The city game

By the standards of big-time basketball, Smith is pretty much a nonentity: a standout at Boston English and the University of Rhode Island in the early '70s, he never got drafted or invited to an NBA camp. His greatest glory came 26 years ago, long before the sport became a force in the entertainment industry, when he was part of the Boston Six, the high-school all-star team that shocked powerhouse squads from DC and New York by winning the first Boston Shootout, putting the city's invitational tournament on the map. Yet this morning, as Smith tries to keep his team alive in the John D. O'Bryant Old-Timer's League playoffs, it seems sort of pointless to worry about fame. Smith, a big-shouldered, bright-eyed man with a gold necklace under his purple uniform shirt, is someone to be reckoned with.

He does have the advantage of youth -- in what's officially a 45-and-over league, he's either right at the limit or a shade too young (either way, says league commissioner- coach-player Jimmy Myers, he does have two bad knees). But mostly it's a matter of talent. Smith is a sleek and assured player; though his team, the Raptors, is being befuddled by the crisp teamwork of its opponents, he keeps his head, works for his shot, cuts to the middle to rebound his teammates' misses. His game is powerful.

And so is the basketball world in which he built it: the city's patchwork street-level system of community-league, tournament, and pickup games. Even as the Raptors and the Magic are playing indoors, in the Shelburne Community Center gym, out on the park's terraced basketball courts there are two full-court games going at once, complete with referees and flip-card scoreboards -- part of the fifth annual Chill Tournament, organized by Willie "Chill" Veal Jr., the owner of a Dorchester auto body shop. Sixteen teams of adults and six youth teams have entered the event, drawn from as far away as Springfield by Chill's free hamburgers and the chance to compete. Later this same day, over at the Blue Hill Boys and Girls Club in Dorchester, a younger old-timers' league for the 35-plus crowd will be having its championship game.

Not that NBA players aren't the best in the world. But basketball, by nature and by design, just isn't a top-down thing. James Naismith invented the game to be a phys-ed activity rather than a spectacle, and the basic principles still hold. It takes less space than football or baseball. You don't need helmets or shoulder pads or a dozen and a half other people. Of the three big American-born sports, basketball is the least regimented and the most democratic; it flourishes in crowded public spaces, where people make their own amusement. The game is meant to be played. The game wants to be free.

Freedom comes in many forms. In a coed game of 21 at Malcolm X, a pair of slick-passing women help each other get around the long-armed males. At Columbus Park in Southie, two stumpy middle-aged men battle in the pivot like Chamberlain and Russell. A scrawny kid in Dorchester torments his bigger companions with a string of sneaky fadeaway jumpers.

Boston, says Chris Ballard, an ex-college basketball player who toured playgrounds nationwide to write the new guidebook Hoops Nation (Owl Books), is one of a special class of American cities "where you can take a ball and head out, [and] always find a game."

In the city proper, the parks department lists 115 playgrounds with full basketball courts, at least 20 of which have more than one. This does not include the full courts across the river in Cambridge, which are some of the area's finest, or the courts under the jurisdiction of the city housing authority and the Metropolitan District Commission. Nor does it include gyms, or half courts, or the courts in schoolyards and on church grounds, or the alleys and driveways and parking lots with hoops tacked up over them.

You will find the best games, most everyone agrees, at the Malcolm X courts, along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the relatively green and rolling section of Roxbury below Dudley Square. "This is the hotbed for basketball," says Alfreda Harris, the Boston School Committee member, former Shelburne Center director, and onetime women's college basketball coach who's known variously as the godmother and grandmother of Boston basketball. She is watching the opening games of the Chill Tournament from the sidewalk above.

There have been courts on this site since the late '60s, back when it was known as Washington Park. But the facility, renovated in stages from 1994 to last year, looks nearly new, with smooth green-and-red paved surfaces, the lines clearly marked. The rims on all four courts are true and unbent, with real string nets instead of chain ones or missing ones. There is no hint of the blasted asphalt and battered chain-link fencing that Hollywood associates with storied playgrounds; the city takes care of its parks (the other top playground in the city, the Jim Bradley Courts in the Back Bay Fens, is wrapping up an $80,000 reconstruction).

The city's commitment to basketball is a perfect example of how civic policy can improve civic life. Unlike other leisure-time activities, the sport is spread evenly around the city. You can't walk to the movies in Roxbury -- there isn't a single theater in the entire neighborhood, nor in Dorchester, Mattapan, or Jamaica Plain. But there are playgrounds everywhere, and some of the best ones are in neighborhoods where hoops is the proverbial only game in town.

As a result, the Menino administration enjoys an elevated reputation on the playground. "The mayor's very interested in keeping youth busy in their leisure time," Alfreda Harris says. As is, unquestionably, Harris herself, who moves regally through the crowds around the Chill Tournament. Large men take on the air of deferential schoolchildren around her; on spotting her, Chill detaches himself from the scorers' table and clambers up to the sidewalk to pay his respects.

The city's basketball culture thrives because there are the people and the community organizations to back it up, to make sure at least this one activity is effective and available. The history of hoops is the history of its backers, both neighborhood activists and regional giants -- the latter including Al Brodsky, a league organizer for 30 years and coach of the perennial AAU powerhouse Roxbury Titans; Leo Papile, now the Celtics' head scout, who runs the Boston Amateur Basketball Club; and Ken Hudson, the first black full-time referee in the NBA, who founded the Shootout. Harris sets down her own list in precise Palmer-method script: Jim Mahone, Jack Crump, Mike Haynes, Rindge Jefferson, John Shelburne, Harry and Dennis Wilson, Jim Bradley.

The result of this devotion is that basketball involvement is communitywide. Saturdays and Sundays, when the weather gets hot, players' and spectators' cars double- and triple-park along Martin Luther King Boulevard; people start cooking out on the grassy roadside strip. One afternoon early this month, says Seaburn Toombs, a 29-year-old who lives around the corner, he and his friends brought a leather couch out to the rocks overlooking the playground.

The strong sense of community can be, in this territorial city, a mixed blessing. On some playgrounds, at some times of day, there is a certain hostility that crops up toward visitors. If you're white and alone at Malcolm X, you may be asked to explain yourself. But the race question is rarely simple, in sports or in society. The first morning of the Chill tournament, an all-black group of spectators was riding one ref mercilessly for making calls against a white team from Stoughton. And one recent afternoon in Dorchester found Elmer Knudsen, a pale young Mormon missionary from Utah, resting in the shade by Ryan Park while his partner -- necktie snugly tied and tucked inside his shirtfront -- played half-court with a group of black and Hispanic kids. Playing basketball, Knudsen explains, is a way for the missionaries to "tell them that we're normal people."

But beyond any of its uses as a forum for social change and community activity, the street-level game is pure, simple sport. If it has produced leaders and role models, well, it's also produced players-- a line of creative and aggressive talent stretching back to the Boston Six and before.

Some of the stars went on to succeed in the NBA, after the example of Roxbury's Jimmy Walker, who joined the Detroit Pistons in 1967 and averaged 16.7 points per game over nine years, twice making the All-Star team. Of the Boston Six, Ron Lee fared the best, playing six years on four different teams. And Patrick Ewing, en route to college and pro stardom, wreaked havoc on the courts of Cambridge in the '80s.

Maybe the greatest local legend is Steve Strother, who crops up time and again when people name the city's very best players, but doesn't show up in the NBA Encyclopedia. After ruling the playgrounds in the early '70s, he had a decent career at Providence College and, like Carlton Smith, went undrafted. He now works for the parks department maintenance division; a 1995 Herald piece on playground legends focused on him, describing in detail his lingering ability to dominate, but the article misspelled his last name throughout.

Names are slippery on the playground: Chill Veal, listing the city's best crossover dribblers, gets to a guy named Tory -- "he plays on my team," Veal says, "but I don't even know his last name."

This is the reward of street success: fame tinged with inaccuracy. The legends of the game are actually legendary, untethered to historical record. Nobody films the games or publishes the scores. (Though the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield does have, through the end of June, a street-basketball exhibit featuring the work of Boston photographers.) Even before Harlem street player Earl "the Goat" Manigault, widely regarded as the most famous playground star ever, died last month at the age of 53, he had already ascended to Valhalla in a cloud of mystery. Had he really once stepped on a man's head on the way up to the basket? Could he actually pull off the "double dunk" -- go up, dunk the ball, catch it, and re-dunk it, all in a single bound?

Thanks to that lure, many pros have playground legacies of their own. A patch of pavement by the Malcolm X courts bears the shoe- and handprints of NBA players who've graced the playground there, from the late, sainted Reggie Lewis to lumbering Celtics center Brad Lohaus. Waiting for his team's turn in the O'Bryant League, 59-year-old Lemuel Mills recalls the time he faced Wilt Chamberlain in a playground game -- in which the Stilt was "pretty much the way he was as a pro," Mills says. "He could stop anybody coming to the basket if he wanted to." Another O'Bryant Leaguer, Darrel Cole, says he played against Julius Erving in a summer league in Springfield, when Dr. J was at UMass. Erving, Cole says, was "literally unstoppable."

The NBA, though, is the wrong yardstick by which to measure the playground game.

In the wider world, people think of street basketball as a tool, a way station to the pros. To the audience of a movie like Hoop Dreams, success means getting off the playground. But that's not quite it. Playground ball isn't a half-formed version of the big time: it is its own game.

This is often misunderstood, even among basketball fans. The phrase playground ball has become a term of disparagement to sports observers, who use it to suggest selfishness, unsound defense, and reckless play. But those parts of the playground game are exaggerated. Today's young pickup players, says O'Bryant Leaguer and Malcolm X habitué Clyde Adams, have better basketball skills than ever. "You won't get chosen if you don't contribute defensively as well as offensively," Adams says.

As for recklessness, if someone wants to try something unorthodox in an off-the-books basketball game, well, that's where most of the interesting stuff in the sport came from in the first place. Aesthetic concerns take precedence. "Anyone can dunk," says Chill Veal, using anyone in a narrow sense -- "it's just, how do you get to the dunk?" And next to watching the Bulls slowly grind up the Jazz, it's easy to see the appeal of a crossover dribble or an over-the-shoulder alley-oop.

Jimmy Myers, too, keeps up a running commentary as he stalks the gym, commissioner and sportscaster and ref all at once. "The flame will not be extinguished," he says.

Carlton Smith drives on the left side, picks up his dribble, and gets double-teamed. All in one motion, he bounces the ball off the forehead of one of the Magic players, Terry Finn, and catches it again, breaking free of the trap. A video replay would record that he dribbled the ball off his foot moments later and fumbled it out of bounds. But there will never be a replay. What lingers is the memory of the ball spanging off Finn's bald head, so quick and outrageous it's hard to believe it even happened.

The game proper works out like this: the Magic control things most of the way, running a patient, low-post offense through the towering Finn, who once played for Yale. But Carlton Smith keeps the Raptors close. Then, inside of a minute to play, the Magic, leading by four, forget to try running out the clock, commit a dumb foul, and turn the ball over to the Raptors. Who promptly nail a three-pointer, cutting the lead to one. The Magic are fouled immediately and make one of two free throws.

So with 16.7 seconds left, down by two points, the Raptors go to work. They inbound the ball and bring it up the court, where someone forces up an off-balance shot from the left side, missing. Carlton Smith gets the rebound, leaps, and launches a high-arcing jump shot. The ball hangs in the air, comes down wide to the left, no good, and is corralled by the Magic. The Raptors manage to get one last possession, with Smith streaking downcourt in hopes of another shot, but their desperate length-of-the-court pass is picked off. The final buzzer blares, reverberating painfully in the mostly empty gym.

For Carlton Smith, the playoffs are over. Which is anything but the end of the world -- in two weeks, he says, there'll be a whole new season under way.

Tom Scocca can be reached at tscocca[a]phx.com