Books : Inside the Cage : Excerpts

Preface: West 4th Street and the Ron Artest Affair

No good book is truly original; nothing worthwhile is created from the imagination alone, with no precedent and no tradition. Inside the Cage is one of many accounts of basketball and the inner-city experience, and as such, it is about urban life as much as it is about basketball. Its most obvious predecessor is a book called Heaven Is a Playground, written twenty-five years ago by a young sportswriter, Rick Telander. Telander focused on street scout Rodney Parker and the Brooklyn kids he was trying to get into college so they could play their way out of the ghetto.

This story, like Telander's, follows a single year of playground basketball in New York City.

In this book, Heaven Is a Playground is revisited twenty-five years later. Even some of the same characters, Rodney Parker and Fly Williams, for example, appear here. But this is a story told by an older man about other older men, so it looks at the people who have stayed involved with summer basketball here for three decades and turned a pleasant run into an enduring New York social institution.

The book explores the most broad and fundamental principles of the street game, and it attempts to understand what lies beneath the game's most blatant features -- the leaping, the shouting, the tricks, and the physical confrontations -- and what is not so obvious: the culture that has been created within the park.

The story has two central characters. The most important person is Kenny Graham, the man who started the West 4th Street Pro-Classic back in the 1970s and who continues to run it today. The second character is the Cage itself, a tiny park between West 3rd Street and West 4th Street on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. Kenny's benevolent dictatorship here, combined with the natural discipline enforced by the configuration of the Cage, has produced some great basketball and even better people.

This account does not romanticize eccentric black athletes who can jump to the moon but cannot function in normal society. Instead, it demonstrates that institutions created in the ghetto by the people who live there do the community more good than something imposed by a remote bureaucracy. Inside the Cage is about having fun, sticking with a good thing, and making it better.

Thus, this book should be a welcome antidote to the Ron Artest affair of November 19, 2004. After Artest went into the stands in Detroit to punch out courtside spectators -- one of whom had thrown beer on him while he lay on the scorer's table, taunting Detroit fans -- Commissioner David Stern said that this was the single worst event he had seen in twenty-one years of running the NBA, and he banned Artest from playing for the rest of the year. The entire episode was played and replayed on television, in slow motion and super-slow motion, until America couldn't stand it any longer.

The violence in city playground games can be even worse. But in the Cage at West 4th Street, it is not. While the culture of the National Basketball Association appears to have been deteriorating over the past two decades, the culture of many inner-city parks has been improving. Why is this so? And why do we not know more about it? Why are inner-city black men better able to take care of themselves than the superorganized and superrich NBA?

Money alone does not solve the problem, and it may even make matters worse. The rage and frustration of men living in what they perceive as a hopeless, oppressive environment has been well documented -- in movies like Straight Out of Brooklyn, by Matty Rich, and in books like Native Son, by Richard Wright. This rage still exists, and it is likely that Ron Artest feels it, despite his annual salary of $6.2 million. Yet because so many big businesses -- and unions -- have so much invested in the success of the NBA (each separate team is a big business itself), the problem there will be finessed and negotiated; it will be viewed as a business problem that requires a consensus-based business solution. Unfortunately this approach seldom fixes anything.

At West 4th Street, impulsive violence is understood, even sympathized with. But still, it is not accepted. Players who cause trouble are simply not invited back. More likely, they are identified and dealt with before they can do any harm. That's how problems get fixed in real life, and that is what Inside the Cage is about. Real life.