Nothing But Net
By Thomas Beller
New York Times

May 18, 2003
 
ONE day last fall, when the weather had cooled and summer seemed to be over, I went down to my local basketball court, on Hudson Street between Horatio and Gansevoort Streets, where I've been going for seven years. The court, which is wedged between the West Village, where I live, and the meatpacking district, is on the loose circuit of courts upon which Players, as it were, like to play. But it looked a little emptier than usual. The players there were mostly those diehards whose compulsion to play basketball is somehow suspicious.

Basketball junkie. There's a phrase you don't hear much anymore. It's a bit morbid, but there is some truth to the formulation.

I played a few games and then, after nearly everyone had gone home, I lingered to shoot around in the strangely early dusk. The trance of the court, into which I had fallen so happily all summer long, was broken. I saw from the inside how the place must look from beyond the chain-link fence that surrounds it: a wide swatch of asphalt in the middle of  the city, with dented hoops, a playground at one end, a softball diamond at the other, the whole thing populated by dog walkers, bench sitters, kids, parents, some derelict types and guys in baggy shorts playing basketball, all in a space officially known as John Seravelli Park.

Just then the person I have come to call the Crazy Lady approached me, with an unusual expression on her face. "Will you take one of these?" she said, handing me a flier. "It's really important."  The Crazy Lady, whose name, I later learned, is Lana, was not, in fact, crazy. She was just very brave, but the two qualities sometimes blur. I started thinking of her as the Crazy Lady when I arrived at the court one afternoon and found her at the center of a mob of basketball players, defending her kids and their friends against what are normally understood to be the laws of playground.

The issue, as is so often the case, was real estate. There is a point in the afternoon when a critical mass of players have arrived, and the half-court games move over to the full court. Lana's kids were shooting on the full-court basket when they were suddenly overrun by the players, all of them itchy to get their hands on the ball.

Lana has frizzy gray hair, wears sandals and jeans, and smokes cigarettes. Her face often registers a "What in God's name is next?" expression that I associate with city parents. The day of the turf war I arrived to find her standing in the middle of the full court, a cigarette in one hand, a cellphone in the other and, like Gandhi, refusing to move. Words were exchanged. Voices were raised. Finally, a half-court basket was secured for the kids and, like refugees given a new homeland, they were ushered to their basket before Lana yielded the full court to the mob.

This autumn day, however, she approached me with a stack of fliers in her arm and an odd look on her face. According to the flier, the Parks Department was considering a proposal to tear up the playground, resurface it with artificial turf and turn it into a private softball field. The nearby Xavier High School would help pay for the renovation. The gates would be padlocked, the ground green, and there would be soccer practice by day and Little League games by night. Who could argue with that?

Quite a few people, apparently. But the tenor of the flier, and the fact that a community board meeting had been arranged to discuss the proposal, suggested that, unknown to us, wheels had been turning for some time. All summer we had been involved in the drama of our playground while, just like a horror movie, a huge monster was almost upon us.

NOW it's spring. On the first nice day I went down to the court. There was a game in progress at each of the three half-courts, and a crowd of people waiting to play.

Arriving at a basketball court is a seemingly casual thing, but who actually gets to play is determined by a number of Byzantine rituals involving such things as how well known you are to the regulars, how well respected your game is, how you look, what color you are (and there are a very wide range of colors), how you dress, walk, talk. But these rules are not written down. They are implicit. They incorporate the rules that pertain to the world outside the playground - the rules enforced by the police, for example -but there are variations, additions and deletions, and no one on hand with a clipboard and a whistle to enforce them.

This is not gym. One of the more important rules is that, in certain circumstances, there are no rules.

That first day, everyone was in an unusually friendly mood. I slapped people five. Vague communications were made, along the lines of, "How you been?," answered by various words and noises that equated with "Good." I saw a guy I recognized go by on a bike, a fiercely quick, whippet-thin kid the color of Turkish coffee whom I have privately nicknamed the Assassin, in part because he is so lethal on offense and in part because he usually wears the expression of someone who is prepared to kill you. Most basketball players exist in a state of mild irritation, like magicians who cannot get a certain trick to go just right. Street ball elevates this irritation to a style, and a lot of people on the court sport a homeboy version of the Travis Bickle line "You talkin' to me?" as though they are just waiting for someone to tick them off.

”You been playin' ball this winter?" someone asked the guy on the bike. "Yeah," he replied. "In a way.'' The reply was so conversational that I had a hard time equating it with the nasty style he had on the court, where he often wore a white doo-rag that made him look like a member of the hip-hop division of the Foreign Legion. This day, on his bike, he seemed like a sweet guy only a few years past teenagerdom.

Glancing around the playground, I realized I knew a lot of the guys there. I know if they are good in the clutch or if they choke. I know how they smile when they mean it, and how they smile when they are faking it, and how they look when they are trying desperately not to smile because they just made a great move but don't want to make it look like a big deal. I know what it takes to stop them and what they'll do to stop me. What I don't know is their names, other than a first name or nickname. I don't know how old they are or how they make a living.

I came to appreciate the strangeness of this dynamic a long time ago, in the events surrounding a guy named Rich. He was a longtime regular at the court I grew up playing on, in Riverside Park at 77th Street. Rich used to arrive in a shroud of silence, carrying a big shoulder bag. He was very fat. Upon arriving, he would stake out a considerable amount of asphalt (a shade of gray as distinctively New York as a yellow taxi) and elaborately change into a pair of immaculate white tube socks. Then came his game sneakers.

Once he got changed, he always made sure he was a captain so he could pick his team. He did this as judiciously as any N.B.A. general manager. The thing about these street games is that if you win, you play again. If you lose, you watch. Considering the time and effort involved in getting to the playground in the first place, there was a lot at stake in winning. Rich wanted to win. Therefore he always refused to put me on his team.

Rich was a trash talker. He wore a plastic mouth guard, like a football player, but spent half the game with it sticking halfway out of his mouth as he did his running commentary. The commentary was usually about the ineffectiveness of the man guarding him. He would use his bulk to bounce you out of the way and get room for his shot. After it went in, he would remove his mouthpiece and tell you how useless you were.

It takes no effort for me to recall how Rich's body felt when I banged into him in a game. The sound of his voice, the way he ran, the speed with which he shifted from being caustic to being, if the word can be applied to basketball, sweet: all that comes to mind easily. He's a perfect example of how, on the basketball court, you can know someone intimately and not know him at all.

One day I went to the court and Rich wasn't there. I didn't notice his absence until I heard some guys talking about him. "When they showed his picture on the late news, I didn't recognize him," one said. "Then I switched to Channel 11 and saw their picture.''

It took me a few seconds to realize I had seen Rich that day, too. I'd stopped at a newsstand to stare at the picture of a dead body lying in a pool of blood that was on the cover of both The Daily News and The New York Post. In spite of the smudgy image, there had been something disturbingly intimate about the picture. Now I knew why.

Rich, it turns out, was a token booth clerk at the West 145th Street subway station. He earned $30,000 a year. He worked a 6 a.m..-to-2 p.m. shift, which meant that all those years I had seen him shortly after he got off work.

Meanwhile, nothing changed at the court. The culture of street ball in New York is like the city's population. Some people are fixtures as permanent as a tree. Others show up out of the blue and then, after a week or a month or a couple of years, disappear without explanation, though usually for reasons less tragic than those that explain the disappearance of Rich.

MY game got under way.

I had on my team Monsieur M, a skinny man who had arrived not long ago from Haiti  and speaks hip-hop with a French accent. He can jump to the moon, but he has not yet learned not to smile. He doesn't use his smile as a weapon of contempt.

Then there was the Laughing Man. Only a month earlier, he had suffered a dislocated thumb. "I broke my thumb!" he called out, and, in a continuation of the play, ran right out of the playground toward St. Vincent's Hospital. A month later he was back, with white tape around his injured finger, in his irrepressibly good mood.

The Laughing Man has one of those iron-hard upper bodies (he usually plays without a shirt), and he can jump quickly; he's like a socially well-adjusted Dennis Rodman, with a touch of Karl Malone. The Laughing Man is also a father. A little girl who was standing near him one day as he changed into his sneakers and socks announced loudly, "Daddy, those socks stinky!"

Our third member is a young man named D. He has the baggiest shorts on the court and, when he can bring himself to shoot it, a nice jump shot. But in games, with the pressure on, D tends to, shall we say, withdraw. The painful disparity between the basketball opera in his head and the game on the court makes him sullen. He's probably the only guy about whom one could say, "He doesn't shoot enough."

The fourth member of my team is me. At 6 foot 5 and a half, a high school and Division III college career behind me (Vassar!), I am, in my own way, a basketball poster boy. In every basketball poster there are two essential components: the first is someone flying through the air in the middle of some amazing, gravity-defying move, usually a dunk. The second is the person, often partially obscured, being dunked on. I fulfill the latter  role.

We won our first game. Monsieur M was the star of the show, skying for rebounds and hitting his jump shot. The team we beat comprised guys about whom I could give thumbnail sketches, quick scouting reports and some essential details about personality, and whose names I hardly knew.

The next team was a tough athletic squad that comprised longtime locals, among them the Litigator. His real name was Dennis, but he was the Litigator to me because he was always manipulating the score and arguing calls. Once, when I referred to him as the Litigator out loud, a guy on the sidelines said: "What are you talking about? He works in a bodega."

My team had no litigator. None of us could argue, least of all me. On the court, I am mute. What words I do say hardly count as language; a transcript would sound vaguely pornographic: "Yes, yes! That's right! Give it to me! Here! Come on!"

We played hard in our second game. Monsieur M! I loved him! His jump shot looked like a shot put; he'd take two massive dribbles, lift off with both feet and throw toward the rim, but the shot was falling. The Laughing Man rolled to the hoop, bruising everyone around him, I had my rebounds and short jumpers. Then Monsieur M unleashed a series of his funny jump shots, and we won. I wandered off, exultant. Then, for the first time since last fall, I saw Lana.

OVER the autumn and winter, the outlook for the court had gone from bleak to  cautiously sunny. A meeting had been called by Community Board 2 to discuss the fate of the court. The day of the meeting was a spectacular Indian summer day, and the court was mobbed. Each of the half-court baskets had two teams waiting to play, the full court was packed and no one was paying attention to the fliers about the meeting that had been taped here and there around the park.

But as 6 o'clock approached there was a giant mood swing. Some of the regulars said they were going, and at the last moment a large contingent of sweaty guys in shorts headed for a cramped room in an N.Y.U. building, where the meeting took place.

”It was immediately apparent that this was an incredible turnout for a Community Board 2 parks and recreation committee hearing, possibly the best-attended hearing the committee had ever seen," a friend e-mailed afterward. The plan to privatize the court and resurface it was abandoned in the face of community opposition.

As Lana and I chatted, I noticed the new hotel, the W Hotel, that was rapidly rising on a former parking lot across the street from the court. Some of the rooms will have a view of the meatpacking district, others of the West Village and still others of Chelsea. Some  guests will look out and see, right across the street, a big stretch of not very pretty asphalt on which people are jumping around in baggy shorts, playing basketball. If they see that, they'll know they're in New York.

It was a rosy dusk. The court cleared. I practiced some dunks. I bounced the ball in a trance, vowing to get skinny, to be strong, to move around the city and play at other courts, so that the whole fluctuating but familiar family of basketball junkies who go to Horatio Street don't get too familiar. I promised myself not to disappear too far down the rabbit hole of street basketball, walked in circles bouncing the ball and took foul shots in the soft and almost gauzy darkening heat. I was wretched, sticky, dirty, thirsty, thrilled. Finally, I went home.