Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  from

  Heaven Is a Playground

  COMING around the corner of Foster and Nostrand at dusk, I see a ten-foot fence and the vague movements of people. Men sit on car hoods and trunks, gesturing, passing brown paper bags, laughing. Stains on the sidewalk sparkle dully like tiny oil slicks in a gray ocean. Garbage clogs the gutters. At the main entrance to Foster Park, I step quickly to the side to dodge a pack of young boys doing wheelies through the gate. When I came out of the subway, I had asked directions from an elderly woman with a massive bosom like a bushel of leaves, and while she spoke, I had involuntarily calculated the racial mix around me—10 percent white, 10 percent Latin, 80 percent black. Now, as I walk into the park I am greeted by a lull in the noise, pulling back like musicians fading out to display the rhythm section at work: a million basketballs whack-whacking on pavement.

  Rodney Parker is there on the first court, standing still thirty feet from the basket, slowly cocking the ball. He is wearing red sneakers, sweatpants, and a sun visor that splits his Afro like a line between two cumulus clouds. His tongue is pointed out the side of his mouth, and as he shoots, he tilts his entire body sideways like a golfer coaxing home a putt.

  The ball arcs up and through the iron hoop and Rodney bursts into laughter. “Oh my God, what a shot! Pay up, Clarence! Who’s next? Who’s got money?”

  In 1966, Rodney, his wife, and two children moved from the East New York district of Brooklyn to the Vanderveer Estates, the housing project that cups Foster Park like a palm on the north and east sides. At that time the area was a predominantly Jewish, Irish, and Italian neighborhood of tidy shops, taverns, and flower beds. The Parkers were among the very first blacks to move into the Vanderveer and Rodney, a basketball fanatic since childhood, became one of the first blacks to hang out at Foster Park.

  Never one to maintain a low profile, Rodney was soon organizing games between the white neighborhood players and his black friends from East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant. On weekends he would preside over these frequently wild contests, usually from his vantage point as fifth man on a team that might include several college stars and pros. He would be everywhere, screaming, refereeing, betting money on his thirty-foot shots, with two hundred, three hundred or more people whooping it up on the sidelines. For identification purposes some people began referring to the playground as “Rodney’s Park.”

  Then as now, Rodney’s occupation was that of ticket scalper, a freelance bit of wheeling-dealing that took him to all the big sporting events in the New York area and put him in contact with most of the sporting stars.1

  He already knew several basketball heroes from his neighborhood, among them pros Lenny Wilkens and Connie Hawkins, and with the connections he made through scalping, it wasn’t long before Rodney was giving reports on Brooklyn players to coaches and scouts and anyone else who might be interested.

  Rodney, whose education ended in ninth grade and whose basketball abilities were never better than average, derived a deep sense of personal worth from his hobby. “I can do things that nobody can,” he liked to say. He helped boys get scholarships to college, he pushed them into prep schools, he got them reduced rates to basketball camps, he even arranged for two of the local white baseball players to get tryouts with the New York Mets. He became known around the park as somebody who could help out if you played ball and weren’t getting anywhere on your own. Kids said that Rodney knew everybody in the world.

  Now, seeing me by the fence, he comes over and demands that I play in a game immediately to help me get acquainted with “the guys.” He charges into the middle of the players and throws commands left and right. This is the rabble—the young men who populate every New York City playground all summer long. Faceless, earnest, apathetic, talented, hoping, hopeless, these are the minor characters in every ghetto drama. They move, drifting in and out in response to Rodney’s orders.

  The ball bounces away from one of the players and is picked up by a small boy on the sidelines. He dribbles it with joy.

  “Gimme that ball ’fore I inject this shoe five feet up your black ass and out your brain!” hollers a somber-looking player named Calvin Franks.

  The boy dribbles, wriggling his hips and taunting. Franks lunges at the youth who drops the ball and sprints through a hole in the fence into the street.

  Franks retrieves the ball and begins talking to himself. “Calvin Franks has the ball, oh shit, is he bad. He takes the man to the base . . . No, no, he shakes one! . . . two! . . . He’s on wheels . . . and the crowd stands to watch the All-American . . .” Franks shoots and the ball rolls up and around the rim like a globe on its axis, then falls out. “He’s fouled! Butchered! They gots to send him to the line . . .”

  The sun is gone now, passed behind the buildings in a false, city sunset. Old women with stockings rolled to their ankles doze near the slides.

  A boy locates his younger brother who had errands to do at home and pulls him from a card game. “I’ll kick yo’ ass!” he shouts, slapping his brother in the face. The youth runs out of the park, blood flowing from his nose. The friends at the game laugh and pick up the cards. Crashes of glass rise above the voices, forming a jagged tapestry interwoven with soul music and sirens.

  I am placed on a team with four locals and the game begins. Rodney walks to the sidelines and starts coaching. He hollers at the players to pass the ball, not to be such stupid fools. Do they want to spend their whole useless lives as nobodies in the ghetto? Pass, defense. “You’re hopeless! Fourteen-year-old Albert King could kill you all!” he shouts.

  “Rodney, my man, my man! This is pro material,” screams Calvin Franks. “Kareem Jabbar come to Foster Park!”

  There are no lights in the park and vision is rapidly disappearing. The lights, I learned last summer, were removed several years ago to keep the boys from playing basketball all night long.

  “What? What’s happenin’ here?” says a young, stocky player named Pablo Billy, his eyes wide in mock surprise as he dribbles between his legs and passes behind his back.

  “Boom! She goes boom!” yells Franks.

  “You done now, Skunk,” answers Lloyd Hill, a skinny 6′3″ forward with arms like vines and large yellowish eyes.

  “Here come the street five! Jive alive. Loosey goosey.”

  “Look at him!” shrieks a player named Clarence, apparently referring to himself, as he spins out of a crowd. “His body just come like this!”

  The fouls become more violent now, with drive-in lay-ups being invitations for blood. I don’t consider myself a bad basketball player, a short forward who at twenty-five could probably play on a few mediocre high school teams, but out here I pass the ball each time I get it, not wanting to make a fool of myself. Players are jumping over my head.

  “Gonna shake it, bake it, and take it to the—” A young player named Eddie has his shot batted angrily out to half court. “Nullify that shit!” says someone called “Muse” or “Music,” I can’t tell which.

  The Vanderveer project rises on our left like a dark red embattlement against the sky, TV’s flickering deep within like synchronized candles. The complex covers parts of four city blocks and houses nearly ten thousand people, a small American town. At one time—no more than ten years ago—the Vanderveer was totally white. Flatbush itself (a name coming from Vlacke Bos, which is Dutch for “wooden plain”) was a haven for the working and middle-class whites who had fled Manhattan and inner Brooklyn, believing no city problems could reach this far.

  By settling in the neighborhood, Rodney and the other first blacks started the chain reaction again. Within days, white residents began leaving. “Apartment for Rent” signs went up as fast as the rented vans carried families and belongings out farther to Canarsie, Sheepshead Bay, or Long Island. The exodus continued in an unbroken stream until by 1970 the Vanderveer and surrounding area was less than half white. By 1974, whites had become a small minority and the Vanderveer Estates had turned entirely black, the number being split fa
irly evenly between West Indian immigrants and “native born.” Soon, the real signs of decay began to appear—the broken glass, graffiti, garbage, and battered buildings that had been predicted by the doomsayers all along.

  If, indeed, there was any plus side to the degeneration, it showed itself on Foster Park courts where a new grade and style of basketball were developing. Premier leapers and ball handlers appeared almost overnight. Patterned play and set shots dissolved to twisting dunks and flashy moves. Black players seemed to bring more of themselves to the playground—rather than follow proven structures, they experimented and “did things” on the court. Soon they controlled the tempo on the half-block of asphalt between Foster and Farragut, and the whites, who came as visitors the way the blacks once had, seemed ponderous and mechanical in comparison.

  To Rodney it was simple justice. “Blacks own the city,” he said. “They should own the game, too.”

  But as the talent escalated, so did the problems. Almost every boy now came from a broken home and was, or had been, in some kind of trouble. The athletic potential had multiplied, but the risk had doubled.

  There is almost total darkness now. Yellowish speckles from a street light fan through a tree at the other end but do not come this far. Teammates and opponents have merged and the only thing I can do is hold onto my man and not let him disappear. Rodney is still hollering. “Pass, dammit. Pass like Danny Odums. Hit the boards! Looking for another Fly! Who’s gonna fly out of the ghetto?”

  Passes have become dangerous, starting off as dark orbs which do not move but simply grow larger and blacker until at the last second hands must be thrown up in protection. The first ball that smacks dead into a player’s face is greeted with hoots.

  Lloyd Hill unleashes his “standing jump shot” and the ball disappears into the night. It reenters, followed by a sharp pop as it whacks straight down on someone’s finger.

  “Oooh, god day-yum! Pull this shit out, Leon! Thing’s all crunched up—” The damaged joint is grabbed and yanked. There is a similar pop. “Eeeeee! Lorda . . . ahh . . . there, now she walking around a little . . .”

  “Where’s Franks?” shouts Lloyd Hill. “Where’d he went just when I’m shooting the rock in his eyeball.”

  Franks reappears from the side. “It’s gone.”

  “What’s gone?” Lloyd asks.

  “The bike.”

  “What bike?”

  “My bike.”

  “You ain’t got a bike, fool.”

  “Friend gave it to me. Had it right over there.”

  The ball is punched out of Rodney’s arms as little kids appear like phantoms out of the darkness to shoot and dribble during the break.

  “Shit, Franks, that ain’t funny.”

  “It’s terrible.”

  “Can’t laugh. Heh, he-he.”

  “Five seconds, gone. Man walks in and rides out.”

  “Hee ga-heeee.”

  “It’s terrible and I ain’t laughing.”

  “Hooo hoo ooooohhhh . . . they steal things in the ghetto.”

  “Niggers . . . hoo-hooo . . . they take your shit!”

  “Some little spook halfway to Fulton Street . . .”

  “Hoo hahoo haaa . . . peddlin’ his ass off in the mother-fuckin’ ghetto—”

  “In the for real Ghet-toe!”

  Franks is now laughing hysterically, doubled up and slapping palms.

  The darkness is complete. The old people have gone home. Slow-moving orange dots point out groups of boys smoking reefers under the trees. Two other basketball games are going on, but only the farthest can be heard. I start to wonder what I’m doing here, in this game, in this place, in these conditions. Playing basketball in total darkness is an act of devotion similar to fishing on land. Soon, I know, someone will rifle a pass and shatter my nose.

  “Come on now, let’s be serious,” says Eddie. “We down, twenty-four, twenty-one.”

  The ball is returned and the contest starts again. Laughter fades and the bicycle is forgotten. Everything is in earnest and yet I am blind; I cannot follow the game with my ears. Rodney shouts but does not exist. Quietly, on an inbounds play, I walk off the court.

  “Hey, hold it,” says Lloyd. “Where’s that white dude we had?”

  “Yeh, we only got four men.” Someone counts. “Where’d he go, Rod?”

  The players look around.

  “He went to get some water, I think. He’s not used to this shit, he’s quitting. Just get another man.”

  “Come on, little brother,” says the tall player called “Muse” or “Music” to one of the hangers-on. “Put the weight to this dude and keep him outta the sky.”

  From thirty feet away on the bench, I can barely see the occasional sparkle of medallions as they catch the street lights along Foster Avenue. I’m exhausted and relish the chance to wipe my face with my shirt and rub my sore knees. I can hear the players’ voices, and it sounds to me like they’ll go all night.2

  1 Once, years later, I was in a traffic jam trying to get into an NFL game—I think it was a Giants game at the Meadowlands, but I’m not sure. It might have been a Patriots game in Foxboro, or an Eagles game in Philly. Anyway, I looked out the window of the car and there was Rodney scurrying up the side of the road, hawking tickets to stalled motorists. It cracked me up. I yelled at him from my unmoving car, and he came over and laughed, and we shook hands through the window and we chatted. But not for long. There was business afoot.

  2 How I remember the many basketball games I played in that summer! In fact, some of the dialogue recorded in Heaven came while I was in the thick of contests, memorized, and written down as soon as I could get to my notebook. I know a number of terrific stories were lost because, frankly, I didn’t give a damn at certain moments about recording anything for journalistic purposes; I just wanted to make my shots, stop my man, grab some boards, and win.

  Michael Novak

  Michael Novak (1933–2017) wrote to put flesh to the bones of his belief that sports, like the arts, are too enmeshed in the human spirit to be left to the vulgar realms of ideology or politics. In holding that view Novak, a conservative Catholic social philosopher who would influence popes and prime ministers, helped confer on games like basketball a worth all their own. Hoops held a special place in the life of this grandson of Slovak immigrants, even if he had no remarkable talent. “Anticipation, quickness and attentiveness could make up for lack of special skills,” he recalled of his childhood in western Pennsylvania. “Spirit reaps rewards in basketball.” At Stonehill College in Massachusetts, later as a graduate student at Harvard, and then while training for the priesthood he ultimately chose not to join, Novak’s appreciation for the game deepened, thanks in part to exposure to Bob Cousy. Even as a seminarian and daily communicant, Novak would carve out time to watch or listen whenever the Celtics engaged their great playoff rivals, the Los Angeles Lakers. Under the spell of those NBA Finals, he wrote in The Joy of Sports (1976), from which this excerpt comes, “sports events rivaled churchgoing in the frequency of my religious liturgies. The liturgies do not have the same worldview, of course, nor celebrate the same way of life. Yet as Aquinas said, so I found it to be true: grace exceeds, but does not cancel, nature.”

  from

  The Joy of Sports

  TEN FEET above the floor, the orange rims of the baskets wait in silence at each end. No sound in sports is sweeter than the clean twang and snap of the corded nets when the ball spins exactly through. The sexual metaphor of penetration has often been called upon; a neat, perfect, and cleanly dropped shot brings an ecstasy and inner pleasure analogous to the release of high sexual tension. The game proceeds, indeed, by rapid exchanges of “baskets”—the ball dropping through the hoop as often as 100 times a game. It is a long intercourse.

  Skill makes the difficult seem easy, and at times it seems that the inherent conflict is a race against the clock—to drop in more baskets than the opposition before time expires. More than in football, the clock
is vital; not occasionally, but in virtually every game, the final race is against the clock. The two teams try to stay within range of each other until the end. Then, in the last four or five minutes, perfection is in order; each error becomes a gift to the other side; only so many errors can be borne. Often enough, ecstasy or despair is decided only in the final five or ten seconds, perhaps in overtime. Standing at the foul line, or putting up the last decisive shot, a man will often drive his fist against the air, driving the ball home in exultation.