including the players, referees are in a unique position to concretize the abstractions of these conversations—how far is too far and what is whistle-worthy behavior—because they’re the ones who’ve been empowered to actually blow the whistle. Veteran MMA ref Herb Dean tells me he rarely enforces the UFC’s prohibition against abusive language (“I mean, we’re punching each other in the face”), but he has come to believe there’s a point at which verbal abuse nevertheless reaches its limit. There’s one fight that sticks out in his mind, when one guy had his opponent in a bad position and taunted him viciously as he tried to pummel him into submission. Saying things like, “Show me your face, bitch. Show me your face.” Dean felt his stomach turn. “It’s a hard thing to describe, but that was too far,” he says. “I did draw a line in my mind. It was horrible. It was demeaning. I felt bad. You know what I mean? This guy, he probably needed therapy after that.”

Steratore has a similar philosophy. He believes trash talk is an expected and essential part of competitive sports—that everyone has opted in—and therefore athletes shouldn’t be overly sensitive about what’s said on the field. But he rejects the idea that athletes must absorb every insult and personal attack without flinching. “You can’t become demeaning. You can’t become degrading,” he says. “We stay away from the things that we should stay away from in life. We stay away from ethnic slurs. Now, I can tell you you’re playing like shit, and you’re dog shit. But that’s not demeaning. That’s healthy.”

Those kinds of red lines can get complicated in practice, even if they’re relatively straightforward on paper. In 2014, for instance, the NFL adopted a zero-tolerance policy for racial and homophobic slurs. But I’ve yet to meet a ref in the NFL (or in the NBA, for that matter) who’ll tell me they automatically penalize a (Black) player for saying something like the N-word, though most acknowledge hearing it plenty. More likely, a ref will issue a warning—That shit is over today!—or simply let it pass. “I don’t remember ever addressing the N-word,” says Roe. “Obviously, if a white person uses it toward a Black person, we would have to step up and address that. But I never had that happen.” As with most trash talk, context is king.

Excerpted from Trash Talk: The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage by Rafi Kohan. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Originally Appeared on GQ