SPORTS
Part III: A Grudge Match
(This is the third in a 5-part series following the exploits of the eight teams in the Holstein Park adult basketball league. Part IV: Lito's Weapon will appear next week.)
By early March, match play in the Holstein Park Adult Basketball League has settled into a steady rhythm. The games are not spectacular, but each is its own little culture clash. Tonight, the boys of Dipset are paired up against a Puerto Rican team called Latin Express from the other side of Western Avenue; and West Haven is back to face off against The Post Office Workers.
When I arrive at the field house, the gym rats are hanging in the lobby. Mutombo leans back on the stairs crushing flyers in one hand and launching them off as jumpers toward an open garbage can. Tony Lopez races around making sure all his team is going to show up. The Moore brothers, Shelton and Cyrus, are still talking about the “incident” the other night when the cops were called.
“I heard he had a gun,” Shelton says. “They were afraid he was going to hang out afterward and shoot somebody.”
Adrian, the recreation director, walks through carrying the scoreboard panel up to the gym.
“Hey, Adrian, he had a gun, didn’t he?”
“No, he didn’t have a gun,” Adrian sighs. He hates the way these kids blow things out of proportion. “But if something like that happens, it never hurts to have cops around.”
As game time approaches, the gym rats move up the stairs to the gym. As they turn the corner, Tony sees Rufus Lacy, the last unaccounted for man on his team, changing out of his street clothes.
“Where were you, man? I thought we’d have to play without you,” Tony says.
“My car got towed,” he says.
Shelton breaks into a hysterical giggle.
“Don’t laugh, man! It costs me a lot of money to get out. You want to pay me back?”
Shelton falls silent. Tony sees that Rufus is out of sorts, so he rallies the others on the team. “Come on, none of that matters,” he says.
The Latin Express team has been on the court warming up for almost 15 minutes. Their coach is Juan Salinas, 34, a sheriff’s deputy who discovered the league when he was driving by the park a few years ago and saw a banner on the fence.
Salinas,
his friend David Cruz, 31, and two brothers, Javier, 36, and David Crespo,
34, all grew up together as neighbors around Palmer Square. In the summer,
they play together on a softball team in the Humboldt Park league. For the
winter basketball season, they’ve added Javier’s son Jonathan,
18, a senior at Kelyvn High School, and Alvaro Diaz, 25, who works for Javier
at the Dominick’s on California and Belmont.
Bucktown can be a little like a Balkan state. Over the years, it’s been a port of entry for immigrants from Germany, Poland, Russia, Puerto Rico and Mexico. When real estate developers wrote it off as too dangerous, artists and students came in the 1980’s to fix up the bungalows or turn cheap apartments into studios. Today, those same bungalows are being bought up for $400,000 and torn down to make way for million dollar MacMansions.
But inside this citizen state, there are always pockets of neighbors who refuse to let their blocks get re-developed for the next new thing. The block where Salinas and the Crespo brothers grew up is one of those. Everyone on Latin Express proudly lives and works within a few miles of where they grew up. The seasons change, the sports change, but the team remains the same. And every year, Salinas tells his team the same thing: this is our year.
Once Adrian has the scoreboard plugged in, Mohammed, the referee, calls the players from Dipset and Latin Express to center court for the opening jump. When they are all in place, he looks around and laughs.
“Okay, everyone with jewelry take it off!” he says.
The Dipset players walk back to the sidelines and begin dropping bracelets, rings, earrings, pins and nose clips on the scorer’s table. The booty falls on the formica in a rhythmic clang. The players on the Latin Express more discreetly put their jewelry back into their duffle bags. Back at center court again, Mohammed blows the whistle and the contest begins.
There’s not much to say about the game. Latin Express is practiced, organized and in condition. But only the youngest of them, Jonathan Crespo, has the kind of street ball savvy that can keep up with Dipset’s playground moves.
For most of the game, Latin Express stays within striking distance. But as the clock winds down, Jonathan’s outside shot deserts him just as Tony Lopez finds his range. Tony drops in three 3-point shots and the score is suddenly 79-67 with only a minute left.
On the sideline, Mutombo has been swinging his arms around and telling anyone within hearing distance, “I can feel my windmill coming on."
Everyone on his the team knows what he means; so, with time running out, Tony calls a timeout and brings Mutombo in Rufus. He spreads his team to the corners, opening the lane for Mutombo to sweep in on an alley-oop pass and “windmill” the ball into the hoop. There isn’t a person in the gym who doesn’t know what’s coming.
But once in the game, Mutombo seems to forget the clock is ticking away. He just stands out in the corner warming up his arm, oblivious to the seconds dwindling away.
Tony jams the ball under his arm and shouts at him. “Run to the hole, dumb ass.” Suddenly, Mutombo looks at the clock and breaks for the basket. Tony lofts the alley-oop. Mutombo grabs it with both hands and slams it down – only to see the ball carom off the rim at the buzzer. Maybe next time.
The second game pits the POW’s against West Haven. Eugene Woods, the West Haven coach, still smarting from the ejection of Corey Evans, tries to convince me his team is better off without the distraction.
“Corey’s going through a lot of personal stuff, so I had to suspend him from the team,” Woods says. “But we’re trying to win the championship here. We won it two years ago, and I really like the guys we have this time, so we have to stay focussed.”
Woods is breathing easier these days because his ringers, Martell and Bone, are both on board for the playoffs. In the early going, Martell had to miss some games because he was in Juice The Loose’s tournament over in Rockwell Gardens. A CTA bus driver and basketball fanatic, Juice is famous for staging a basketball tournament in the housing projects that soaks up all the good playground on the west side. Now that the tournament is over, Martell and Bone mix easily with the other West Haven players, who are goofing under the basket until game time.
Across
the way, my postman James Howard introduces me to the rest of his POW team:
Wilbert Parker, 46, his co-coach; Eric Patton, 26; Maurice Pleasant, 34; Jesse
Reed, 29; and Ontario Hopson, 24. All work as mail carriers in the Logan Square
station on California Ave.
This is the team’s fourth year in the league, Howard says. Although it’s been suggested they could win it all with only a little outside help, there are no ringers in the bunch. The postal carriers believe that if they play by the rules, they will win by the rules. (But it doesn’t hurt that Hopson is a 6’ 8” recent transferee who played college ball at Olive-Harvey College.)
The POW warm-ups look like they came right out of the civil service manual. Before every game, the team arrives early. They walk in clockwise fashion around the perimeter shooting jump shots. After each has taken five shots, they run lay-ups, then each takes five free throws. The routine never varies, and no one breaks the routine.
Although both teams are made up entirely of African-Americans, they could not be more different. One thrives on organization, passing and waiting for the good shots. The other freestyles from one playground move to the next, somehow making ends meet. The result is a culture clash as severe as any in the league -- and more than a little animosity brews just under the surface.
In tonight’s game, freestyling wins out. West Haven jumps out to an early lead and sets a rapid-fire pace. The attack comes alternately up the middle on drives by Martell or from the edges with 3-pointers from Ty, Bone and the suddenly hot “Z” Pruitt. By halftime, the score is West Haven, 54, POW’s 27; and there’s no reason to think the postal workers can catch up.
Only minutes into the second half, Ty and Martell start showboating. Martell grabs a long lob under the bucket and, in a single step, he is up, over and dunking the ball. The Ref blows the whistle for a foul. There’s no dunking allowed in this league.
A few minutes later, in an almost identical play, Martell takes another long pass and drives to the basket again. Again, he rises up over the hoop then gently waits while he falls back to earth. Just before his feet hit the floor, he finger rolls the ball over the lip of the hoop for another basket. Martell drifts back on defense with a sly grin across his face. The ref too smiles.
Mohammed has seen it too many times before. If only this kid . . . he thinks to himself . . . hadn’t dropped out of Crane High School, he’d have been varsity for sure. He probably would have been offered a college scholarship. He might have had a shot at the NBA. Even without the NBA, he could be a coach, a lawyer, a team leader. Now he’s a 28-year-old unemployed playground player; and the only people who will see this talent are in this tiny Holstein Park gym, the place where all the might-have-beens come to be.
When the buzzer sounds, the final score is West Haven 122, POW’s 64. The good news for the postal workers is that their overall record, 7-3, is good enough to get them into the playoffs next week. The bad news is their first opponent will be West Haven.
“Hey Adrian,” Woods shouts, “Can’t we just take this game, spot them 50 points, and call it over?”
“It’s the playoffs,” Adrian replies. “Anything can happen.”
To Be Continued
Did you miss Part I: A Season for All Reasons or Part II: The Gym Rats?
