The Team-and-“Gunners” Political Metaphor

The Team-and-“Gunners” Political Metaphor turns basketball into a model of political character: a city advances when its people act together, while a self-promoting “gunner” may shine individually and still leave the team—and the city—behind. Andre Fleet uses the contrast to make unity sound both like a practical strategy and a moral demand. Set beside Wes Jordan’s account of campaign money and neighborhood brokers, the metaphor also carries a tension: the language of a team sits within a political world organized through deals, intermediaries, and competing claims to represent the city.

The basketball lesson

Fleet develops his argument through a story about playing for the 76ers against the Boston Celtics in the playoffs. His team is down three games to one in the series and trails by 21 points entering the fourth quarter. The coach, Buster Grant, refuses to let the players respond desperately by forcing long shots. Instead, he tells them to play as a team: only the open player should shoot, and the rule applies to everyone.

The example makes the alternative to the gunner concrete. One forward, Eric Wycoff, has earned the nickname Gunner because he keeps shooting regardless of the defense or whether he is open. Grant does not single him out by name, but lets his eyes rest on him longer than on anyone else. The rebuke is therefore indirect but legible: individual talent becomes a liability when it refuses the discipline of shared play.

The comeback supplies the story’s proof. The 76ers outscore the Celtics 35 to 13 in the final period and win 84 to 83. Seven players share the scoring, and none scores more than six points. Wycoff scores only four, including two free throws, but discovers that he can pass and make plays as well as shoot. Fleet presents the improvement as collective: the team becomes better when its players stop treating personal scoring as the measure of success.

From the court to city politics

Fleet draws the analogy explicitly. Politics, like basketball, can produce a star who attracts attention without helping the whole city. The gunner’s pursuit of personal glory is set against the work of making people into a team—brothers and sisters able to act with unity. Fleet’s account thus gives the metaphor two scales: it describes how a player should behave within a game and how citizens should understand political action together.

At the pulpit, Fleet varies his manner to make that appeal intimate and broad. He speaks at times as a preacher, at times as a neighbor, fishing companion, or former NBA player. The basketball story makes unity accessible through a familiar popular sport, while its closing lesson turns the crowd’s attention toward Atlanta’s political divisions. Fleet calls Atlanta the Black Mecca, then argues that the city cannot function as a team while it remains in the hands of “beige half brothers” courting “the vanilla people.” His target is not simply an opponent’s individual ambition; it is a political order in which leaders, in his telling, seek approval from outside their own constituency rather than build collective power.

He casts his mayoral candidacy, announced for November, as an effort to create the team his people need. His call to unite rejects elites of any color and ends by insisting that the game is not over: unity can make the community’s souls catch fire and allow it to win. The congregation responds with applause and the repeated chant “gotcha back!” The scene’s emotional momentum makes the team an appealing promise of mutual support, not merely a sports tactic.

The campaign machinery behind the ideal

Wes Jordan’s account of citywide elections supplies a harder, less inspirational view of what it takes to assemble political support. He describes learning that a candidate cannot win on merit alone: money and organization are essential, especially people who know each neighborhood and can assess who can deliver votes. The campaign’s practical team is therefore made up not only of candidates and supporters but also of local operators who know how to mobilize particular communities.

Jordan recounts how a stack of letters arrived with checks attached, each offering money in exchange for the candidate’s commitment to an organization’s agenda. One organization offered $20,000 for a series of positions on gay rights. Jordan says he returned the check, then saw himself denounced in The Five Pointer as a homophobe and opportunist; he concluded that rejecting the offer had cost him the gay vote. As the campaign’s costs grew and vendors stopped extending credit, he describes the pressure to reconsider such refusals. His example makes political coalition-building a matter not only of conviction but of money, organized constituencies, and the electoral costs of exclusion.

He also describes get-out-the-vote money as a system of informal cash payments. In the closing days, a neighborhood operator may claim the ability to deliver a set number of votes and demand payment up front. A campaign intermediary delivers the money, after which the candidate has no control over what happens to it and no recourse if the promise fails. Jordan says that an operator who can deliver calls potential voters on election morning to urge them to go to the polls. He acknowledges that money is retained along the way and that the practice amounts to buying votes; in his account, a candidate should set aside half a million dollars for it, while a million dollars would increase the chances of winning by 50 percent. He identifies Andre Fleet as the candidate guaranteed a million dollars in such money.

This account does not simply disprove Fleet’s appeal, but it complicates its meaning. The team is a public ideal of cooperation; the machinery Jordan describes depends on cash, local knowledge, and personal intermediaries. Organization can enable collective participation, but the same system can turn votes into deliverable quantities and political loyalty into a transaction. The metaphor’s force lies partly in this gap between the unity Fleet promises and the methods through which citywide campaigns pursue power.

Atlanta’s core and the meaning of unity

Jordan’s baseball image for the Atlanta Way gives the campaign discussion a broader geography. He recalls peeling away a baseball’s white horsehide cover to find a long winding of white string and, beneath it, a small, hard black rubber core. In his political analogy, the core is the 280,000 Black residents of South Atlanta, whose votes control the city; the surrounding string represents three million white residents of North Atlanta and the counties around the city. The image describes power as layered: a smaller electorate holds decisive control, while a much larger population surrounds it.

Jordan connects that structure to a bargain over development. Recalling a billion-dollar airport expansion under Maynard, he says the mayor told business interests that 30 percent of the project would go to minority contractors. The prospect of receiving the remaining $700 million overcame their initial resistance, and Maynard later took pride in the creation of twenty-five Black millionaires. Jordan calls this arrangement the Atlanta Way. The example presents a form of negotiated inclusion: public investment and minority contracting offer material benefits, while business interests continue to participate in the project.

Read alongside Fleet’s metaphor, the Atlanta Way exposes a question the basketball story cannot settle on its own: what kind of unity is being built, and on whose terms? Fleet condemns the gunner who seeks glory instead of serving the whole team; Jordan describes political order as a negotiation among groups with unequal numbers, money, and leverage. Together, the accounts make the team more than a call for harmony. It is a contest over representation and resources, in which collective purpose may challenge self-interest but must still operate through the city’s political arrangements.

Rhetorical force and limits

Fleet’s story persuades by making its conclusion visible before it is political. The 84–83 comeback shows the cost of desperate individual shooting and the possibility of success through shared play. Wycoff’s change is especially important: the gunner does not have to disappear from the team but must learn that passing and making plays are also forms of excellence. The model is not sameness; it is talent redirected toward a common result.

Yet the metaphor also works as campaign rhetoric. Fleet identifies a divided political present, names unity as the remedy, and presents his candidacy as a means of creating it. The crowd’s response and Roger Too White’s discomfort show how forcefully the appeal marks belonging and exclusion in the room. In the wider account of Atlanta politics, however, unity is not achieved merely by declaring a team. It is negotiated through constituencies, money, organization, and development. The contrast between the stirring basketball lesson and the less idealistic mechanics of campaigning leaves the metaphor both persuasive and unsettled: a team is the promised alternative to political self-interest, but the route to building one runs through the very contests for power that the ideal seeks to overcome.