How 'bout that? I opened the chapter on Sports in that book and found these comments:

..."But the mark on basketball of today's players can be measured by more than money or visibility. It's a question of style. For there are clear differences between "black" and "white" styles of playing... Most simply [remember we are talking culture and not chromosomes}, "black" basketball is the use of superb athletic skill to adapt to the limits of space imposed by the game. "White" basketball is the pulverization of that space by sheer intensity...

This liquid grace is an integral part of "black ball, almost exclusively the province of the playground player. Some white stars like Bob Cousy, Billy Cunningham, Doug Collins, and Paul Westphal had it: the body control, the moves to the basket, the free-ranging mobility.They also have the surface case [face?] that is integral to the "black style; an incorporation of the ethic of mean streets-to "make it" is not just to have wealth, but to have it without strain. Whatever the muscles and organs are doing, the face of the "black" star almost never shows it. George Gervin of the San Antonio Spurs can drive to the basket with two men on him, pull up, turn around, and hit a basket without the least flicker of emotion...

If there is a single trait that characterizes "black" ball it is leaping agility...Speed, mobility, quickness, acceleration, "the moves"-all of these are catch-phrases that surround the "black" playground style of play. So does the most racially tinged of attributes "rhythm". Yet rhythm is what the black stars themselves talk about; feeling the flow of the game, finding the tempo of the dribble, the step, the shot. It is an instinctive quality, one that has led to difficulty between systematic coaches and free-form players...

There is another kind of basketball that has grown up in American. It is not played on asphalt playgrounds with a crowd of kids competing for the court; it is played on macadam driveways by one boy with a ball and a backboard nailed over the garage; it is played in Midwestern gyms and on Southern dirt courts. It is a mechanical, precise development of skills...It is "white" basketball: jagged sweaty, stumbling, intense. A "black" player overcomes an obstacle with finesse and body control; a "white" player reacts by outrunning or outpowering the obstacle...

"White" ball, then, is the basketball of patience and method. "Black" ball is the basketball of electric self-expression. One player has all the time in the world to perfect his skills, the other a need to prove himself. These are slippery categories, because a poor boy who is black can play "white" and a white boy of middle-class parents can play "black". Jamaal Wilkes and Paul Westphal are athlets who defy these categories. And what makes basketball the most intriguing of sports is how these styles do not necessarily clash; how the punishing intensity of "white" players and the dazzling moves of the "blacks" ca fit together, a fushion of cultures that seems more and more difficult in the world beyond the out-of-bounds line".

Jeff Greenfield, "The Black and White Truth about Basketball" {1975}cp. 375-378
signifin{g}, santifin,' & slam dunking: A Reader In African American Expressive Culture {Gina Dagel Capon, ed.; University of Mass. Press, 1999}.

Note: I added the word "face" in italics and bracket because I wondered if that was a misprint/typo.

Note 2: So that's where that title of the movie "White Men Can't Jump" came from.