If you want confirmation of Thomas Carlyle’s great-man theory of history, look no further than the new HBO miniseries “John Adams.”
The first two installments of the seven-part drama premiere Sunday night at 8. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name by historian David McCullough, “John Adams” chronicles the first 50 years of the United States of America through 50 years in the life of one man. According to the series, the former would not exist without the latter.
Tonight’s first episode, “Join or Die,” begins in 1770 with the Boston Massacre. Tensions are running high in Massachusetts, where many Colonists are angry at being taxed to pay for a government in which they have no representation and resentful that their freedom of trade is strictly limited. One moonlit March night, a group of British troops fires into a crowd of rioters, killing five civilians.
The troops are arrested and charged with murder. There isn’t a single lawyer in the defiant Colony who will defend them until an emissary begs John Adams (played by Paul Giamatti) to take the case. The lawyer has just moved to Boston from the countryside, hoping to increase his practice.
He wins the case, but defending unpopular clients has done nothing for his own popularity or law practice. Yet, “you now have a reputation for impartiality,” one of the rebellious Colonists tells him. They want him to speak out for their cause.

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EW YORK — - The date, March 12, 1944, is not etched in history the way other landmark sporting events are, but for college basketball and the civil rights struggle in the U.S., it should be high on any list.
“It was truly a transformative event,” said Dr. Milton Katz, professor of American studies and liberal arts at the Kansas City Art Institute and author of “Breaking Through: John B. McLendon, Basketball Legend and Civil Rights Pioneer.”
March 12, 1944 was the day of the “Secret Game,” in which McLendon’s team from North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham,now North Carolina Central University, played a team of medical students that was considered the best on the Duke campus in 1944, even better than the varsity team.
“It made everyone involved look at the issue of race differently,” Katz said. “Black players learned that they could compete with white players, and the white players learned the same thing. Race was just a skin color, nothing more.”
The story of the game is just one of the segments in ESPN’s “Black Magic,” a four-hour documentary on basketball at historically black colleges during the civil rights movement. It will air March 16-17.

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Gene Frenette is a sports columnist for the Florida Times-Union. His column usually appears on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
The only thing Chaney remembers about the Jacksonville area he lived in before moving to Blodgett was its nickname, “Black Bottom,” because of the smell from the mud when it was hit by heavy rains.
Even when Chaney’s family moved to Philadelphia at age 14 (after his stepfather found a job there working in a shipyard) and became the city’s top basketball player, he was forced to settle for a 9-to-5 job unloading box cars at Sears & Roebuck. That’s because in those days of segregation, none of the major colleges gave scholarships to African-American players.
So Chaney found himself back in a different kind of Black Bottom, wondering if his dream to keep playing basketball would be snuffed out forever.
“My parents wanted me to get a regular job, because college really wasn’t an option,” Chaney said. “It was such a small world for blacks then. The only whites you knew were the ones you worked for. All we knew about a successful [black] person was listening to Joe Louis fights on the radio.”
Chaney’s story - along with many people who played and coached at black colleges/universities during the early period of America’s civil rights movement - will be chronicled in a four-hour documentary called Black Magic that airs in two parts, tonight and Monday night on ESPN (9 p.m.).

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March 13 (Bloomberg) — Roll over, Sam Adams. Cousin John is about to eclipse you.
Though he was America's first vice president and second president, John Adams hasn't enjoyed the prominence of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin or even cousin Sam Adams, now better known as the namesake of a popular beer than as one of the Founding Fathers.
A new HBO miniseries, which debuts March 16 at 8 p.m. New York time, should help remedy that. Based on the Pulitzer Prize- winning biography by David McCullough and directed by Tom Hooper, “John Adams'' is a laudable work that rightly portrays Adams as one of the most important figures in American history.
Paul Giamatti plays a slightly chunky, deeply passionate and somewhat vain Adams, while Laura Linney, as Abigail Adams, portrays a formidable woman every bit her husband's match. Both turn in spectacular performances over the course of the seven- part series, whose producers include Tom Hanks.
The story begins March 5, 1770, in Boston, then a town of about 15,000, where the natives made the unwise decision to shower British troops with ice, stones and oyster shells. The resulting massacre killed five Americans, stoked the fires of revolution and brought Adams to prominence as the soldiers' legal counsel.

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