Order on the court

In Providence's neighborhoods, hoopers from all walks of life mix it up

by David Andrew Stoler

Driving down Valley Street on the West Side of Providence, you'll come upon a basketball court orphaned by the city. No longer on the list of city courts that the Providence Parks Department claims responsibility for and takes care of, the court is cracked and crumbling. Grass is sprouting everywhere; glass is strewn about.

And yet this court, in the blistering 90-degree July heat that has hushed some of the busiest courts in Providence, is bustling. Three young men -- two white, one black -- are playing hustle at the south end of the court, where a well-built Rasta with long dreads smokes dope and rhymes to his friend about "Jah" while he dribbles a ball around the game.

On the north rim, a serious game of three-on-three is going down. Four of the players are Hispanic, one is black, and the other is white. The play is almost entirely in Spanish, the usual trash talk translated into la puta cusses.

And now a young Hispanic player wearing jeans and loafers takes the ball up for a dunk and gets fouled hard enough to knock away the ball, the resonant slap of flesh on flesh making the call clear. "Call the cops!" he yells, the first words I hear in English.

Eventually, I join in, although the court has some unexpected etiquette: three times during the two games I participate in, the play just stops, silently and without impatience, as one of the players leaves the court to deal drugs. Later, when I ask a young man why the court has been abandoned by the Parks Department, he nods to all the players on the court: "We need a new surface. We play down here, everybody plays down here," he says. "But they want to get rid of us. This is the hotspot -- too many drugs down here."

I'm white with bleached-blond hair, short, and Jewish. And yet not one word of this is mentioned. I get no hassle for playing, no hassle for being here, other than a "so you livin' like that" and a smile when I get into my nice car to go home, the very comment implying an intimacy created over the last hour spent playing.

The joy of playing Provcat ball, of hooping in this city, is two-fold. First is that I met, playing at Valley that day, a drug dealer, a young father, and the Jamaican-born son of a crack addict, all of whom I never would have known had I not wandered outside the confines of my own neighborhood. Second, I met them all and played with them, without reservation or racial or cultural comment.

The language part

Language seems as good a place as any to explain why this happens in Providence and elsewhere. It is, after all, so often thought of as a key into people and culture, indicative of what a people find important, what defines their lives and how they see themselves. There are classic examples: the long list of words in Eskimo that translate into our "snow," for example.

Sports, like peoples, cultures, and classes, have their own languages as well. Most of these involve the metaphors of war, men doing battle for pride, victory, and defeat. Football may be the most blatant, with teams wanting to "crush," "kill," and "batter" an opponent.

But the prevailing language in basketball isn't one of war generals or civilized battles. For all its Indiana legend, basketball is a city game, a poor man's game. The places where it's played best are our poorest -- Bucklin, Camp Street, Gano, Smith Hill -- places where language is one of the few outlets to power and becomes strong and aggressive as a result. And yet, for all that aggression, something happens when people step onto the basketball court. Not much interpretative discourse necessary, really, to understand the mindset changes when what are referred to as "guns" (arms) off-court become "wings" on it.

The class and race part

Indeed, the language of basketball is one of escape, of relief. The language change here showing how, on-court, the common weight of disempowerment can disappear. There are levels of respect there, too, but they are, in fact, born of empowerment. It's not race or money but skill, whether or not you can walk it, that matters. No one's gonna dis your "pay-less" kicks if you're blowing by them, and the bills to buy the Jordans don't mean anything if you can't pick and roll.

Unlike the off-court world, where people so often judge you by things you can't control, the language of basketball empowers in a straightforward and clear way. If you can play and know the street rules, well then, you can play. And it is in this way that race -- that most weighty and insurmountable of topics, the classifier and divider -- can, if not disappear, at least begin not to matter.

Providence offers us a particularly good opportunity to see this at work. That's the beauty of hoops here: we are, for a city of our size, damn diverse. Portuguese, African, West Indian, all sorts of Asian, Hispanic, whites of all backgrounds and religions, Providence has us all. And we're just not that big a city to keep very separated -- neighborhoods overlap and people talk, particularly on-court. In a city where the East Side's super-rich live not one full block over from Fox Point's deep depression, there's no way each class, each race, and each culture can have its own court.

And so on-court, we mix and, in fact, want to mix. If you speak the language of hoop, if you play and run and get a kick in the pants by adrenaline when you snap an 18-footer over a sprawling defender, you don't want your pool of competitors to be limited to people and players just like you. You want to play against everybody. Of course, prejudices do manifest themselves. Walking up to some of the hardest courts in the hardest areas of the city, you can hear the jawing going on:

"What do you think this is, the WNBA?"

"Stop cryin', you bitch!"

At Candace street, near the Chad Brown housing project in Smith Hill, the game is almost entirely black: of the 20 or so people playing or waiting to, I see one Hispanic, four Asians. The intimidation is instant and instinctual, an inner-awareness of my glaring whiteness.

But get this: now a black man about the size and shape of NBA roughneck Anthony Mason, mouth full of gold teeth, comes up to the side of the court where I stand. It is perhaps inappropriate that I expect a hassle, feel a tug of tension as this stranger approaches.

And now he smiles: "You in this game? You playin'?"

On a recent tour of Providence courts, this happened to me several times, always in the roughest neighborhoods and something I've rarely seen before, never outside of Providence. People actually went out of their way to invite a stranger into their game.

In New York, hell, almost anywhere, it just doesn't work that way. Standard protocol is that you wait by the side of the court and if you want to play, you do one of two things: you either find out who on the sidelines has next game and then ask if you can get in on it or you call "nexts" after them and gather your team yourself. If you want to play, it's up to you to do it.

But in Providence, this small city with so many different ethnicities living on top of each other, things are different, can be different. Most of the prejudice at Candace or anywhere else comes not from the court but me. There is the occasional comment (i.e., a couple of missed shots might get a "This ain't hockey") and although I don't necessarily forget who I am, where I come from, everybody just gets past it once the game starts flowing.

And it happens all over the place in Providence. Just today at the "Wick," located between College Hill and the poorer neighborhood of Fox Point, eight of us of entirely different circumstance and being and situation played together. One black, one Jew, a recent immigrant from Venezuela, two sons of Portuguese immigrants, a Pole, a white, middle-aged father, and an Italian. Two of us were Ivy League- educated. Three of us didn't -- and won't -- finish high school.

And we played, and what was an issue was an illegal pick or whether or not so-and-so traveled. Race, though, background and class, not so much.

Of course, not all is glory on the court. There have been fights at the Wick; things have been stolen. Maybe three years ago a Providence police cruiser drove right up onto the court, mid-game, to arrest one of the participants. We stopped, watched, and once cruiser and criminal were gone, picked up an extra man and continued the game.

No, people all don't get along, clearly. Not even in Providence. The South Side Boyz gang it vs. the Latin Kings; West Side won't be denied its propers; the Chad Brown don't want you drivin' through, etc. But sports can -- and so often have -- defined the best and worst of our human prejudices. From Adolph Rupp and Jesse Owens to Jackie Robinson and Tiger Woods, sports have revealed to us our failures and then given us the opportunity to improve.

Why it's bigger than the first two parts

Of course, that revelation comes in all sports - track, football, golf, etc. But what makes basketball different, what makes it a special thing, is something greater than this, something that goes beyond race and class and has to do with humanness only -- and our ability to transcend it.

The fact is, you hear so many people talking about hoops like it's some spiritually transcendent thing. Just look at the titles of basketball books and movies: Hoop Dreams; Glory Days; Soul of the Game. Then there's Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior. Hell, Phil Jackson has made a career of preaching, of all things, Zen hoop. And it tends to make you gag a bit.

The reaction is to say that it's like any other thing -- particularly like any other sport -- that people do and then talk about in big ways, aggrandize with words to make it seem important. It's the language game again, this time basketball's "civilized" denizens (read: older, white-establishment members) using language in their own way, for their own purposes and justifications.

But in no other adrenaline sport is the force that we fight (and here you'll note just how hard it is to escape the war metaphor) so much bigger than us. In every other team sport, the game is primarily people vs. people, and while it's true there is, in basketball, that offense-vs.-defense aspect, the defining game is played above people.

The true foe in hoop is gravity itself, that force that reins in humans more than any other, except maybe time. Gravity, above all things, makes us small -- tiny beings stuck fast to a big, big world. It shapes almost everything that we do and are, keeps us from flying and speeding like our souls so often seem to want. And we challenge that restraint the only way we without NASA-backing can -- by jumping, leaping, by trying to break free, if only for a second, from that which defines us.

That's the glory of hoops -- basketball at its best. It's something that you only taste every now and again playing, maybe after a particularly tough day at work or a bad week with your girlfriend. The redemption is the opportunity to not only lose yourself, lose your race and your class and the problems of the struggle of the daily, but also to shed the entire human condition, the human weight of being a small body among billions of other small bodies in a really big universe. It's a fundamentally human straining, the push to be "of the soul" without earth and its binds.

That's basketball at its best, of course. At its average, it is just hooping -- the heart beating, the blood flowing fast. Movement and the physical. Running and jumping and playing and the like. It is not going to war, not fighting with guns. Just playing. Like a kid. With wings. Flying, for a second.

---

Providence got game

---