SPORTS
Part VI: The Playoffs
(This is the sixth part in a series following the exploits of the eight teams in the Holstein Park adult basketball league. The last part: The Champion will appear next week.)
Jesse Reed walked into the Holstein Park field house alone and went immediately to the pop machine. He plunked in a dollar for a diet soda. No time for dinner tonight. It’s playoff time.
This is the fourth year Reed, 29, has come to the playoffs with his team, the postal workers, and he has no plans to go home disappointed. “We’ve got to win, we just have to win,” he says. He has plenty of reasons for optimism. It’s not just that the new uniforms have arrived – finally. This year they also have the talent, one Ontario Hopson, a 6’8” center who, only a few years ago, anchored his Olive Harvey college team.
On the day Hopson walked into the Logan Square post office on California Avenue,
Jesse remembers saying to himself, “We have to get this guy on the team.
If he’s on board, this is our year.”
Tonight, the first game in the playoffs for the POW’s is against West Haven. Over the course of the regular season, the POW’s and West Haven have met twice and come away with a split decision. Unfortunately, the last part of the split was a 122-64 pasting the POW’s took just before the playoffs began.
All weekend, Reed had been stewing about how to reverse the outcome. He wants to be a leader this time, to get to the gym early, but not so early as to appear over-anxious. He walks up the stairways to the gym only to discover he is the last to arrive. All eight other POW’s are already out practicing. Reed changes quickly and makes it on court just in time for the opening tip-off.
West Haven is playing tonight without the benefit of their coach, Eugene Woods, 46, who is taking his young charges on a Spring vacation bus tour of southern colleges. But Woods’ regulars are all there – Ty Kirby, Randy Mason, Bone, Greg Turner and Alonzo “Z” Pruitt – everyone but “The Determinator” Martell Thompson, who shows up about midway through the first half.
For the first few minutes, it looks like the POW’s have the upper hand. Hopson controls the lane but passes it out so others can take their outside shots. When Martell shows up, though, the momentum shifts. He locks horns with Hopson. Now free from rebounding duties, Bone and Ty Kirby tie up the less athletic postal workers on defense and, on offense, pour in three point shots. By halftime, the score is West Haven 41, POW’s 29.
The lopsided scoring breeds dissention in the POW’s huddle. Hopson complains there are too many big men on West Haven that the other POW’s aren’t covering. He can’t play both offense and defense on the boards, he says. James Howard, 50, the coach urges the team to stay calm and pass more. Reed insists that when he’s open no one gets him the ball.
The second half begins much as the first one ended. Their lead has made West all that much more confident and, without Woods there to urge teamwork, they are freestyling like it’s playground time after dark. The older POW’s can’t keep up. But Reed isn’t going to let this game slip away so easily.
With only four minutes left -- and West Haven ahead by 20 -- Reed calls a timeout from the sidelines and checks himself into the game to relieve his coach. The ref is confused. Suddenly, there are five POW’s on the floor. The referee asks them all to sort it out. To make peace, Howard sits and lets Reed play. But nothing changes. The blowout ends West Haven, 79, POW’s 47.
The season is over for the postal workers. Everything except the recriminations and second-guessing that are sure to follow. Both teams go to the bench to change, but Jesse can’t let go.
“You guys got nothing,” Reed shouts
across the gym at West Haven.“You got nothing!”
“Oh yeah,” Bone shouts back. “We got a team.”
“We got a team,” Jesse responds.
“You got a losing team,” Bone says.
For Latin Express, making the playoffs is another occasion for a family party. They arrive for their game against Dipset with a cheering section of wives, kids, cousins and girlfriends. Juan Salinas, 34, the coach, scurries around making sure everyone has a comfortable place to watch. His excitement is contagious.
But the boys on Dipset are also pumped. Tony, Rufus, Dante, Vic and Black Vic are running a disciplined lay-up line while Mutombo, showing no signs of his ankle injury, stands under the basket handling rebounds.
Both teams appear evenly matched in size and talents – neither has a towering player in the center – so after 20 minutes Latin Express goes into halftime with a one point lead.
Tony is not happy with his team's performance. Rufus has kept them in the game with tough rebounding and defense in the lane, but their outside shooting stinks, especially Tony’s. In the first half, Tony has thrown up 11 attempts and made only 3. And Mutumbo has been all but useless.
Instead of mapping strategy with his team, Mutombo spends his halftime complaining to the referee about alleged fouls that weren’t called. Matthew Mohammed, the referee, listens patiently at the scorer’s table, but all he can do is smile. When Mutombo finally walks away, Mohammed laughs.
“He’s just young,” he says, “When he gets some meat on those bones, he won’t feel every touch. Mutumbo thinks a stiff wind is a foul.”
Tony’s frustration at his poor first half shooting only makes him re-double his efforts in the second. His first two long shots drift wide of his mark and Rufus, hoping to calm him down, shouts, “You don’t have to do it all alone. Look for the cutters.”
As soon as Tony eases up, the kids on Dipset step up. Dante comes into the game and hits two quick jumpers, one for three points. Then Mutumbo, who’s been staying wide of the hoop for much of the game, mixes it up under the basket for a crucial rebound and a put-back bucket. Suddenly, Dipset is up 67 to 51. Their swagger is back.
Latin Express calls a timeout to map strategy; and the boys from Dipset, at each other’s throats only minutes ago, are hanging on each other’s shoulders, exchanging high fives, confident they can’t be caught.
The Latin Express pulls back to within nine points, but they’re reduced to a series of desperate fouls at the end. With only ten seconds left, Mutombo grabs a rebound and stands holding the ball until the clock runs out. But Jonathan Crespo, 18, won’t go down easy. The smallest player on the court wraps his arms around the tallest for one last, deliberate foul.
“Finally, Mutumbo gets his foul,” Dante says. But he misses the free throw. The game ends Dipset 75, Latin Express 66. Dipset has won a place in the championship game.
Beating the postal workers did not put West Haven into the championship. It only moved them along to a bigger challenge: Lito’s Weapon, the neighborhood favorite playing for the honor of their murdered friend Lito Velez.
Lito’s Weapon had a 9-1 record and decimated most of its opponents in the division. It rode on the shoulders of its two big men, Brian Kelleher and Alan Erickson; but Rob Mihalski, the 25-year-old they call “Country,” Lito’s cousin Antonio, or “Q”, and Danny Garcia were strong outside shooters. And the heart and soul of the team was Moses Seda, 20, who guards the legend of Lito as carefully as any man on the court.
When I entered Holstein Park for the final playoff game, there was only one person in the gym. It was Ty Kirby, the outside shooter for West Haven who’d startled me the first time I saw him by draining 15 points in three minutes -- even though he showed up only five minutes before the end of the game.
Somehow, Kirby had gotten the start time of the game wrong – again.
He’d driven up all the way up from his job warehousing hair care products in Blue Island, fighting traffic on the Dan Ryan for two hours, only to discover he was an hour early and the only player on either team in the gym.
When I approached him, Kirby told me this was his first year on Wood’s West Haven team. He joined as a favor to his dad, who played with Woods on his softball team in the summer.
“Mostly, I just like freestyling, but in this league, I get to do a little tournament and a little freestyling. It’s good to mix it up.”
I started asking about Ty’s high school record. He said he started out at Orr High School, then, in 1990, Landon Cox, the tough talking coach of King High School recruited him to a team that went on to Champaign for the state finals. In 1991, Cox’s King High team won the city championship.
“Were you a starter,” I asked.
“I was in the beginning,” he said, “but coach benched me
because he said I wouldn’t play defense, and he was right. But I am
kind of famous."
"Oh yeah?” I asked.
“Yeah, I was in that movie Hoop Dreams.”
“You weren’t William Gates or Arthur Agee, I know that,”
I said.
“No, but you know that scene where Marshall was playing King. I was in the crip line [doing lay-ups] when they had a good close-up of me. I wish I had a dollar for every time they showed that,” he said.
“So do we all,” I said.
For the opening tip-off, Moses is paired against Martell, who is not only six inches taller, but 50 pounds heavier. Ty grabs the tip and throw up a long shot that falls wide. Then they are off.
For the next twenty minutes, both sides go at a frantic pace, up and down the court, with picks, no-look passes and in-your-face lay-ups. This is one of those games where the small gym plays like a pinball machine. Players from other teams, waiting for the second game, crowd into the little bench area to watch.
For twenty minutes, it is a glorious game of basketball. There is no one hero on either side, and no specific turning point. Everyone plays well. Everyone is a hero. But gradually the tide turns to West Haven. By the middle of the second half, Country’s outside shot has gone cold and Q has no problem dribbling between defenders up the court, but there’s no one open to pass to. Kelleher and Erickson pick up hard fouls under the board.
When Martell drives the lane to take the West Haven lead to 18 points, Moses calls a time out. He leaps up and slams the wall, then stalks around the court cursing only himself. There’s not enough time for Lito’s Weapon to stage a comeback, a fact Martell makes sure everyone on his team understands.
“They have to catch us,” he says. “Take your time. Play out the clock. They have to catch us.”
And that is just what West Haven does, slowing the tempo and drawing more fouls from a team that have few to give. When the game is out of reach, Woods pulls Martell out to play the last couple minutes himself.
Martell takes a seat on the bench, spread out his legs and begins singing. “Sha Na Na Na. . . Sha Na Na Na. . . Hey, hey, goodbye.”
But he isn’t much into the thrill of victory. He’s thinking about the tournament prize money, now only a game away. “How much is it?” he starts asking around on the bench. “How much do we get if we win?”
After supplies and ref fees are paid, it’s traditional for the Holstein Park recreational staff to split the remaining team fees into 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize money. First place is worth about $475. There’s $250 for the second place team about $100 for the team that wins the consolation game.
Coach Woods has promised his team that he will split the winnings with them if West Haven wins. As he steps off the court, Martell is right in his face with the question. “One more game, right? How much do we get if we win?”
No one on Lito’s Weapon wants to talk after the game. I ask Kelleher what happened.
“We played lousy,” he says. Not much in the way of sports quotes, but pretty accurate.
At the gym door, I see that Bone has changed into another of his sartorial outfits, this time featuring a loose blue silk shirt, baggy white pants and another buck-fifty cap. This one has “Chicago Cubs” sequined across the front and carries tributes to Terrance, George and RIP Duke.
“How many of those caps do you have?” I ask. “I got a lot of them,” Bone answers. “I got a lot of dead friends.”
The Championship match will be West Haven vs. Dipset. For all the marbles – and $475.
To Be Continued
Did you miss Part I: A Season for All Reasons or Part II: The Gym Rats or Part III: The Grudge Match or Part IV: Lito's Weapon? or Part V: The Old Fockers Go Down ?
