Leaving the Comfort Zone

You begin by playing against your friends. They’re kids from your immediate neighborhood. Kids who truly believe they have a love for the game. Over time, however, you realize that you’re different. Your team almost always wins. And when it comes time to choose up sides, you’re usually picked first.

Soon you find yourself alone on a court, shooting baskets long after the sun goes down. You’re playing on the one bent rim in the park because it’s the only hoop illuminated by a streetlight. Or maybe you’ve talked a relative into bringing their car up to the fence and turning on the headlights. You’re hungry for a game. But your friends are all off doing something else. That’s when you realize you’re ready for the next step. You need to leave the comfort zone of your neighborhood yard and test yourself against better players.

For me, that came about during the spring of my senior year in high school. It meant leaving the hoops nestled beneath the Triborough Bridge (now renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) in Queens, New York. They were courts shielded from the harsh elements of the world by the immense six-lane roadway approximately sixty feet overhead.

Still uncertain of myself, I took a lateral sidestep, four blocks west to a second section of courts under the bridge. Those courts drew players from other neighborhoods and housing developments. The rising roadway was probably 150 feet overhead there, high enough to allow in the slashing winds and rain.

I didn’t have any siblings or a best friend to use as a sounding board, to give me feedback about my plans. There wasn’t a girl I’d dated more than two or three times. Most streetballers are loners. It comes with the territory, the solo hours of practice invested in polishing your game.

My parents both worked, living paycheck to paycheck, while never owning a house or a car. They really hadn’t succeeded at anything in life, except being great people. Their biggest claim to fame had been raising me, a B– student who never mouthed off to his teachers. Only I desperately wanted something more. And I found it in the feeling of a basketball balanced on my fingertips.

“You’re just like your old man,” Dad told me. “I played basketball in the street all the time. I was crazy for the game.”

I’d nod my head in response and smile, just to make him feel good. But deep down, I knew his love affair with the game hadn’t burned anywhere as fiery as mine. I could tell by the coolness in his stories and the way he held the ball in his hands instead of cradling it.

As a streetballer, I could pass and shoot the rock with some touch. More importantly, I played defense with an immense chip on my shoulder, taking every point scored against me as a personal insult.

My skills stood up to the new surroundings, and I quickly bonded with four other players: Angelo, Monk, Hot Rod Rodriguez, and Jumbo. It was easy to see that we shared the same intense passion to play. Together, we became a makeshift team ready to travel to any yard in the five boroughs to stamp ourselves as recognized New York City streetballers.

Like me, Angelo and Monk were high school seniors. Angelo was the sharpest jump shooter I’d ever seen, although he didn’t look anything like a basketball player. He was six-foot even, with a frame that was round and soft. He was the real-life Woody Harrelson character (Billy Hoyle) from White Men Can’t Jump a decade before that movie was made. Angelo had learned to shoot the rock by practicing night and day in his backyard, fine-tuning a high-arching jumper over his mother’s clothesline. His house was a half mile from the courts. After every game, he’d phone home to make sure his mom had a meal ready for him. His conversation with her, mostly in Greek, would be punctuated by a handful of words I understood.

“Ma . . . pork chops . . . french fries,” he’d emphasize, interrupting the flow of her native tongue.

Monk was a stone-cold preppy. He only wore the newest kicks and changed the laces every week to keep them spotless. His shirt was always tucked into his shorts, even if he had to stop playing mid-game to fix it. He was tall and lanky. For a nice guy, Monk was amazingly annoying, often pointing out everyone else’s faults. And though other players were jealous of Monk’s ideal basketball body, they mostly viewed him as someone who’d never worked hard enough to get the most out of it.

“All your life you are told the things you cannot do. All your life they will say you’re not good enough or strong enough or talented enough. They will say you’re the wrong height or the wrong weight or the wrong type to play this or be this or achieve this. They will tell you no. A thousand times no. Until all the no’s become meaningless. All your life they will tell you no. Quite firmly and very quickly. And you will tell them yes.” —LeBron James, Akron, Ohio, native and three-time NBA champion, who as a youngster fought to overcome his harsh inner-city environment

Hot Rod Rodriguez was a few years older. He’d done a hitch in the army and had a job on the nightshift as a doorman at a swanky Manhattan apartment building. He stood five feet, nine inches tall and was built like a short-armed fire hydrant. Hot Rod couldn’t shoot, dribble, or pass. What he could do, though, was station himself directly in front of you and play defense. He’d somehow injured his right wrist in the military and couldn’t make a normal layup without turning it into an odd-angled adventure.

I started calling Hot Rod “Fifty-Fifty” because those were the realistic odds of him sinking a breakaway layup.

Jumbo gave our quintet size, a presence beneath the boards and in the paint. He was six foot two and a good thirty-five to forty pounds overweight. That didn’t stop him from being amazingly agile and moving like a chunky ballerina with octopus arms. Jumbo had a full-time job reading electric meters for Con Edison. Every day, he’d read the minimum number of meters on his route before marking everyone else N/A (not available). Then Jumbo would ditch his blue Con Edison work shirt and meet us at the courts. Equally as important, Jumbo had a car—a brown two-door economy model. It was a four-seater into which the five of us jammed to barnstorm the city’s b-ball yards. Jumbo named her “Brown Betty” after his favorite dessert of apples baked with brown sugar. Being our thinnest member, I routinely rode the hump in the middle of her backseat.

“Unless somebody goes on a diet or I decide to leave Monk stranded in some park, that’s your official spot, your half-seat,” Jumbo needled me.

My streetball game was in its infancy. At six feet tall and 165 pounds, I shied away from physical contact, using my speed to find open jumpers. My pops was left-handed, so I’d emulated him. As a natural righty, I’d become almost ambidextrous and could shoot the ball with both hands.

Not long after our team’s birth, I earned a nickname. While I was playing shirtless on a sunny June day, somebody’s unleashed Rottweiler grabbed my T-shirt in its saliva-soaked mouth and refused to give it back. That’s when Angelo gave me the tag “Pets.” Whenever we went into the store across the street from the courts for chips and drinks, the rest of the guys would point at the sign in the window that read “No Pets Allowed.”

We were hardly an intimidating-looking crew. But as a streetball squad, we knew each other’s moves—strengths and weaknesses—allowing us to play well over our athletic ceilings. We came away with surprising victories in hugely competitive yards such as Central Park and Dyckman Park.

At Manhattan Beach (located in Brooklyn), we held the court for almost two hours, winning several games in a row. The locals were completely pissed and put together a team of goons to physically beat us into the asphalt. Jumbo exchanged a series of vicious elbows with their biggest threat, who became even angrier at his daring to fight back.

That’s when the guy tightly gripped the rock between his huge paws. From maybe ten feet away, he fired it overhand at Jumbo, who caught it cleanly in his hands as if he were king of the dodgeball court. In response, Jumbo punted the ball over the fence and onto the sandy beach, where it bounced toward the ocean.

A wild fight broke out between us and what seemed like every player we’d defeated that afternoon. I ducked a few phantom punches and heard Monk’s voice from behind me shouting, “Cooler heads, guys! Cooler heads!”

That melee probably lasted for less than a minute, before three times our number chased us out of the park and across the boulevard to where Brown Betty was parked. We jumped inside in record time and then sped away with a small mob chasing us down the street.

No one was hurt. All the way home, we laughed and bragged about our performance the way a tight-knit army platoon might after surviving an ambush. It was a great streetball experience. Something that would ultimately serve us well. Though we had no idea at the time, over the course of the next few Saturdays, we’d take the first steps down a brutal gauntlet. One that would offer us the opportunity to raise our streetball reputation to another level.