On the way in from the airport, late one night, my taxi lowered into the Manhattan landscape and came to a stop at a red light at Ninety-seventh Street, just off Second Avenue. There is a playground there, and when I looked out the window I saw a man shooting a basketball by himself. The court was a barren, lonely place at that hour, lit by some nearby streetlights, but his presence redeemed it. He was a heavy man, dressed in grey sweats, and, for a moment, I imagined that he was a once-talented player who had gone to seed, now moved by some personal crisis to revisit his old skills near midnight.
After a moment of watching, it seemed clear that he had never had much in the way of skills. I then imagined that he had recently made a resolution to lose weight. He was moving quickly to get his own rebound, dribbling energetically, and I decided that this late-night cameo appearance signalled that he was in the manic phase of his resolution, that he was pushing himself too hard, that he would diet and work out like this for four days and then pull a muscle. By the end of the week, he would be eating pound cake out of the box.
For once, I was grateful for an interminable red light. The man was undaunted, rhythmic. His movements suggested some interior fantasy was in progress. I wondered what it was as the cab pulled away.
Location is important with basketball, and yet it’s not—you can play anywhere, and in the act of playing you forget where you are. I make a point of playing basketball whenever I travel to a new place. There is an outdoor court in Paradise Valley, Montana, that has stayed with me. And there is a hoop in a parking lot in Phnom Penh, next to an apartment building with balconies on which, as I shot around there, in 1994, little kids appeared. More and more of these kids materialized as my workout continued, all of them practicing their English, which seemed to consist of one word: “Hello.” They murmured it, softly at first, then louder. It was like playing in front of a flock of gently cooing birds that slowly, gradually, morphed into crazy American basketball fans, all of them shouting, “Hello!”
Basketball is a sport that contains many games. The one we watch on television is only one variation. Basketball can be played alone or in groups. Indoors or outdoors. Full court, half court, or no court. N.B.A. players who play abroad must adjust to the rules of the league’s European counterpart, FIBA (The famously taciturn Tim Duncan offered his two cents on this variation of the game at the end of the 2004 Olympics: “FIBA sucks.”) Was the guy I saw shooting around by himself in the dark on Ninety-Seventh street playing basketball? To quote a favorite phrase of the former Knick John Starks, “Most definitely.”
When another former Knick, Bill Bradley, ran for Senate in New Jersey, his television commercials ended with him tossing a crumpled piece of paper into a tiny basketball hoop affixed to a garbage pail. Is throwing something into a trashcan—with or without a tiny hoop attached—basketball? You could make the case. In the documentary “Doin’ It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC,” made by Robert (Bobbito) García and Kevin Couliau, an old-timer in Harlem recalls seeing the local playground courts so crowded with serious players that the kids were forced into a kind of apprenticeship, in which they would shoot hoops into a garbage can off to the side.
The culture of New York City playground basketball looms large in the history of the N.B.A. Several generations of the game’s greatest players owe their basketball education, in part, to New York’s Department of Parks and Recreation. So it was appropriate that the N.B.A. used the occasion of the 2015 All-Star Game, which was played at Madison Square Garden, to commemorate this fact with a magnificently detailed map (and an app) titled “A History of New York City Basketball.” The map is filled with notable places, along with links to short videos. Each of the five boroughs has its own section, and the app featured special categories for “point guards” and “playgrounds.” It seems right that these subjects should be highlighted. Street ball and ball handling are entwined. New York is, or was, known for its fierce point guards. The video takes you through the history: Bob Cousy, Dick McGuire, Tiny Archibald, Pearl Washington, Rod Strickland, Kenny Smith, Kenny Anderson, Mark Jackson, Rafer Alston, Stephon Marbury, Jamaal Tinsley, Kemba Walker.
The segment on Manhattan is mostly focussed on the borough’s most famous product, introduced as perhaps the greatest player ever to play the game: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. When he says, “I was raised in Manhattan, so I learned the game right in the heart of the city,” it is understood, even before the clip cuts away to a shot of the court at 140th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, that he is referring to his local playground. “I never consciously made a connection between basketball and how it is tied to life in New York City,” he says, while the camera pans across the court in morning light. “But I grew up in it, and I was part of it.” The implication is that the playground is the primal scene of Abdul-Jabbar’s basketball initiation and education.
As much as I enjoyed the history lesson from the N.B.A., it further crystalized my feeling that this was a historical moment that has been eclipsed. Street ball in New York is in decline. I have observed, in the past decade, one playground after another—where, once, you could have shown up in the mid to late afternoon and found a group of fairly skilled players of different ages battling—become depopulated. I am not talking about a mass extinction. There are still lots of playgrounds with lots of good players—but fewer playgrounds, and fewer players, and the ones who show up seem older. Kareem’s playground, for example, had just a few desultory players shooting by themselves on a recent afternoon. A river that runs low will sometimes run dry.
That the basketball courts of New York’s playgrounds are not as populated as they once were is an observation based firmly on evidence that is anecdotal and totally unscientific. Furthermore, even this evidence is mostly limited to Manhattan. So perhaps these are all Manhattan problems. When I read a report in the Times on the people who buy condos in the Time Warner Center—in brief, extremely rich and not from here—I wasn’t thinking about basketball, but it now occurs to me that the Time Warner Center is less than ten blocks from the projects that provided a fair number of the players at my own childhood basketball court, in Riverside Park at 76th Street. Can billionaires play ball? That is a different city game.
I am not claiming that the city’s courts are empty, exactly—up on St. Nicholas Terrace, about ten blocks from where Kareem played, there was a respectable half-court game underway when I visited, but no one had next. One court over, however, was the scene of a roiling game of full court, comprised mostly of kids. The place was not abandoned, yet this was not the world of highly competitive basketball in which so many N.B.A. talents were forged. The courts on Horatio Street and Hudson (where Joakim Noah, age fourteen, a human pencil with an afro, dunked on me) are now devoid of pick-up basketball in the afternoons. That court had been closed for renovations for some time, so perhaps it’s a special case. The Tompkins Square Park courts are mostly empty; the courts on 20th and Second Avenue, where a lot of the Tompkins Square Park crowd sought refuge, are now barren.
I don’t even live in New York anymore. I’m there for a few weeks over the winter holidays and for a couple of months in the summer. Was I being paranoid ? Was this just nostalgia, a projection of that terrible undertow of feeling that the world of your childhood is vanishing, which is unique to no sport or city?
I can argue against my own case: The court in Central Park (there is one, on the north side of the Great Lawn) is busy; the new courts down by Battery Park City, on the river, both half court and full, are populated by players from all over the city. Yet the feeling that I’ve gotten from playing playground basketball in New York in the past several years is that something has changed. The mystery concerns the youth. Where are the youth? Playing video games at home? Playing soccer?
My life as a street-ball player began when I was twelve years old. It was the middle of winter. I was at the basketball court in Riverside Park, at 76th Street. It was a bright day and freezing cold, the sort of weather where enormous sheets of ice might be floating on the Hudson. It’s so cold that the asphalt on which I bounce the ball is dusted white with salt and frost. It catches the sun’s glare. I look down at the ball, and at my hands, which are buried in black wool gloves. Around me, a vast expanse of empty courts. I see these images, and the white clouds from my breath, as though I were watching Super-8 footage. Sun-struck, silent, magical—it’s freezing cold but I am lost in a fantasy of buzzer-beating shots, variations on the same imagined heroics, the naked, orange rim framing a circle of blue sky, which I seek to fill over and over. The hypnotic, syncopated sound of the bouncing ball.
I was on the junior-varsity basketball team and had a number of years playing in school gyms. But this was the first time that I thought of that patch of asphalt as a resource in my life, a place to which I could retreat and seek solace. On that freezing cold day in 1977, I was all alone.
Perhaps the city game is in eclipse because the talent pool is now global. As the journalist Rick Telander showed us in his 1974 book, “Heaven is a Playground,” there was a moment in the early nineteen-seventies when colleges around the country realized that they could tap into New York City’s street-ball talent. In the ESPN “30 for 30” episode on Bernard King, he recalled seeing an assistant coach from the University of Tennessee show up at the Fort Greene housing projects, where King lived, and thinking, “Does this guy have any idea of where he is?” This recruiting revolution took place, at least in part, due to the efforts of Rodney Parker, a playground-basketball impresario whose day job was scalping tickets at Mets and Knicks games, and who became a kind of unofficial agent, working the phones and shopping playground talent all over the country.
This exporting of playground talent from New York to the provinces no longer happens. Why? Perhaps the very thing that once made New York ball players so special—their moves, their toughness, their creativity in getting into the paint—is now, somehow, a hindrance. In “Doin’ It in the Park,” García and Couliau postulate that New York produced so many great ball-handling guards because New York is the birthplace of the improvised game “21,” which is a kind of basketball version of “kill the carrier.” Toughness and singularity of vision are what the city breeds in its players.
You see basketball courts everywhere in New York. They are prehistoric manifestations of the city—like old-growth forests. But they did not grow. Someone put them there. The person who put most of them there—the unlikely patron saint of New York as basketball Mecca—was Robert Moses. According to Alex Garvin, author of “The Planning Game,” New York has more public parks, by far, than any other city in the country. More than Chicago, which built a lot of playgrounds. More than Los Angeles. Twenty-five per cent of New York’s territory is devoted to public parks, the largest percentage of any city in America.
In “Doin It in the Park,” Garcia and Couliau interview scores of players from multiple generations, all of whom strive to find words for what makes street ball special. The speakers are not famous, exactly, but we understand them to be legends, if only from their nicknames: Shamgod, Sundance, Homicide, Fly. We hear from Kenny (The Jet) Smith, “I never had a more rush, to this day, since the first time I played street basketball.” He adds, “My most vivid memory ... EVER ... is the first day I won on the three-on-three in the back.”
My first winter of dribbling in gloves gave way to spring. Other people appeared at the court on 76th Street. I was tall, skinny, uncoördinated. Against common sense and good judgment, I tried to play in these games. I am still trying. I felt like I had immigrated to another country and had no choice but simply to marinate in this foreign culture until I understood it and was accepted. It’s been a long wait.
I played with guys whose nicknames were Birdie, Puppet, Red, Cello. I would arrive at the court and ask who had next. When I found that person I would say, “You have your five?”
They would usually nod, yes, and sometimes look me straight in the eye as though they were hoping I grasped that this was a bald-faced lie and wanted to see the insult register in my expression. But I came back. There was one guy, Rudie, who was a writer for TV. He always seemed a bit depressed. It was a loud, buoyant scene but also crazed, somehow.
Birdie was a kind of basketball dandy—a very good shot, quick, hated contact, danced away from it. Puppet was a wild delinquent with athletic talent. (I have not the slightest idea why he was called Puppet. I never dared ask.) Red was an old alcoholic who talked trash nonstop, wore outrageously large knee pads, and had a curious glamour around him and his creaky game; in his insistence on getting the ball, there was a suggestion of long-past glory, which he could still, now and then, approach. Cello was a loud, very good in a Barkley sort of way—strong, aggressive, constantly talking. He stopped showing up at some point. A year or so later, I heard that he had been thrown down an elevator shaft. He survived, I was told, but his legs didn’t.
My role in this game was as a kind of crash-test dummy—though with a mouth. Once in a while, I got punched. Sometimes, dunked on. But sometimes people would offer me tips. Keep the ball above your head! Don’t dribble! I was always told to go down low. It was like the post—that spot on the court near the basket—was a prison. It took me twenty years to break out. Meanwhile, people still talk to me like I am a project. I don’t know why. I used to hate it. Now I like it. It makes me feel as if I still have upside. I am always happy that I believe this to be the case. Upside is not optimism; it’s potential. What you do with it hangs in the balance. The story is not finished. Do you have heart?
I didn’t have heart. What I had was a kind of dogged masochism that kept me coming back. What is it about basketball? Alexander Wolff, in his book “Big Game, Small World,” reports on this addictive mystery at the heart of the game, first observed by its founder, James Naismith. According to Wolff, one day Naismith walked past a young person throwing a ball into a basket. An hour later he saw the same boy, still shooting. “I stopped and asked him why he was practicing so long,” Naismith wrote. “The boy answered that he did not know, but that he just liked to see if he could make a basket every time he threw the ball.”
I kept throwing myself into this maelstrom. I would show up, ask who had next, be told by various people that they had their team, only to discover that they were holding out for better players. This was my idea of fun? It’s almost like some part of me craved being defeated and abused. But, at the same time, I got better. I survived. It taught me something—how to be a jerk, in part. But other, more valuable things, too. Certain ball-handling moves, flow, postures, phrases (“You reach, I teach.” ). Most of all, the pleasure in the flow of the game, the unruly sense of possibility in a world with no immediate adult supervision, where anything could happen. My favorite scene in “Doin’ It in the Park” is the first one, when a fierce game of one-on-one draws a crowd. Among them is a loud, funny guy who could be described as a comedian, a heckler, a drunk guy, or a dangerous individual. He paces, shouts, makes a fool of himself and is funny but also a bit scary. The sense of being in the presence of some unmanaged force, in a place where there is no front desk at which to complain, is upsetting and kind of thrilling.
Compare this to a scene from the summer of 2015 in Riverside Park, at 76th Street, on a Saturday, late morning, a time when the place was once packed with players and games. Now, it was empty except for two groups. One was an old, lean firecracker taking shots; he popped an Achilles a while back, he told me, and no longer plays, but my impression from his movements was that he was once pretty good. I shot around with him while, a few courts away, Rob Sergeant, a formidable figure, who once played professional basketball in Europe, worked out a kid who was maybe twelve, or ten, or eight, with no apparent physical gifts. I had spoken with Sergeant before, amazed to see him doing a thriving business coaching schmucks like the former me for eighty dollars an hour.
Would I have been a better basketball player had I received one-on-one personal training from a top-level athlete as opposed to being smacked around endlessly and trash talked by Tweety, Cello, Red, and Puppet? Probably. And yet something about this picture seemed off, a kind of “Bowling Alone,” applied to street ball. My daughter wandered over and somehow Nelson, the guy I was shooting with, got onto the subject of stickball, which he explained to her, and in so doing conjured a teeming, unsupervised world of childhood. It sounded as remote, now, as it would have been for me, as a kid, to hear of women with parasols and men with wide-brimmed hats.
The moment when I first glimpsed this problem has stayed with me: It was a few years ago, and I was taking my daughter to camp at Riverside Church, home of a famous A.A.U. team, the Hawks, who are enough of an icon that they get a dot on the N.B.A.’s All-Star map. I was locking up my bike when three young guys sauntered past, lanky, lean, age fourteen or fifteen. They wore socks and open-toed athletic sandals, baggy shorts, and had bags over the shoulders—the basketball-prodigy look. The “I don’t play on concrete because it hurts your knees” look. I won’t disparage any kid with potential for wanting to protect their assets. As Al-Faruk Aminu, a bashful N.B.A. role player, once put it to me, in the New Orleans Pelicans locker room, “Your body is your business.”
The idea that the talent should avoid the concrete of playgrounds isn’t new: Bernard King never played at the Tillary Street courts up the street from where he lived; his brother Albert, the former N.B.A. player, did. Something about the saunter of those young ballers made me follow them into the church lobby. I saw the staircase they took, and, after dropping off my daughter at camp, I wound my way through the maze of hallways until I found myself at a small window overlooking a modest-sized basketball court. A bunch of players of different sizes were being put through a rigorous workout by a coach.
Ashton Coughlin—who played basketball for Collegiate, then Wesleyan, and was, at the time, working as a coach at Riverside Church—wandered down the hall just then, and I stopped him to ask a question. As punishment for chatting with me that day, he has had to deal with me writing to him every year or so with more questions and propositions about the mysterious vanishing of youth from the city game. The answer, clearly, in addition to the influx of foreign billionaires at the Time Warner Center and everywhere else in New York, and video games, and whatever else, is that the players who are really interested in basketball are not playing on the playground. They are in the basketball version of pre-med, which is what I was watching down on the court.
But are all these guys enrolled in the basketball equivalent of pre-med really talented? Or are there other motives for funneling so many kids into this pre-professional structure? “The professionalization of the game is definitely part of it,” Ashton wrote in response to my most recent volley of questions and theories. He pointed out that there is money for more people in organized sports, and that there is none in street ball. “Coaches tell parents and their kids—even the ones who suck—‘Hey, come workout with me.... Come to this camp.... Join this team,’ ” Ashton wrote. Such programs, he added, can make significant amounts of money by “taking kids from street ball and putting them in a ‘safe,’ organized environment.”
He added, “It’s hard for anyone, especially kids, to turn down an opportunity from someone saying, ‘Hey, you’re special. I believe in you. Let me help you improve.’ ”
And yet there is something about basketball’s spirit, perhaps more so than any other sport, that seems to resist the professionalization of the game.
I was recently seated on a porch at a Mardi Gras party filled with children, and beside me, in another rocking chair, was a very large fellow who was also taking a break. His name, I learned, was Tommy. He was from Alabama and had a demolition company. It turns out that Tommy had two sons who played football at Alabama, and then in the N.F.L. Both were linemen. Their careers are over now, and I asked how they handled the transition, physically, out of being a professional athlete. Which is to say I asked, as delicately as possible, if they got fat. He said one did and one didn’t, and then, somehow, we got on a riff about football and basketball. “Football, especially if you are a lineman, is something you have approach as work,” he said. “And basketball, I always thought, was something you play.”
