Recently in New YorkBill De Blasio stood his ground. He did not want anyone on the streets, and to avoid temptations he had the hoops removed from the baskets of all the street fields that plague the Big Apple. Literal. It was the only way to prevent playgrounds maintain their normal activity during confinement. «There will be no basketball games because there will be no hoops. It is a contact sport and the risk of contagion is evident »declared the mayor. He #stayhome by force, but also a more than evident sample that basketball is a religion on the streets of NYC.
My good friend Kevin Couliau, co-director of the documentary Doin’ It In The Park along with a whole street basketball legend like Bobbito Garcia, published on his personal Instagram account one of his wonderful videos with basketball as the protagonist. Called him The Soul of Silence and it showed courts and more courts of New York, including the most emblematic ones, in absolute solitude. You don’t hear bouncing balls, or chain nets emitting their particular click after each basket. Nothing. There are no kids playing, no neighborhood kids training their jump shot and dreaming of one day making a living from the basket. Nothing. Honestly, if it weren’t because I’ve been to most of those courts, I’d say New York is unrecognizable. There can be no NYC without asphalt basketball.
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When you step on the Rucker Park it’s like going back in time to those nights when NBA players returned to the neighborhood to leave their mark on the playground most famous in the world. Kobe Bryant showing his insatiable competitiveness the summer of the same year that he had won his third consecutive ring. Allen Iverson, Baron Davis, Stephon Marbury, Steve Francis, Jamal Crawford, Gilbert Arenas, Nate Robinson, Kenyon Martin… Stars of the League to a greater or lesser extent facing a king of the neighborhood who reached the NBA as Rafer Alston, aka Skip To My Lou or a teenager Lance Stephenson who gave lessons to the elderly. Brandon Jennings dog-face against a living NYC legend like Adris de Leon. Kevin Durant scoring 66 points with an incredible streak of 3s from home. A non-stop of memories of the recent history of the park, which are now just that, memories. The locals cannot imitate their idols and tourists have no hoops to photograph when taking the mythical snapshot of the Rucker Park basket with the projects background.
And it is that street basketball outshines professional basketball every summer. He even becomes the only protagonist as in the summer of 2011, when the NBA was in full swing. lockout. There was not training camps, neither preseason, nor regular season in sight. If you wanted basketball you had to go out and go to the park. If possible go to the tournament Dyckman, in which the best players of playground from the city met every afternoon and received the pros who arrived with basket overalls. A summer for history on the Washington Heights court where you can’t play today. At least until further notice. The line 1 subway, whose tracks pass by the famous park, looks sadly at a place that used to stop to watch game nights. It is not the same neighborhood.
AND West 4th? The legendary court known as The Cage it has not been spared either. He playground most visited in all of New York, located in the heart of Manhattan, it receives players, tourists, regulars and curious people every day of the week. Asphalt basketball at its finest. Pick-up games, tournaments or just kids shooting to the basket. You can breathe basketball at any time of the day … except now that the doors are closed with padlocks and the boards do not have rings. And the worst thing about this whole situation is not that in New York you can’t play. The worst, without a doubt, is that you cannot dream … until everything happens.
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