My Old Neighborhood Remembered by Avery Corman

Author:Avery Corman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780962303272
Publisher: Barricade Books

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SCHOOLYARD BASKETBALL

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Schoolyard basketball was played continuously, on scorching summer days and on courts cleared of snow, played by day and by night with the light of lampposts, played by dirty ballplayers who could never foul out because nobody kept track of fouls, and crybabies who would cry foul if you grazed their shirts, played between stellar ballplayers and hapless ballplayers, between goody-two-shoes students and academic ne-er do-wells. Democracy in action.

Every neighborhood had its schoolyard basketball stand-outs, some who went on to play for high school and college teams and sometimes returned to play in the schoolyards where it all began for them.

If anybody bothered to calculate, many of us probably spent more time playing schoolyard basketball than any other activity, apart from physically sitting in a classroom.

The world contained in a schoolyard basketball court was compressed, intense, something the boys did that the girls did not. You never saw girls playing schoolyard basketball. The basic form was the three-man game. Every once in a while a full-court game was played. Winners stayed on, losers got off. If you lost, it wasn’t a crushing defeat. You might have to wait your turn to play again. If you won, you won court time, like with a pinball machine.

Which neighborhood had the best basketball players was impossible to determine. Good ballplayers came out of every neighborhood and some went on to have well-regarded basketball careers. Where I lived we had the advantage of the small-scale court in the Bronx High School of Science schoolyard to learn our skills before moving up to the Creston Junior High schoolyard. Madison Square Garden was referred to in the sports pages as “the Mecca of college basketball.” The Mecca of schoolyard basketball in our part of the Bronx was the schoolyard at Creston. With the active intramural basketball program at the school, you were caught up in the basketball-mindedness of the place. You played on the Creston schoolyard court whenever you could and when you went on to high school you still played there.

In my time important ballplayers could be seen on the court at Creston, Dolph Schayes, who starred for DeWitt Clinton High School, N.Y.U., and the Syracuse Nationals of the NBA and who would be named to the NBA Hall of Fame, Jack Molinas, who led Columbia to an Ivy League championship and who was a story unto himself, Arnie Stein, who played with Dayton University in the NIT Tournament, Bobby Santini, who played for Iona College, Ed Roman from the C.C.N.Y. double championship team, Dick Kor of N.Y.U., Danny Lyons of Fordham University. When any of these players were on the court, a crowd formed on the sidelines and behind the schoolyard fence, neighborhood people watching neighborhood people who were, unquestionably in our minds, stars.

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