Is Heaven Still a Playground?
Chicago Basketball has always been the sport of two seasons: winter and summer. Winter is when money is made (NBA, NCAA, etc.); summer is when legends are made.
Every summer in most urban areas around the country, the game rediscovers itself. Resurrects itself. On concrete.
This summer...Different. Including in a city that claims as many -- maybe more -- street basketball legends than any place in the world.
This summer, the basketball courts in and around Chicago have been dry, almost empty. And calls to other cities indicate the situation is pretty much the same in New York, Baltimore, LA, Houston, D.C., Philadelphia, Oakland, Birmingham, Atlanta and Gary, Ind.
It's probably because I live here, but the decline in the number of kids hooping on the streets, on outdoor courts, in Chicago has been particularly noticeable.
Is it that video games and other sporting or extracurricular activities are pulling the kids away? Maybe. But maybe it's something else, too. Maybe the violence and the gunshots in the city this summer are doing more than harming and killing people. On the streets of Chicago, they may be killing a game, too. A game responsible for giving the city some of its life.
According to a recent report in the Chicago Tribune, 303 people were shot and 33 of them were killed in the city in the 31 days of July. That's an average of almost 10 people per day hit by gunfire, and more than one per day killed by it.
And those are just the numbers that have been reported.
Beyond anecdotal evidence, it probably isn't possible to prove the connection. But it doesn't seem like a stretch to me to link the much-publicized increase in random, often nonspecific, non-gang-related violence to a decrease in use of the more than 150 public courts that grace the city from the west side to the south suburbs. And caught in the middle: basketball.
The silence on the courts is far from golden, silver or platinum.
Do I think the shootings over the summer have had an effect on people playing basketball in the streets? Absolutely...kids already don't play as much as they did when I was coming up (some has to do with the emergence of the AAU and Grassroots hoops movement), but now the parents are scared. And so are the kids."
When urban areas go through periods of violence like Chicago has experienced this summer, the effect on lives beyond those who are directly involved in it is sometimes overlooked. In this case, the soul of a sport has been damaged. And maybe lost.
Basketball used to be the pulse of summer here. The sounds of the game were the heartbeat of the city. All day and most of the night, you could hear balls bouncing and arguments agitating. Drive, walk or ride almost anywhere in the city, and you'd see bands of brothers lining fences and sidelines waiting to get "next".
Now, it seems, everyone is trying not to be next -- next to have his life ended or altered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The basketball courts used to an escape from the streets that called to kids with their less righteous alternatives. They used to pull them away from that mayhem. Now, like thousands of other kids who just want to play ball, that is much less of an option. Now, it's either find a gym or die trying.
Some say the weather is part of the reason kids haven't been populating the courts the way they used to. (Chicago had a record 46 consecutive days where the temperature was over 80 degrees this summer.) Some blame the heat for the escalation in the behavior that has accounted for so many black and minority youths becoming gunshot victims. Police data indicate that a disproportionate number of the shootings in the month of July occurred on the city's south and west sides, areas that are predominantly black.
Others blame the economy, the high unemployment rate and a lack of job opportunities that are giving so many kids nothing to do but wild out. Some say it's simply the state of the world we live in now. Get used to it.
Some of the basketball purists -- high school coaches, former players and local street legends claim (as I did earlier) that AAU ball has taken more kids off the public courts than the threat and fear of getting shot has, and it's a possibility. But it's hard to believe it could be the prime factor; the AAU circuit has been strong in Chicago for the past 15 years, and the city has never looked this desolate when it comes to basketball.
The shootings and the drug trade have stopped kids from playing ball (outside), the drug dealers have taken over the playgrounds and it's open season out there. The playgrounds and basketball courts have become battlegrounds and I can't blame these kids for not playing ball outside... I haven't played a game of outside hoops in close to two years (which is strange because I spend countless hours, days, outside playing in and around the city growing up).
Summertime shootings have become bad, so routine, in the 6th Ward that the city officials have "disabled" the basketball courts at the famous "Nat King Cole Park" by putting locks on the rims...and then ordered that the hoops should come down altogether.
I read a story in the Tribune back in mid-May, there was a Chicago policeman, that said "It's starting to feel like it's expected in this community. When people think of the South Side of Chicago, they think violence. In Chatham, that's not what we see. It's happened, and we're going to fix it so it doesn't happen again."
Three days later, on May 19, he was shot and killed in front of his father's house during in a robbery attempt of his motorcycle. The house is directly across the street from the basketball courts.
Used to be the old saying of "Shoot Hoops, Not Guns" could be a rallying cry for a campaign to stop the violence, but it's too late for that now. It's too late for Michael Jordan, Derrick Rose or even President Obama, three people who represent and are deeply connected to the culture of basketball in Chicago, to say something that might shift the thought patterns of the knuckleheads who refuse to cease fire, or that might convince thousands of kids that it's safe to return to the parks to play ball.
Summer's over now...
I am left to drive around the city and watch an integral part of the beauty of a game become extinct. And I ask myself: What happens to a sport when the fear of being shot while playing it forces the game into obscurity?
Out…Cundiff
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