Pete Axthelm THE CITY GAME For the boys of New York's streets, basketball offers the transcendent drama of escape and the brief, often tragic, glory of being a hero. ~ ASKETBALL IS THE CITY CAME. Its battlegrounds mapped strategic war games invite fans to become ~ are strips of asphalt between tattered wire generals, plotting and second-guessing along with ences or crumbling buildings; its rhythms grow their warriors on the fields. With its action com- :om the uneven thump of a ball against hard sur- pressed in a fairly small area and its formations Ices. It demands no open spaces or lush back. and patterns relatively easy to interpret, football ards or elaborate equipment. It doesn't even re- is the ideal television spectacle. Other sports have uire specified numbers of players; a one-on-one similar, if smaller, primary audiences. Golf and mfrontation in a playground can be as memora- tennis belong first to country-club members, horse Ie as a full-scale organized game. Basketball is racing to an enduring breed of gamblers, auto ie game for young athletes without cars or allow- racing to Middle Americans who thrive on its vio- rices-the game in which the drama and. action lent roaring machines and death-defying risks. But re intensified by its confined spaces and chaotic basketball belongs to the cities-and New York, irroundings, from its asphalt playgrounds to the huge modern Every American sport directs itself in a general arena that houses the professional basketball cham- ay toward certain segments of American life. pions of the world, is the most active, dedicated aseball is basically a slow, pastoral experience; basketball city of all. lIering a tableau of athletes against a green back- The game is simple, an act of one man challeng- Pete Axthelm. is sports round, providing moments of action amid longer ing another, twisting, feinting, then perhaps break- editor of Newsweek, and eriods allowed for contemplation of the spectacle. ing free to leap upward, directing a ball toward a has published three I its relaxed, unhurried way, it is exactly what it target, a metal hoop tcn feet above the ground. books since graduating aims to be--the national "pastime" rather than But its simple motions swirl into intricate patterns, from Yale in 1965. This article is excerpted 1 intense, sustained game crammed with action. its variations become almost endless, its brief soar- from his forthcoming orn in a rural age, its appeal still lies largely in ing moments merge into a fascinating dance. To book, The City Game, ; offer of an untroubled island where, for a few the uninitiated, the patterns may seem fleeting, to be published soon by mrs, a pitcher tugging at his pants leg can seem elusive, even confusing; but on a city playground, Harper's Magazine Press. be the most important thing in a fan's life, a classic play is frozen in the minds of those who Football's attraction is more contemporary. Its see it-a moment of order and achievement in a Copyright @ 1970 br olence is in tune with the times, and its well- turbulent, frustrating existence. Basketball is more Pete Axthelm. 8S Pete Axthelm than a sport or diversion in the cities. It is a part, pie on either side could relish the sight of open often a major part, of the fabric of life. Kids in war between Nixon's newly unleashed Silent Ma- THE small towns-particularly in the Midwest-often jority and opponents of the war. Some of the spec- CITY GAME become superb basketball players. But they do so tators who came to watch the Knicks that night by developing accurate shots and precise skills; in may have wondered just how much they could still the cities, kids simply develop "moves." Other care about a game. Then the Knicks showed them. athletes may learn basketball, but city kids live it. They didn't solve the world's problems, any more than playground games cure the ills of the ghetto. But the Knicks and Lakers did offer a moment of HE NEW YORK KNICKERBOCKERS, champions of high drama, a brief and necessary escape from reo T the National Basketball Association, are not ality-a transcendent experience that, in the end, direct products of the city's playgrounds. Like all is all anyone can ask of a great sporting event. professional teams, they have been assembled by Basketball has always had this special quality drafting and trading to amass the best available for the boys of New York's streets. Two decades athletes from across the country. Geographically ago, it fed the dreams of the Irish athletes on fa- and socially, they could hardly have more diverse mous playgrounds like the one on 108th Street in backgrounds. The coach, Red Holzman, was a pure Rockaway, Queens. Those playgrounds produced New York ballplayer; the captain, Willis Reed, is Bob Cousy and Dick McGuire and other superb from the black rural South. The other stars include pia ymakers and brilliant passers; they also spawned black products of city streets and the white son of countless athletes who were almost as accomplished a bank president. Yet as they rose to the summit 'but never made it to college and did not achieve of basketball, the Knicks became inextricably iden- public recognition. On Kingsbridge Road in the tified with the city they represented. Bronx, tough, aggressive Jewish youths grew into The media, based largely in New York, have defense-minded, set-shooting stars; some led the fallen in love with the Knicks and with basketball, colleges of the city to national prominence in the giving the sport its first taste of heavy television late 1940s, but still others faded before the Ipublic coverage, national-magazine cover stories, and all ever learned their names. With money available forms of advertising and promotion. New York's for cars and stereos and surfboards, the hunger rich citizens also joined the love affair, and the vanished from many white playgrounds, and so traditionally scruffy pro basketball audiences were did top-caliber basketball. But the blacks of Har- replaced by a chic new breed in Madison Square lem and Bedford-Stuyvesant more than filled the Garden. And in the playgrounds, the kids too re- void. Some made it to colleges and into the pros, sponded to the Knicks, acknowledging that a New helping to reshape the game with their flamboyant York team was at last bringing a rare playground moves. Still others failed to find a niche in college art to new levels of perfection. The Knicks seemed or the pros, but endured as playground heroes, fac- ideal symbols of the traditions of New York bas- ing the challenges of the best of each new genera- ketball, and if the media portrayed the Knick stars tion of players, occasionally proving themselves as larger than life, the playground kids understood against pro players who return to the parks for that too. summer games. The first week of May, when the Knicks won the Each ethnic group and each generation of street championship, had been a brutalizing, feverish or- ballplayers produced its special styles and legends, deal for most New Yorkers. United States armies and each left its colorful brand on the sport. But were marching into Cambodia and a shocked more than that, each built a distinctive kind of young girl was screaming silently from the front pride-partly ethnic or racial, partly athletic, but pages of newspapers and magazines, in terrible, much more than the sum of those parts. Veterans haunting testimony to the four murders at Kent of playground ball describe it in terms of individ- State University. Demonstrators were assembling uality, status, manhood; they also talk of the way near the United Nations and in the Wall Street it brings kids together. If the Knicks brought a area, pleading almost hopelessly to a government special pride to all New York, they were only mul- they knew wasn't listening. Then the city's dark- tiplying the feeling that the playground kids have est fears took shape, as mobs of Wall Street con- always understood. struction workers unleashed the small hatreds and Occasionally the two distinct worlds of New resentments that had been building within them York basketball converge. A playground idol such for years, and descended on the young people who as Connie Hawkins joins the Phoenix Suns and their President had reassured them were merely comes into the Garden to challenge the Knicks; bums. On the afternoon before the final Knicks Knick stars like Bill Bradley and Willis Reed ap- game against the Los Angeles Lakers, the workers pear at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue to enter came down to bully the kids at close range. Aided Harlem's most prestigious summer competition, by Wall Street clerks, they went on a spree, gang- the Rucker Pro Tournament. These confrontations ing up on the kids, kicking them when they were are always electric. Hawkins may pack the Garden, on the pavement, and leaving scores of bloody vic- while a Reed or Bradley will add hundreds to the tims while policemen stood placidly by. overflowing crowds at a Rucker game. And if a The politics of hate and polarization had thrust playground star like Herman ("Helicopter") Know deep into New York's consciousness, and few peo- ings or Harold ("Funny") Kitt goes up to block 86 a pro's shot or stuff a basket over a pro defender, termination are as shadowy as the man himself "Basketball is he creates myths that endure long after the score sometimes seems, but it made the Evil Doctor a more than a of the game is forgotten.