SPORTS
A Season for All Reasons
(This is the first of a 5-part series following the exploits of the eight teams in the Holstein Park adult basketball league. Part II - The Gym Rats will appear next week. Additional installments will appear weekly.)
At night, when I walk the streets of Bucktown, I can hear the distinctive squeak of sneakers and dribbled basketballs coming out of a second story window of the Holstein Park field house telling me there is a basketball game in progress.
The field house is a landmark, a hulking edifice built in 1912 to bring more recreational opportunities to the working class on Chicago’s west side. The sound I am hearing 93 years later comes every Tuesday and Thursday night from an adult basketball league that still plays in the Holstein Park gym.
There are eight teams in the league -- each representing some facet of Bucktown’s racially mixed population and, it turns out, every division within it. On any given night, you can find 18-year-olds playing 50-year-olds, gangbangers playing yuppies, college grads playing high school dropouts -- men of all ages, races, incomes and backgrounds mixing it up on a basketball court, where none of that matters.
For the last few months, I have been going to the field house to watch the games and, every week, I learn something new about the teams, the players and their reasons for playing.
They play under names chosen by the teams – Lito’s Weapon, The POW’s, Dipset, Papa’s Moustache, West Haven, Latin Express, Fullers Brew Crew and The Old Fockers. As you might suspect, there is a story behind every name.
The rules of the Holstein Park Adult Basketball League are not like those in other leagues. By current standards, the Holstein gym is a cracker box so players must make some accommodation. A professional basketball court these days is 94 feet long by 50 feet wide. This one is 45 by 36. And that’s a wall-to-wall measurement with two inches between the out-of-bounds line and the gymnasium’s brick walls.
Because of the small size, teams can only put four players on the court at a time. Players who are not playing sit in an 8-foot wide bench area at one end of the court. Spectators can watch the action from a similar postage stamp-sized cage above it. If either players on the bench or spectators above want to see whether a shot has gone into the basket, they have to lean out into the court and look up -- or down -- at a backboard that is bolted to the overhead gallery mesh.
When the Holstein Park gym was built, basketball was still a game played with baskets. Nets with the bottoms cut out were not introduced until 1917. After every score, play was stopped for a new jump ball at center court. Under those rules, the room was plenty large enough.
But that was an era when basketball was a game of set shots and two-handed passes. In a new era of crossover dribbles, no-look passes and double-dog-dare-you reverse dunks, the Holstein gym can easily make teams feel like they are playing inside a pinball machine.
When you walk into the Holstein Park gym for the first time, you are reminded of what it must have been like in the days of yore. The brick walls have been varnished so many times they are stained brown. There’s a warm, oily wood smell to the air. The ceiling is held up by wood beams and skylights are the chief source of illumination. If you close your eyes, it’s not hard to imagine rows of men in white leggings and moustaches doing calisthenics or tossing medicine balls to and fro.
At the start of every game, Adrian Loza, the recreation director, gets out a metal rod and cranks open the upper windows for ventilation. There is no air-conditioning. It’s not comfort but competition that draws teams to the Holstein Park Adult Basketball League. When I first started going to the games, the season was already five games old. The Old Fockers were playing against Papa’s Moustache, but neither team was tearing up the court.
During the warm-ups, Papa’s Moustache looked to be the stronger team because it was filled with young college grads. Teddy Harris, 24, said the team was mainly a bunch of his friends who recently graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee and found themselves working in Chicago and living within a few miles of each other in Bucktown. Joining the league was a way to carry on their friendship, stay in shape and talk about their jobs without just sitting around in bars.
In the beginning, everyone was enthusiastic. Choosing a name might have been the high point of their season. After many beers, they decided to call themselves Papa’s Moustache after a racehorse in the 1970’s known for coming from behind. They would be the Papa’s Moustache of the league, the team nobody noticed until the end – when it couldn’t be stopped.
The entrance fee was easy enough to raise, and the team agreed the T-shirts shouldn’t be the cheap kind, but 100% cotton with cool graphics. Unfortunately, making their way as young professionals in Chicago soon took the players in different directions, and their enthusiasm for playing basketball was one of the first bonds to break.
By the fifth game, as good as the team was, Teddy began to realize he was lucky to be able to field the minimum three players required before a forfeit. Even with a full team, it was a rare night the come-from-behind Papa’s Moustache had enough reserves on the bench to actually come from behind.
The Old Fockers are Papa’s Moustache ten years later. Ten years further along in their careers, with wives and children in the picture, they joke about fighting off senility the way Sammy Sosa jokes about taking steroids. The realities of life require a little self-deprecating humor, and so they call themselves The Old Fockers.
The team is the brainchild of Mike Bernstein, 40, a freight cartage broker, who owns a three-flat across from the park. Bernstein is short and prematurely graying, with a middle-age paunch around his belly; but he’s a more than passable ball-handler who exudes competitiveness and, in practice at least, has a deadly shot from the corner.
For the 15 years Bernstein has lived across the street from the park, he’s watched Bucktown gentrify from his living room window. He’s seen the drug dealing through the fences around the basketball court and the gangbangers staking out their benches in the park. But he’s also seen the slow change in the games on Holstein’s outdoor court as artists and college students and young professionals, emboldened by their growing numbers, started making their own games there.
A few years ago, Bernstein and his wife had their first child and, looking for inexpensive day care nearby, discovered the tots program at Holstein Park. It was during one of those parent observation nights, while Bernstein and the other dads in the program were watching their 3-year-olds show off their tumbling skills, that the dads came to realize the time had come when they too ought to be exercising.
Bernstein suggested they join the Holstein Park adult basketball league. He found takers in Steve Lipe, 38, a real estate developer; Trey Rasmussen, 35, an executive with BP/Amoco; Paul Stepan, 35, a commercial real estate lender; Rob Sciachetano, 34, an insurance underwriter; and Mike Hartnett, 34, a sales manager for a plastics company.
Because they needed a little talent to go along with their enthusiasm, Bernstein recruited Mark Roswig, 36, a former tenant, and Joe Backer, 25, another freight broker at his firm. Both had actually played college ball even if, as Backer admits, he was only on the junior varsity at St. Joseph’s in Michigan, a Division III NCAA school.
It did not take long for The Old Fockers to become marked men in the league. In the second game of the season, a rag-tag team of gym rats playing under the name of Dipset beat them by 67 points -- in a 40-minute game. The game became an instantaneous legend, and other teams who played The Old Fockers felt winning by any smaller margin was a defeat.
On this night, Trey Rasmussen was out on the court shooting free throws when Bernstein walked into the gym talking on his cell phone. “Yeah, but he said he’ll be here, right?” Bernstein said. “Okay, say goodnight to her for me. Love you. Be home soon.”
“The hardest part is being sure we’ll have four guys,” Rasmussen said. “We spend all day exchanging emails on who’s coming, but you never know who’s going to show up. And if you can’t get more than four, you have to play the whole game without substitutions.”
At the last minute, Stepan and Backer show up. The game between The Old Fockers and Papa’s Moustache begins. It is a low scoring affair. Neither team is especially interested in ramping up the pace because neither has any reserves.
Somewhere around the middle of the second half, I wander upstairs to the gallery. There is only one other spectator. One of the players waiting for the next game is a man wearing a bright jersey that says POW, who calmly monitors the action (or lack of it.)
I take a seat next to him. Just as I do, Teddy Harris from Papa’s Moustache explodes to the basket with a two-step leap over two startled Old Fockers.
“I don’t think these Old Fockers can hold up,” I say. “They’ll fold, you watch.”
“Yeah, kids these days, they’re all run and gun,” he says. “They’ll wear you down pretty quick. But maybe The Old Fockers will surprise you.”
He introduces himself as James Howard, one of the player/coaches on the POW’s. Howard admits he himself is 50 -- 12 years older than the oldest of The Old Fockers -- and Howard doesn’t even care if he gets to play. He just enjoys coming to the gym to watch the action. So we go back to watching, but now I am curious why he plays on a team called The POW’s.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” he smiles. I look at him again but draw a complete blank.
“I’m your mailman. We call ourselves The POW’s because we are your Post Office Workers. Get it?"
James and I watch The Old Fockers and Papa’s Moustache duke it out right down to the last minute. With 40 seconds left to play, the score is 54-49. The Old Fockers are ahead by 6 points.
The referee whistles a foul, and two free throws later Papa’s Moustache narrows the gap to 54-51. They steal the ball and score again. It’s now a one point game, but the Old Fockers are still ahead 57-56. With nine seconds to play, they can taste their first victory.
After a hard day at the office, fighting traffic on the Kennedy to make the game, changing with no time for warm-ups, saying goodnight to their 3-year-olds on a cell phone, and forced to play 40 minutes with no substitutes, they are nine seconds away from victory.
But not tonight. Papa’s Moustache steals the inbound pass and Harris drives the length of the court to hit a deuce at the buzzer.
The game ends Papa’s Moustache 58, Old Fockers 57.
To Be Continued
