Did you see William C. Rhoden’s wild column, D-League Team Could Bring Rens Back To Harlem, in the New York Times today?

It makes me wanna smack somebody seriously upside the head, and its gotta be either David Stern and his N.B.A., or the Rev. Calvin Butts III and his Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC). Or both. Stern for his insincerity, and Butts for his blind greed.

Rhoden is a well known sports writer; he’s the guy who wrote Forty Million Dollar Slaves, that great book which explains why highly-paid athletes (NBA and other sports) have no clue about how powerless and vulnerable they really are.

Rhoden says that N.B.A. commissioner David Stern claims he wants to put an N.B.A. Development League (D-League) team in Harlem. “The Knicks are all over it,” says Stern. Yeah, right.

But if so, then the only place that team should play, says Rhoden, is at the old, once-famous Renaissance Ballroom and Casino on the corner of 138th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. That’s where legendary New York Renaissance, a.k.a. the Harlem Rens basketball team used to play.

Former Rens player John Isaacs, now 93 years old, poses in front of the Renaissance Ballroom in 2005 with kids from the neighborhood. “This place means a lot to me,” says Isaacs.

That building has been vacant and boarded up since the late-1970s and since 1991 its owner, the Abyssinian Baptist Church (and its related ADC), have squandered opportunities to bring the structure back to life as the magnificent jewel of Harlem that it once was.

For years the surrounding community, and Harlem extended, had been hoping to protect the rich cultural heritage of the Renaissance Ballroom and Casino by having it designated as a historical landmark.

For years, Butts, supposedly the local community leader, fought to block any efforts to memorialize and preserve the place while it rotted away.

(Courtesy of Rachel Eschenbach.) A recent photo of the Renaissance Ballroom shows a tree growing out of its roof, a symbol of years of neglect by Abyssinian Development Corporation.

Owned and operated by African-American entrepreneurs, the Renaissance was Harlem’s first multi-purpose entertainment complex where movies, plays, assemblies, dancing, and sports could be enjoyed. At a time when black people were forced to sit in the balconies at racially segregated theaters in their own communities, the Renaissance promoted itself as the first and only theater in New York City “built by Colored capital and owned and managed by Colored people.”

The Aristocrat of Harlem. A vintage program from the Renaissance Ballroom, circa 1930.

The Rens, the brainchild of team owner and Hall of Fame member Robert Douglas, featured Hall of Fame players Charles “Tarzan” Cooper and William “Pop” Gates, as well as others deserving of enshrinement, including 93-year-old John Isaacs, who is still living (and working every day as a counselor at a Boys and Girls Club). The Rens dominated basketball from the late 1920s through the early 1940s and won the inaugural World’s Professional Basketball Tournament championship in 1939 by beating America’s ten best white teams.

Butts, who is no fool, knew that landmark designation would prevent his plans to tear down the building and replace it with high-paying condos.

Rhoden, the sentimental dreamer, says he can see a new Renaissance basketball team playing in Harlem, at the old ballroom.

Stern, the patronizing saint, thinks he is teaching us something. “Harlem represents a basketball tradition that for decades and decades and decades has given the N.B.A. so many players,” Stern explained to Rhoden. Really?!

An advertisement promoting the grand opening of the Renaissance in 1922.

I part of me wants to smack Rhoden upside the head too, for proposing a vision that’s too little and too late, especially from a journalist with his clout. Couldn’t he have written this column ten years ago? Five years ago? One year ago? Did he have to wait for Stern to blow his own wind chime?

Earlier this year, as reported in Rhoden’s own newspaper, Butts and ADC successfully defeated landmark designation once and for all.

They did it with the unprecedented help of some surprisingly influential (but disappointing) supporters. The Landmarks Commission voted 6-1 against landmark protection after hearing opposing arguments from the Municipal Arts Society, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Historic Districts Council, and, of all people, former New York City Mayor Dinkins. Landmark designation “would create insurmountable obstacles to bringing ballroom and the cultural space back to life,” they argued.

The voices of the people of Harlem couldn’t stop the full scale sell out.

“It’s a great mistake to feel that modern development needs to crowd out the great history,” Morningside Heights Historic District Committee member Carolyn Kent told the New York Sun.

As Chris Rock would say, “Grand opening! Grand closing!”

ADC will gut the historic interiors of the structure and build a 19-story condo tower in its place, which reportedly will have 112 units, 27,000 square feet of cultural and performance space, 10,000 square feet of community space and 10,000 square feet of commercial space.

Some parts of the building’s facade might remain for show.

Back to basketball. Although they won’t play at the Renaissance, of course, I would be delighted if the D-League brought the Rens back to Harlem, because that would require the N.B.A. to create a collaboration with my company, Black Fives, Inc., which owns the trademarking and merchandising rights to the New York (Harlem) Rens name, as well as related names and intellectual property.

Fans of Black Fives, especially those from Harlem, have sought such a collaboration for a long time because it could enable the advancement of many culturally and historically enriching basketball-related initiatives.

Major League Baseball has a long standing collabo with the Negro Leagues, and it has worked OK even though the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is in trouble.

A basketball alliance would pose a different since in many ways the NBA views any other sports property (i.e., Black Fives) as taking away from its focus if not from its potential revenues. Besides, I think Mr. Stern is still pissed about having had to assign that original Rens trademark to Black Fives in the first place.

But I think we can get over it, and people would be really excited if something like that did go down. How about it N.B.A.?

Hmm. To mock another patronizing saint: Mr. Stern, tear down that wall!

Is David Stern merely pandering to African Americans in Harlem and therefore everywhere? Is Calvin Butts III doing a disservice to the community and therefore to black culture everywhere?

What do you think?