Streetball in January

I played basketball yesterday at Rodney Park North. It is an outdoor court that sits above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that cuts through the neighborhoods of the city. There is a chain-link fence preventing any balls or people from falling down the steep incline onto the roads below.

At home I got ready to go out to the court and I put in my contact lenses and put on some tearaway pants over my shorts and a long sleeve t-shirt over my yellow Flash shirt. When I got outside, I realized I didn't need the long sleeve shirt or the pants. What I did need was a pair of sunglasses. It is early January and there I was dribbling a basketball to a nearby court to shoot some hoops on a beautiful day. I couldn't believe it, but I took full advantage of it.

After shooting around by myself for a few minutes, I couldn't believe there wasn't anyone else playing there. I've visited and played at other courts in the neighborhood and this one is the best.

There are probably 6 basketball courts closer to where I live, but I choose this one for a few reasons. It's clean, it has a great surface, it has break-away rims and best of all, the hoops have mesh. It is the rare court I've seen in Brooklyn to have mesh on the rims. And I'm not even talking about just some ripped, frayed mesh. This is crisp and clean and helps to create that happy swishing sound when the ball drops through.

Along with that sweet, inner-city soundtrack of cars honking, sirens blaring, people shouting and trucks honking on the BQE, you get good-as-new mesh. Why go anywhere else?

I shot around for about an hour and a half, and on some long, high arching jump-shots the ball seemed to brush the bottoms of the wings of the pigeons flying overhead.