The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (11 page)

The success stories have become a part of the folklore of the game and are passed down from one era to the next. Joe “The Destroyer” Hammond was offered a contract by the Lakers after he scored 50 on Dr. J in the park. Harlem's Adrian “A Butta” Walton once dropped 33 on Vince Carter. Larry “The Bone Collector” Williams was an unknown Pasadena kid who earned himself an AND1 tour contract off the strength of his Rucker Park performances. The tales are endless. So too is the allure.

TJ knows all these stories by heart. He knows every last page of the history and anecdotes of New York street basketball and often spends his free time researching well-known streetball players, memorizing their achievements, but imagining their stories are about him and his life. This is his sustenance. It allows him to believe that a 24-year-old white kid, born and raised in stark poverty—who never played an organized indoor game in his life, never graduated high school—somehow not just belongs here in the open run standing on this court, but that one day his own story will also become part of the mythology of Rucker Park. A chance to not just earn himself a nickname, a reputation, and respect, but maybe if all the stars align the way he thinks they will, the way he believes they will, perhaps he'll get noticed by the right people and earn himself a basketball contract, maybe somewhere overseas, the AND1 Mixtape Tour, or the Ball Up Streetball Tour—
anywhere
, just to do what he loves, just to change things.

Really, he's given himself no other choice. He quit his job as janitor at the Greyhound bus station in his hometown of Sacramento, gave up his room in his grandfather's house, and cashed in every last penny he saved to take a three-day bus trip across the country to try out for these 20 minutes.

Twenty minutes. Running clock. That's all he has to make a team and continue his journey toward the gates of basketball heaven, or crumble and perish into the basketball hellfire below.

The referee bends his legs slightly as the longtime EBC announcer, Duke Tango, picks up the microphone.

“Welcome to Rucker Park, the start of the greatest outdoor tournament in the world.” His husky voice shreds through the summer air, jolting the listless crowd.

The ball is tossed up—a knuckleball—and climbs toward its apex before a pair of large hands meet it on the way down. It's tipped backwards in a slow, soft arc. TJ grabs it out of the air, then pauses and looks over at the scoreboard, at the clock that has already begun its slow descent toward judgment.

19:59 . . . 19:58 . . . 19:57 . . .

 

In the early afternoon, our bus pulls into Salt Lake City. The station is crowded, but it somehow seems vacant. A room full of exhausted, hungry people gives the long, cold hallways a feeling of vast emptiness. I've only been on the bus with TJ a relatively short 14 hours, but it's already begun to feel claustrophobic and restrictive, like a truck full of cattle.

I find a couple open spaces on the floor at the far end of the station; I put my bag underneath me and sit down. Soon the stench of hours of unchecked sweat spills out across the room. TJ seems unfazed. He pulls out his basketball, nearly worn to the rubber, signed by each of his family members and closest friends like an arm cast, wishing him luck on his journey. He begins casually spinning it around his finger in a tight circle, then around his thumb, then finally transferring the spinning ball to the edge of his cell phone. It's a party trick he's perfected to the point of boredom. A smallish man, with thick, worn lines across his forehead, comes closer to admire the skill. TJ smiles proudly.

This is the third time TJ has made this pilgrimage across country. The first time, in 2011, he had no expectations or even a place to stay. He was allotted a free ticket by virtue of working at Greyhound and simply wanted to take the three-day journey, place his feet on the Rucker Park playground, then get back on the bus and head home. However, a few days before he left, as if by divine intervention, he met a fellow streetballer at his favorite court on P Street and 10th in downtown Sacramento. He invited TJ to stay at his family's place in Queens for a few days, only a subway ride from Harlem.

“The first time I went there I took the subway to 145th Street,” he explains to me through an awkward accent—a slow Northern California drawl (he'll say “hella” more than a few times) with touches of a Southern twang from his high school years spent in Oxford, Mississippi.

“As I'm walking I see the Polo Grounds Towers and my heart starts racing. I was shaking and nervous because I'm so excited. I sit down during a game and at halftime they ask if anyone wants to dunk. I was nervous, but I know for a fact if I raise my hand they'll pick me. Why? Because I'm white. Hannibal (an EBC announcer) picked me out of everyone. I went on the court, threw myself an alley-oop, cocked it back, and dunked it. It was 10 at night, streetlights on, music is going. The place went
crazy.
I dreamed about that my whole life.”

A year later, he returned to Rucker, not just to dunk, but also to enter the open run and try to make a team. However, an ankle injury a few days before derailed his attempt. He stayed in New York a week longer, returning to Rucker Park nearly every day to watch the games, before eventually taking the bus home.

Over the last 12 months, he's been consumed with thoughts of playing in the EBC and excelling, seeking out that euphoric rush from the crowd on a weekly basis. He wakes up every day at 5:00
A.M.
, runs suicides, shoots an obscene number of jumpers, then plays in any game he can find.

But he's also taken to Facebook to boast he's one of the best in Sactown. He has announced that he is coming to Rucker Park this summer to score 40 to 50 points a game against the world's best.

People began to take notice. The director of the EBC heard about him, and so did others associated with the tournament. A film production team in Los Angeles got wind of the white kid with the unreasonable confidence and soaring leaping ability, and they got curious.

A producer friend of mine suggested I go up to Sacramento from LA and find out more about him, then document his journey across country. I played 10 years of pro ball overseas, and although I knew very little about street basketball in New York, my friend thought, if nothing else, I'd be a good judge of talent.

 

The day before we took off across country, I met TJ at his grandfather's house in the northern Sacramento neighborhood of Del Paso Heights (DPH, or “Deepest Part of Hell,” as TJ calls it). It's a community of mostly small, decaying California bungalow houses built for migrant farmworkers from Oklahoma and Mexico during the Great Depression and workers at the McClellan Air Force Base during World War II. His place, near the end of the block, sits across from an alley of abandoned furniture and behind a pair of RV dealerships. A couple of the houses on the block are boarded up; the rest seem to be, if not neglected, barely functional, nothing more.

I walk past his uncle's old Camaro parked across the front lawn. TJ greets me and shakes my hand with an unconvincing flip of the wrist. His cutoff T-shirt shows off sleeves of colorful, cartoonish tattoos that start at his wrist and work their way up.

'80'
S BABY
, his left arm shouts; a Roc-A-Fella Records logo with the lines from a verse in Jay-Z's “Lost One”: “Time don't go back, it goes forward / Can't run from the pain, go towards it”; a boom box animation with
HIP-HOP
tagged above it; a Wu-Tang Clan symbol near his right wrist; a large inscription of the '80s rap group Audio Two (“Milk is chillin'”); an array of colorful dollar signs and tiger-striped stars; and his self-anointed moniker,
UPTOWN FINEST
.

I wasn't quite sure what to make of his tattoos, and stared at them a few moments longer before I noticed his grandfather, hunched over on the blue cloth couch across the room, waving at me. He began to say something before picking up a glass marijuana pipe. He lit it up and took one long toke before turning back toward me and groaning some barely audible greeting.

After a lifetime of chronic back pain, he's usually stuck in a wheelchair and has spent most of the last few years under a haze of smoke and reruns of
Judge Judy.
At night, he simply curls up on the couch while TJ's older cousin sleeps on the love seat.

The house itself is crumbling. The bathroom is decaying and full of mold, and the kitchen floor seems to be rotting completely on one side. The only well-cared-for items in the entire place are two large cannabis plants on a circular plastic kitchen table, surrounded by bleach bottles, glowing under fierce HID lighting.

TJ has lived here almost six years, after homesickness brought him back from Mississippi. Born in Sacramento, starting in eighth grade when his father moved him to Reno, he had a nomadic childhood. He was there for a year before his dad abandoned him and his sister for another family—he hasn't spoken to him since. His mother remarried and took TJ to Oxford, Mississippi, during his high school years. He tried to adapt, but struggled in school, cutting classes to shoot hoops or just roam the streets with his new friends. He dropped out before graduation to help his family pay the bills. Eventually, one day when he'd had enough of the South, he walked to the bus station and headed back to Sacramento.

When he came home, after searching for months, he found the only job he could get in Sacramento's harsh, collapsed economy—cleaning bathrooms, part-time, at the local Greyhound station. In three years, he's never had a promotion or a pay raise.

Standing in TJ's kitchen, the inescapable smell of weed and beer drifts in from the yard. I walk through the back door and see 20 to 30 smaller marijuana plants lined up in neat rows, empty beer cans strewn across the concrete patio. The family pit bull lies in the sun, tongue out, and takes in the sweet smell of freshly grown weed.

TJ, who seems to be weary, ushers me back inside. We pass his uncle's bedroom. He's counting piles of green Ziploc bags, and shoving them into a box.

I walk behind TJ into his room, then freeze and look around. His bed is immaculately made, his sneakers lined up perfectly. A clothes iron is placed on the floor. There is the tidiness of a well-groomed man, but also innocence, the naïveté of a 14-year-old boy who still views the world in terms of heroes and candy money.

As he talks to me, he fiddles with his white headphones and moves them off his ears. I can hear the faint sounds of Mobb Deep's “The Infamous” eke into the air.

On his desk sits a large plastic jar filled to the brim with nickels, dimes, quarters, and pennies. Mostly pennies. It's money he's saving for food in New York. Next to the jar are spray cans and black markers for tags he's working on—“Brooklyn” and “Uptown Finest.”

In the confines of his room, it's as if he's trying to live out his own fantasy of what he imagines an early-'90s childhood to be during the golden age of hip-hop on the streets of New York. A time that must seem romantic and authentic, in a way that his life now seems difficult and mundane.

On his desk, stacked neatly in two piles, seem to be every DVD or VHS tape ever produced about street basketball.
Above the Rim, Heaven Is a Playground
, a documentary about streetballer Earl “The Goat” Manigault.

These are the tapes he grew up with. “I was like, in the second grade watching a show with my dad and this commercial come on about streetball,” he says. “I can't remember what it was, but the footage was fuckin' crazy. I was hypnotized, I couldn't get enough. Ever since that, that's all I want to do.”

The rest of his room is a homage to his idols: quotes and pictures of Jay-Z over his window, an awkward life-size cutout of Michael Jordan leaned against the wall, a framed photograph he took with streetball legend Joe Hammond the first time he went to Rucker. “Joe didn't have to go to class, he was a legend,” he says. “The entire Lakers flew to Rucker to see him play.” He holds the picture in his hands, then puts it down and stares at it in admiration.

And above his bed, glaring down on him each night, is a mini-shrine to the fiery Boston Celtics playmaker Rajon Rondo. It's almost an unhealthy love. His entire bedroom is sprinkled with odes to Rondo—a jersey, his pictures, a warm-up shirt, and all types of assorted Boston Celtics paraphernalia.

When I ask him to name five players to comprise an all-time team, he mentions Jordan, then almost gushes with admiration just to say Rondo's name. He identifies with the antiauthoritarian point guard, who views the game through the lens of love, loyalty, and heart, and who shuns standardized versions of fundamentals and statistical analysis. A streetballer's baller.

“Rondo plays because he loves basketball,” TJ says. “Basketball players in the NBA right now, like LeBron James, they're all about money. Like, Rondo dislocated his elbow and he
still
played.”

Finally, he picks up his basketball off the carpeted floor, and tosses it to me. “You wanna play one-on-one?” he asks.

 

Seventy-four hours, 12 states, and eight bus changes. The distance from Sacramento to New York can be measured in many ways—hours wearing the same underwear, times stepping over a poor, passed-out soul in a bus station bathroom, centimeters of your swollen ankles, vending machine Snickers bars for lunch or dinner—but as the hours pass and sleep deprivation takes hold of you, your actual destination seems less and less important. It's almost as if you begin to just float alongside the bus in a sort of zombie-fied state, watching yourself through glossy eyes.

Still days away from New York, falling forward through the night across I-80, somewhere east of Utah, I looked over in TJ's direction and wondered what he was thinking. The lights inside the bus were off completely except for the thin strip across the roof that acted as a night-light.

Maybe he could sense me looking at him and he turned toward me. “You know how the EBC started?” he offered, as if he's been waiting for this moment to tell me. I say nothing. “You don't know?” He leans in as if we're around a campfire. I can make out the outline of his face across the aisle.