COURTING DISASTER

Naclerio had brought me there to see a game — the best basketball game in New York. It was a professional game, of sorts, most of the players paid by local drug lords eager to enhance their reputations and spend a night betting thousands of dollars on their teams. On court were several recent graduates of Division I colleges, others who would have played Division I had they been able to stay in school, and one boy, Lamar Odom, who at age sixteen was 6 feet 9 inches tall and already nicknamed “The Franchise.”

Naclerio, my host in the underworld of New York City basketball, is the coach of the Cardozo High School boys’ basketball team, the editor of the Hoop Scoop newsletter, and the man who discovered the now-professional superstar Stephon Marbury when he was in the sixth grade. That makes Naclerio a combination of talent scout, pimp, and king-maker in the shadow world of playground basketball. It also makes him part of a phenomenon that is helping destroy inner-city children.

Basketball is divided into two worlds — one of battered playgrounds, the other of multimillion-dollar arenas; one of drug money, the other of shoe contracts; one of myth, the other of fame. The two worlds overlap a little, and a few young players have a chance to move from the first to the second. But their opportunities disappear very quickly as they get older.

The world most people know is the National Basketball Association. The NBA has gone from being a barnstorming sideshow to a slickly packaged showcase for the world’s most popular sport in just fifty years. Most of the players in the NBA today have traveled the same path: Discovered in grade school by men like Naclerio, they are shepherded into basketball clubs with other promising youngsters. These clubs, sponsored by sneaker companies, pay the tuition at private high schools for the most talented players, the best of whom go on to play at Division I colleges, again on full scholarship. The best of those college players are then drafted into the NBA, where they can expect to spend an average of 3.75 years and make an average yearly salary of $ 1.7 million.

The other, much larger, world is the subject of two new books: Hoops Nation: A Guide to America’s Best Pickup Basketball, by Chris Ballard, and Pickup Artists: Street Basketball in America, by Lars Anderson and Chad Millman. This alternative world also begins with talented boys signed to clubs to develop their skills. But some boys prove unable to handle even the reduced academic work expected of athletes and lose their scholarships. Kicked back to public schools, surrounded by the daily calamity of life in the inner city, these kids neglect their schoolwork, fall in with the wrong people, get involved with drugs. Many drop out before graduation, and those who do graduate go on to “juco” — junior college, the last resort for troubled ballplayers. Despite the promise of a chance at a Division I program after two years, most linger only a few months before returning to the city. Then they go to the only place left for them to play basketball: the playground.

Professional basketball differs from other professional sports in two ways. First, the factors that determine whether a player makes it are rarely physical. Professional-caliber players can be found on almost every competitive playground in America. What separates those in the NBA from those on the streets isn’t their jump shots, but their heads. A handful of players — Allen Iverson, Latrell Sprewell, Anthony Mason — are so talented that they play professionally despite their behavioral difficulties. But with the exception of the very top echelon of NBA stars, intellectual ability and emotional stability are all that separate the millionaires from those on the street.

Second, unlike baseball, where the stature of a player is based on his statistics, or football, where a player is defined by the number of championships won, basketball ranks its players almost entirely by their moves. Where other major sports deal in permanence, basketball is based on the fleeting: Unearthly dunks or impossible passes are the equivalent of slugging averages and Super Bowl rings, meaning that playground players have a chance to become legends alongside their NBA counterparts.

As a result, some of the greatest basketball players never spent a minute in the NBA — and some of the best basketball is, and always has been, played on the street.

Every few years, there appears a sudden clump of books and movies about playground basketball. Pete Axthelm’s The City Game (1970), Rick Telander’s Heaven Is a Playground (1976), and Jim Carroll’s nefarious The Basketball Diaries (1978) were seminal works and the first real recognition of the playground. Interest revived with Darcy Frey’s The Last Shot in 1994 and a spate of movies: in 1992, White Men Can’t Jump; in 1994, the Oscar-nominated documentary Hoop Dreams; in 1995, the movie version of The Basketball Diaries, starring Leonardo DiCaprio; in 1996, the HBO documentary Rebound: The Legend of Earl ‘The Goat’ Manigault; and this spring, Spike Lee’s He Got Game.

Unfortunately, the two recent books on the topic are inferior additions to this flood of 1990s coverage. Ballard’s Hoops Nation is a Michelin Guide for basketball players. He rates and describes basketball courts across the country and tries to make it seem a book by adding snippets of his travel diary as well as simple-minded bluster about the character of street basketball. Ballard is at his best when he catalogues courts and recreation centers, providing interesting information for travelers who want to play a little basketball. His problem comes when he tries to talk about the game — for he has little grasp of its history, and his desperate attempts to use “authentic” court language sound false and forced.

Anderson and Millman’s Pickup Artists is more of a history, chronicling the street game from its origins in 1918. Requiring little space and less equipment, basketball has always been a city game, and so from the beginning it has been played by the ethnic groups that filled the ghettos. Until the late 1940s, playground basketball was ruled by the likes of Ralph and Danny Kaplowitz, Sheky Gotthoffer, Eddie Gottlieb, Dutch Garfinkle, and Sonny Herzberg. As the Jews began to flee the city, blacks moved in and quickly took over the game.

In the 1960s, the New York playground scene was dominated by Earl “The Goat” Manigault. In the ten years he played basketball, from age twelve to twenty-two, Manigault created a powerful legend. Just over six feet tall, he once dunked over Lew Alcindor (the legendary seven-foot center from a New York high-school who led UCLA to three national collegiate championships and, after changing his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, had one of the longest, most productive careers in the history of the NBA). Manigault is the only person ever to perform a double-dunk, and his greatest regret was never being able to perfect sitting on the rim after a dunk, something he decided to try because he noticed that during dunks, “my waist would be hovering near the rim.” At twenty-two — after a brief and failed attempt to manage college life at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina — he became addicted to heroin and never played seriously again.

Joe Hammond was the next superstar of the street game. During a summer-league game in 1970, Hammond scored fifty points in one half while being guarded by Julius Erving. He had to do it in one half, because he couldn’t be bothered to show up until halftime — which is why Julius Erving is a now-retired NBA legend worth millions of dollars, and Joe Hammond is not. Drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers, Hammond served two terms in prison on drug charges and never played a game in the pros.

While Anderson and Millman provide an interesting if cursory history of the game, they fail to address the most important question we must ask about the sport: What role has basketball really played in the inner-city?

Some commentators argue that the culture of basketball has helped at-risk youth by keeping them out of trouble and giving them something to which they can dedicate themselves. Richard Lapchick of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society points out that the college graduation rate for black male college basketball players, 38 percent, is higher than the graduation rate for all black male students, 34 percent. In his book, Sport in Society: Equal Opportunity or Business As Usual?, Lapchick cites a survey of black high-school student athletes, who said overwhelmingly that they felt their lives were better off because of their participation in sports.

There is, however, considerable evidence to suggest those kids are mistaken. In 1992, the Department of Education released a survey showing that 30 percent of high-school basketball players leave school functionally illiterate. The graduation rate for black basketball players, though higher than that for all black male students, lags significantly behind the 56 percent graduation rate for all students.

Even more alarming is a 1997 survey, also from the Center for the Study of Sport in Society, which shows that 66 percent of black males between thirteen and eighteen believe that they can one day make their livings as professional athletes. This is the reason, one supposes, that playground courts in New York have their three-point lines drawn at NBA distance, not the shorter high-school and college distance.

Of course, there are only 306 Division I basketball programs in America, and even if the programs had all twelve players on full scholarship — which they don’t — that would produce only 3,672 college scholarships. Of those athletes, at most fifty-eight are drafted into the NBA each year. Not 66 percent, but 0.01 percent of high-school basketball players actually make the NBA.

But the dream of basketball stardom isn’t about reality; it’s the fantasy of a cosmic lottery. How could poor kids from broken homes who go to violent, dysfunctional schools not want to believe — seeing an NBA that is 79 percent black, watching highlight films on ESPN and Nike ads with Penny Hardaway, reading articles in the Washington Post about the wealth of teenaged Tracy McGrady who went pro right after high school, and listening to coaches who paint the picture of the dream. “The promise being held out there is that this is the escape route,” argues sportswriter John Feinstein, author of such basketball classics as A March to Madness, A Season on the Brink, and A Season Inside.

So instead of working hard to get good grades and mustering the emotional capital needed to stay away from trouble, these kids play basketball. It may temporarily keep them away from danger, as Lapchick claims, but they aren’t helping themselves in the long run by pursuing it at the expense of school. Lotteries always draw from the pool of those who can least afford to play. In the urban wasteland, even the brightest and most stable children have to struggle to life themselves out of the ghetto — meaning that an average child who throws all his energy into a sport has almost no chance.

The fact is that basketball has contributed its full share to the destruction of possibilities for black middle-class life. Coming from a world apparently limited to either extreme poverty or extreme wealth, young inner-city men never seem to realize that most people count success as making $ 40,000 a year and moving to a small house in the suburbs. For a thirteen-year-old, low-income black boy with talent, there is a fleeting window of opportunity where if he concentrates on school and ignores the mirage of wealth, he has a chance at college — and the education that can give him a running start on the road to middle-class living.

That window, so small to begin with, shrinks with each year a kid falls behind in school, develops bad habits, and stays on the street. By age seventeen or eighteen, the window is shut: Those who are going to make it have; those who haven’t aren’t going to.

All the while, the NBA, the shoe companies, the Washington Post, ESPN, and particularly the Ron Naclerios of the world perpetuate a delusion. Like gambling commissions running ads for state lotteries that promise the poor their ship is coming in — like crack dealers promising a good high, for that matter — they are selling expensive and destructive dreams to young people caught in the throes of a social nightmare.

And then, when those players are in their twenties, they find themselves back where they started — on the playground. The best street players will have their legend, just like the ones who made it professionally, but not much else.

“I’m fifty-two, I feel like I’m a hundred,” The Goat said. “The way I figure it, I’m just lucky to be alive, lucky to still be on the playground.” All that talent, the chance to escape, gone. Two weeks ago, on May 14, Earl Manigault died of congestive heart failure at age fifty-three, his health ruined by too many late nights, too many drugs, too much basketball. That’s the kind of luck tomorrow’s players could do without.

Jonathan V. Last, research associate at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, edits the on-line magazine Squire.