Bushwick Basketball: The Blog

This blog is now about basketball in Bushwick. Specifically, the brand of Bushwick basketball played at Gilbert Ramirez Park on McKibben Street.

The court sits between a children's playground and a chain-link fence, shadowed by old warehouses in a neighborhood at the edge of gentrification. The playground features a mock-subway system complete with signs for the P Train, and on the other side of the fence Hispanic kids play handball against a massive cement wall. A sprawling junkyard stretches across the one-way street, and young plane trees are scattered inside the park. Project housing is about six blocks away, and Bed-Stuy isn't much further, but an organic grocery store is closer still, and signs in the large windows of converted lofts nearby advertise cheap studio space for artists. The west side of the park has a narrow community garden filled with weeds, wheelbarrows, planter's soil, and clay pots. A ten-foot wrought iron fence, black and spiked, encloses the whole space.

Today's feature: Player Profile.


NICK

Nick is a white male in his mid-to-late thirties. He lives in my building a block from the park, and I've played with him about five times to date. When I first met Nick, I was shooting for teams with a group of black and hispanic kids who played high school ball together and are now in their first year of college. Before Nick came through the gate, they spotted him jogging down from Bogart Street, dribbling his ball. Nick was wearing the same outfit he's worn every time I've seen him play since- a gray sweat suit and a white do-rag. "Ohhhh shit," said Nelson, one of the college kids. He pointed. "Here's our boy."

Nick is short and thin, and moves with a sort of spastic quickness. He has a perpetual five-o'clock shadow, and sullen eyes. His posture is somewhat hunched. When he jogged through the gate and onto the court, he looked up quickly and shouted, "yo, what's game?" Without stopping to listen, he took two hard dribbles toward the basket and pulled up abruptly. His jumpshot sailed well past the rim.

Nick plays point guard, and he's more or less competent while handling the ball. When he finds himself with an open lay-up, he usually propels the ball with far too much gusto, and rarely converts. His jumpshot is erratic, at best, and his technique is odd to behold. Jumping in the air and kicking his legs forward, he holds the ball at the top of his head for an illogically long time, releasing the shot only milliseconds before landing. This results in a shot that is completely without arc, and follows a flat path that typically ends with a hard collision against the front rim.

He often finds himself in arguments in the middle of a game, and is a favorite target of locals. That first day we played, he often referred to the ball as a "rock," and Lewis, a black kid who spends his time between points doing a wobbly-knee dance, kept saying he'd prefer to play with a ball. "Yeah bro," said Nick, "I'm really droppin' mad slang with 'rock.'"

On our way back to the building, after our team lost by a considerable margin, Nick told me he was a keyboard player. Kanye West had asked him to play on his latest album, and offered him millions, but Nick had to decline. He explained to me that he was in the process of trying to build his own empire, and playing with Kanye would put that dream in jeopardy. "It was a heart decision, you know, brother?"

When I played with Nick Monday, and he'd missed most of the shots he'd taken in the course of a game, he told me this was just the beginning. "It's only March," he said, "by the time August comes around you'll think Ray Allen's out here. Every shot drops."

Last weekend, I played four-on-four with a group of white guys who mostly live in the artist lofts on McKibben Street or in my building. When the guys playing are mostly white, the rules tend to change slightly. The biggest shift is that every ball has to be taken out past the three-point line after a change of possession, regardless of whether it hits the rim. When a newcomer joined the game and mistakenly shot a lay-up after a stolen pass without bringing it out, Nick said, "nah man, we're playing white boy rules."

"You're white, too, dude," said Laurence (or L.B.), a white, 6'6", late-twenties player with a decent post game and a great shot. "I hate to say it, but you're white."

"Yo, I ain't white, bro," Nick shot back. "I'm Arabic."

He caught up with me again for the walk home. "I hope y'all didn't take me wrong when I said 'white boy rules,'" he told me. "I ain't racist, bro. Your white's side your right side, right? Nah, I don't mean it like that, but you know what I'm saying."

"I get you," I said.

Nick and I found ourselves on the same team in a full-court, 5-on-5 game yesterday. We won 22-16.



Personal results, 3/26: Team won 22-16. Miserable shooting performance. Shoelace broke mid-game. Hit winning three-pointer- only made jump shot of the game. On the plus side, several beautiful passes.