About High Contrast:
High Contrast: A Story of Basketball, Race and Politics in Oregon 1972, recounting the events surrounding one of Oregon’s most fabled sporting events that occurred fifty years ago in Portland. In an era when high school sports popularity eclipsed both college and pro sports in Oregon, the meeting between the All-Black team from Portland’s Jefferson High and the white “farm boys” from Eastern Oregon’s Baker High captivated the public imagination. The biggest crowd ever to witness an indoor sporting event (13,395 paid admissions) crammed into the Portland Memorial Coliseum to witness the OSAA Boys AAA State Basketball Championship. It was the culmination of Oregon’s own version of “March Madness” as 16 schools descended into town for a five-day hoops extravaganza.
Author and former sportswriter Andrew Kaza tells the tale of an event that seemed to be much more than just a game. Set amidst the backdrop of racist history plus the political tumult of 1972, it may have been a battle for the soul of Oregon.
Author bio
Andrew Kaza grew up in the Portland suburb of Beaverton, but as the son of Portland teacher/musician Eugene Kaza, he was a fan of Portland high school hoops from a young age. A local sportswriter from the age of 15, he covered high school sports for the Valley Times from 1975-1982. As a fifth grader, he was part of a small group of white kids that took part in a voluntary busing program with the Portland Public Schools and was one of two white kids in his class at Martin Luther King Elementary, a school then 97 percent Black. That experience forever impacted his world view of prejudice and discrimination. After a long media career, including 25 years abroad, he returned to live in Oregon full-time in 2015.
With his wife Yee Cheng, he took over a four screen movie theater in of Sisters in 2016. When the Covid pandemic struck and shut down the cinema in spring 2020, he embarked to tell the phenomenal story of the Baker-Jefferson game amidst the tumultuous landscape of 1972. A father of six grown children, he resides in Deschutes County, Oregon with his wife, two cats and a restless Samoyed dog named Ava.