Another thing you can count on when talking about guys who could drain 3-pointers is that hardly anybody brings up Craig Hodges. You don’t know Hodges or maybe faintly recall his name? The three-time NBA 3-Point Shootout champion thinks there could be a good reason for that.
Talent-wise, Hodges was one of the best long-range shooters of his generation, but he wasn’t a starter. Instead of being announced along with Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, Bill Cartwright and Jordan, Hodges was a reliable choice off the bench after John Paxson and B.J. Armstrong for the first half of the Chicago Bulls’ dynasty in the early 1990s after stints with three other teams.
But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have the special talent to help a team win.
In an era when the NBA was dominated by big men like Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon, along with Jordan almost always leading the league in scoring, Hodges stood out for his shooting. He especially shined at the NBA All-Star weekend’s 3-point shooting contest in 1991, he became the record holder for most made shots in a round (21) and most consecutive shots made (19), certainly proving he had a knack for shooting the long ball.
Hodges maybe wasn’t necessary when you had as many weapons as the Bulls did during those years, but plenty of teams would want a guy whose specialty is draining shots from the three-point line. So why then, when the Bulls waived the shooter in 1992 after their second NBA Championship, did no single team bother to pick up his contract? Why aren’t we talking more about Hodges today?
If you ask Hodges, it’s because he was blackballed by the league for speaking out; on a visit the team made to President George H.W. Bush at the White House in 1991, which culminated in the 1996 Craig Hodges vs. the National Basketball Association lawsuit. Hodges, who wore a dashiki on the team’s visit, handed a letter to President Bush’s press secretary pleading with him to come up with a comprehensive plan to end the injustices toward the black community. Hodges, the NBA’s reigning All-Star 3-point shooting contest champion, knew he had to make the best of his opportunity to meet the leader of the free world.
“I was not only an athlete but a descendant of slaves, a child of the Black liberation movement, and a man willing to fight to make the world a better place for the African-American population,” Hodges writes in his new memoir, Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter. “I would use this visit to help escalate discussions of rising incarceration, reparations for slavery, the causes of street violence, and the plight of Black people in the United States to the highest office in the land, on behalf of the community that raised me.”
So how did Hodges go from being a player on one of the NBA’s greatest dynasties to becoming a precautionary tale for professional athletes who speak out on polarizing issues?
“Systematic racism has gone on for years and people don’t want to speak on it. The issue is ugly. People didn’t want to deal with it and I happened to be the one who did,” Hodges tells Rolling Stone. “The ramifications had other athletes say, ‘Look what happened to Hodges. I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want to lose ways to earn money for me and my family.’ I can’t be mad at them for that. Self-preservation is first in our nature.”