Big city, small town
Feuerherd, Peter
THE LAST WORD BIG CITY, SHALL TOWN Peter Feuerherd For the past ten years I have been a proud participant in the oldest established pickup basketball game in New York City. The history...
...They just might have gotten tired over all the foul calls and bickering that have marked The Game since its inception...
...We would have had them meet our children...
...The history of The Game goes back decades...
...Still, in the back of our minds is the thought that maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time on a sunny New York morning a few weeks ago...
...Once, I let on that I wrote for Catholic publications and, for weeks, my moniker was "Father...
...A female friend told me how different the socializing would be if The Game were an all-women activity...
...Ever so slowly, I began to find out that these guys had lives beyond the hard court...
...He worked as an accountant downtown...
...As I got to know them, they got to know about me...
...As my son got older and taller—he is now a college sophomore—I involved him in The Game...
...The Game continues, I can attest...
...Curtis and John, if you are out there, The Game is waiting...
...When Benny died, a guy who I'm told played for NYU back in the '40s and practiced the art of trashtalking to perfection, we heard about it...
...Yet most times you never trouble to know their names...
...Before September 11, who would have thought such information would have loomed so large...
...Not quite...
...at Crowley Park, near the site of the former gas tanks next to the Long Island Expressway in Elmhurst, Queens...
...Still, by the fifth year or so of my participation in The Game, I had gotten to know all the regulars' names...
...We would have already invited everyone over for tea...
...the Panamanian with a quick move to the basket...
...Last week someone asked, "Where's Curtis...
...And we actually had conversations...
...I'm told there has been a game, weather permitting (and sometimes even when it's not weatherpermitting), for some twenty-five years...
...For much of my first four years with The Game, I would report to my spouse stories about the dozen or so regulars...
...Maybe it's possible that someone could actually get tired of basketball, unlikely as that might seem to the rest of us...
...Commonweal 31 October 26,2001...
...We didn't make the funeral...
...And so it continued...
...Peter Feuerherd writes frequently for Commonweal...
...At least their first names...
...There are lots of people you come in contact with in New York...
...The glimpses of other outside lives also began to emerge...
...They are simple questions...
...Curtis, our tallest player, moved to Oklahoma for a year, only to return after his wife passed away...
...The tradition continues each Saturday beginning at 8:30 a.m...
...Guys move a little slowly on the social front, however...
...And it has always been a kind of big-city tradition...
...We would have had a contact list...
...I would describe them, using ethnic "handles" and occupations, and my wife would look dumbfounded...
...But when we heard of the death of the young daughter of Joe, the Italian Catholic, most of us made it to the wake in a show of solidarity appreciated by our grieving fellow weekend warrior...
...They are part of the landscape, in some ways a regular part of your life, like the newsstand vendor you buy the Post from every morning...
...It has been hyperbolically asserted in the weeks after September 11 that everything about life in New York would change...
...John, the guy from Brooklyn who pedals his bike over every weekend, would teach my gangly boy how to assert himself under the boards...
...the Chinese computer techie whose game kept getting better...
...It is a thought too horrible to contemplate aloud...
...And then another asked, "Where's John...
...You better come earlier if you want to get a game in the good weather, however, and be prepared to sustain some minor bruises, scratches, and an occasional elbow in the gut if you dare go near the basket...
...Yet there is a different edge...
...I hope it happens next week...
...My foul calls were argued with accusations that, as a Catholic writer, I was just maybe a wee bit hypocritical to unjustly accuse others of rule violations...
...There was the Jewish real estate guy with the great outside shot...
...They might be on vacation...
...Until then, I just wish I had bothered to break through the anonymity of big-city life at least once and gotten a phone number or a last name...
...She was right, I sheepishly admitted...
...We haven't seen those guys since before September 11...
...Nobody mentions it, but I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking it...
...They might just be sleeping in late on weekend mornings...
...You don't even know most of those guys' names, do you...
...Benny was Jewish, however, and so the ancient custom of quick burial applied...
...Every Saturday morning I look for John and Curtis to show up...
...But such routine inquiries in today's New York are no longer so simple...
Vol. 128 • October 2001 • No. 18
