SPORTS
Part II: The Gym Rats
(This is the second in a 5-part series following the exploits of the eight teams in the Holstein Park adult basketball league. Part III: Grudge Match will appear next week.)
I went over to Holstein Park again tonight, arriving just in time to see The Old Fockers get shellacked by the brew crew from Fuller’s Tap. The winning margin was 23 points.
The gym rats were cackling.
“Don’t get discouraged,” Shelton shouted. “You beat the spread.”
“What do you mean?” asked Trey Rasmussen, one of the mainstays on The Old Fockers.
“The ref had you -- and 25 points,” Shelton said.
In every park, and every high school, and every place in America where basketball is played, there are always some kids who seem to live and breathe gymnasium air. They cannot walk without dribbling a basketball between their legs, pass a hoop without throwing something at it, or see a game without stopping to critique it. Like other gym rats, Holstein Park’s start gathering at the park as soon as school lets out and hang around on league days until the last buzzer sounds.
The first to arrive are Shelton and Cyrus Moore, 15 and 17, two brothers who have been coming to the park since they were in grade school. Shelton is a freshman at Roberto Clemente High School and a starter on the freshman basketball team. He is stick thin and only 5’4”, but makes up for his lack of height with playful bravado and a sharp tongue.
His older brother Cyrus, 17, is more reserved, but a wizard when it comes to dribbling basketballs off stairs, water coolers, walls and the backs of unsuspecting friends. When Cyrus is happy, he is very happy. A grin the size of a pizza slice spreads across his face. But when he not happy, he falls into a dark and brooding silence.
After the Moore brothers arrive, Dante “DT” Fitts, 16, a starter on the Senn High School team usually shows up. Then, always late, comes Rob Da’Jon Duren, 16, a 6’2” sophomore at Lincoln Park High School that they call “Mutombo” because, with every ounce of muscle pulled into taffy strings, he resembles Dikembe Mutombo, the 7’2” back-up center for the Houston Rockets.
Most of the gym rats play together on a park team in the afternoon high school league, but the action, they all know, is in the adult league at night. So they cling to their patron, Tony Lopez, 20, who used to be one of them, but now works at O’Hare airport transporting coffins in the cargo terminals.
Too old to play as a park teenager, Lopez last winter decided to put up the fee for the adult league and fill his roster with the best of his gym rat friends. Besides Mutombo and DT, he recruited Vic DeJesus, 22, and Vic Hubbard, 20, whom they call “Black Vic” from a church league down the street. But his best catch was Rufus Lacy, 26, a former star on the powerhouse Westinghouse High School Team, who used to work with Lopez’s brother in the warehouse at Best Buy.
Tony lives and breathes basketball. (Wouldn’t you if your day job was transporting dead bodies?) Although he’s only 5’6” himself, he’s the perfect point guard, always looking for ways to pull more players into the mix. To build team spirit, he let the team choose their name, and they voted to call themselves Dipset after a rap group from Harlem whose song “Crunk Music” was the flavor of the month at the time. “Who cares what you are called? What matters is winning” Tony told me. For Tony, it’s all about winning.
For Lacy, it’s a different story. In some respects, he doesn’t actually want to be at the gym. He’s not lazy, he tells me, and he’s not dumb. He works hard, and his goal in life is a steady job he can build a career on. It just hasn’t happened yet. After Christmas, Best Buy scaled back the warehouse jobs and he was laid off. His confidence needed a little boost so Rufus turned to the one thing he knows best.
On the court, he’s a natural, always in control, always in the right place at the right time. In the Dipset offense, the 6’ 4” Lacy is the lynchpin in the lane. “Tony is always trying to get me on his team,” Lacy explained to me one night. “ I didn’t want to play this year because I need to look for a new job, but he’s hard to turn down . . . and basketball’s something I’m good at.”
Although Dipset is not playing tonight, the gym rats congregate at the park anyway to watch what they anticipate will be a preview of the championship game. Lito’s Weapon, now leading the league with a 7-0 record, will be playing West Haven, second in its division at 5-2 – unless somehow Dipset can slip in.
Lito’s
Weapon appears to be the sentimental favorite of the park staff and, after
their own team, most of the gym rats. If you can imagine the gym rats at Holstein
Park ten years ago, you would have the entire line-up of Lito’s Weapon.
When Brian Kelleher, 28, and Alan Erickson, 30, Rob Mihalski, 25, and Antonio Velez, 24, were growing up in the neighborhood, they were the gym rats. All came from blue collar families and, even though one of two still play on going to college, they all still work and live within a couple of miles of where they grew up. Kelleher is a logistics supervisor up the street at the Target store. Erickson is an electrician. Mihalski, whom they call “Country,” works construction; and Velez, or “Q”, is an assistant coach at Kelvyn High School, where he played on the varsity as a teenager.
Rounding out the team are Danny Garcia, 24, and Moses Seda, 20, who were young enough to be mascots to the gang back in the old days, but now are full-fledged members of the team. No matter what kinds of things they might have fought over ten years ago, this gang of Irish, Polish, Swedish and Puerto Rican kids have come through it all together as a team.
“It’s fun playing with these guys,” Kelleher says. “You don’t have to worry about stupid stuff like how we’ll get along. We all know so much about each other. We know who everyone is, and what they’re going to do.”
What drives the team this year is the missing seventh man, Lito Velez, everyone’s favorite friend and teammate. Last November, on a street corner just a block south of the park, Velez, 20, was shot dead in a drive-by gang shooting.
So they are playing this year as “Lito’s Weapon” and have dedicated their season to finding Lito’s killer.
While Lito’s Weapon warms up on one end of the court, the West Haven
team gathers at the other.
Eugene
Woods, the 46-year-old coach, takes off his street clothes revealing that
West Haven is sponsored by State Sen. Rickey Hendon on behalf of a “Better
Life for Youth” – the program for troubled teens that Woods has
run for almost two decades in the Henry Horner projects, most recently in
the Suder School at 2001 W. Washington.
One look at West Haven players warming up shows that youth can be considered a flexible concept. Besides Woods, The West Haven roster includes Greg Turner, 32, a clerk in a downtown law firm; Ty Kirby, 30, a former King High School star who works at a hair products warehouse in Blue Island; Randy Mason, 23, a fork life operator in the O’Hare cargo area; Corey Evans, 30, a neighborhood activist; Alonzo Pruitt, 31, whose occupation is somewhat undefined, and two other players, Martell Thompson, 28, and Daryll Lane, 32, also known as “Bone,” who you might call ringers.
Woods has assembled his West Haven team this year as he has in the past from the playgrounds on Chicago’s west side. It’s territory he knows well. He grew up in the Henry Horner projects just north of the United Center and attended Crane High School where he played varsity on the baseball, basketball and football teams. In 1979, he went to Kansas State on a baseball scholarship, but soon discovered Kansas isn’t Chicago and returned to Chicago to work in the community.
Woods is what is known on the west side as a playground scout. He’s one of those shadowy figures you find standing outside the chain link fences in the parks watching kids play ball. Occasionally, if he spots a genuine diamond in the rough, he might call a coaching friend to suggest so-and-so really wants to transfer to Marshall High School to improve his chances of going to Harvard.
But Woods doesn’t stop there. He keeps tracking the talent long after they’re out of high school. He knows who dropped out, who’s back in the gangs, who’s selling drugs, who went to jail, and who’s getting out. He knows when his players are fighting with their girlfriends, or need a job or just want a friend. By always having a team going, he always has a way of connecting. “I know most of the really good players on the west side,” he boasts, “but you have to get them when they are available.”
This is the first year a Wood team has played under the West Haven banner. The name is a concession to the Chicago Housing Authority attempt to re-brand the old projects as a new “mixed-income” community they are calling West Haven.
As many as 1400 apartments in the old project high rises have been torn down in the last few years, replaced so far by 450 new low rises in cul de sac developments next door. But much of the poverty and problems of the area remain. The medium income of the neighborhood remains around $10,895 and 38% of the families live below the poverty line. Kids in the local elementary schools read in the 27th-35th percentile of Chicago students. Only 70% ever get to high school. And only 60% of those in high school ever graduate.
One of the most nagging problems, though, is adult unemployment, which hovers around 50%. With no jobs to be had, players can always find a pick-up game on the playground courts. This gives Woods a wealth of talent to choose from, but can also be a drawback. “I had a really great 3-point shooter and ball-handler last year,” he told me. “But he went and robbed a bank so we were at a real disadvantage during the playoffs.”
The West Haven players are slow to arrive so while we wait, I introduce myself to the referee, Matthew Mohammed.
Like most of the refs who work Chicago Park District games in the neighborhood gyms, Mohammed, 45. is a high school coach picking up a little spending money on the side. For the last six years, he’s been the varsity basketball coach at Collins High in Chicago. He started his coaching career as an assistant to the late Willie Little at UIC in the late 1980’s then coached other college teams in Elmhurst and at Malcolm X.
Before
he became Matthew Mohammed, the ref, he was Matthew Pepper, a star himself
at Creiger High School who played in the glory years of the late 70’s
against the likes of Mark Aguirre and Skip Dillard at Westinghouse, and Terry
Cummings at Carver, and Russell Cross at Manley, He once put up 26 points
against Aguirre in the city semi-finals, but nobody was looking at him. So
when Aguirre went on to DePaul, Mohammed accepted a scholarship to Chicago
State -- where he played, coached and graduated, as many of the others did
not.
Mohammed is sharing with me his stories of coaching with Willie Little, himself a Chicago high school legend, when “Bone” arrives -- just in time to save West Haven from a forfeit.
Bone is wearing baggy blue jeans, a leather Pelle-Pelle jacket, and a buck-fifty baseball cap (named because custom versions are sold on West Madison for $150.) The cap’s lid is a silky laminate snakeskin and Bone has had the maker stitch in rhinestones on all four sides the names Malcolm X, Lil Buck, Big Dog and Lil D.
Before he undresses, I ask Bone what the names on the cap represent. “They’re friends of mine who died,” he says.
Adrian Loza, the Holstein recreation director, notes that we are running late so Mohammed blows the opening whistle and the two teams go at it, driving up and down the court -- not that it takes many steps – exchanging baskets at a furious pace.
It’s a strong, physical game. Kelleher and Erickson are big forwards in the Luc Longley mold who patrol the paint like it’s their own private property. The only player on the West Haven team who can match up is Martell Thompson, who, at 6’8” calls himself “the determinator” because, when he steps into the game, he changes the outcome, he says.
Martell is determined to play that role here. So he steps to the top of the key then charges to the basket like Michael Jordan on a tear. The ref blows the whistle to call a charging foul.
“What kind of fucked up dumb call is that?” Corey Evans shouts from the sidelines. Woods, standing beside him, glances up in the air, but says nothing. Corey paces up and down then flips the ref the bird. “Get eyes, man, get eyes!”
Mohammed stops play and calls a technical foul.
A few minutes later, Martell makes the same cut to the basket. This time he is draped in the arms of the defenders, but the ref holds back on the whistle. “Hey, you faggot ass ref, get a clue!” Corey shouts.
Mohammed again blows his whistles and signals another technical foul.
“You’re blind, ref, you’re blind.” Corey won’t let up. He paces and tosses a towel onto the floor. Since he is the only authority on the court, Mohammed calls yet another technical foul and ejects Corey from gymnasium.
But Corey won’t leave. He storms onto the court screaming, “I’m going to kick your motherfucking ass!” Woods and Bone finally grab him and walk him to the door. Adrian dials the cops on his cellphone.
It takes all of two minutes before the police arrive. Two policemen walk in, followed by two more, and two more, and two more. Before you can say ‘what happened?’ there are ten officers inside the field house, and four squad cars parked outside. But Corey is long gone.
“What can I tell you,” Adrian says later. “These cops like me. Nobody’s going to let anything bad happen in my park.”
The first half ends with Lito’s Weapon up 34-30, largely on the strength of the three technical fouls against Corey. Woods makes a point of reminding his team that, but the technical fouls, West Haven would be ahead. Neither team is ready to throw in the towel so the second half starts off just as intensely as the first.
With five minutes remaining, and the score knotted up even, West Haven calls a time out.
“We’ve got to keep them off the boards,” Kelleher tells his teammates in the huddle. “Box ‘em out. Crash the boards. Play the D. Play the D.” They double clap and run back onto the court.
“We’re not in bad shape. We got better athletes than them,” Woods tells his team. But West Haven is dragging. The players take their places back on court. Just then, Woods sees Ty Kirby poke his head through the gym door.
Kirby looks like he has just woken up. He didn’t think his West Haven team was playing until the second game, so he doesn’t actually have his jersey, but Woods rushes to get him a clean white T-shirt. By the time Kirby has changed, there are only three minutes left to play. But Woods calls a special timeout so Kirby can check himself in at the scorer’s table.
When play resumes, Kirby, standing off to the side, seems out of place. The inbound pass finds its way into his hands and he pops it up for a 3-pointer. On the next play, the ball is tapped over to him again, and he drops another 3-pointer.
In the span of the next 90 seconds, he adds another 3-pointer, two jump shots and, on a foul, a free throw -- 15 points in three minutes.
The game ends: West Haven 79, Lito’s Weapon 67.
“Who is that guy?” I ask my new best
friend Bone.
“He’s pretty good, isn’t he?” he says.
“He’s great!” I say.
“Yeah, when he shows up,” Bone says.
To Be Continued
Did you miss Part I: A Season for All Reasons?
