From the Chicago Tribune
June 19, 2005

Finding intimacy in a game of pickup street basketball provides sportswriter lessons in life

By Bonnie DeSimone.

Former Tribune staff reporter Bonnie DeSimone is a freelance writer in Philadelphia. Her recent work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and ESPN Magazine.

The literary genre of sociological analysis through sport has become crowded, and original takes on the subject are increasingly hard to come by. That is even true of the subcategory of street and pickup basketball.

Since then-Sports Illustrated writer and current Chicago Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander's "Heaven Is a Playground" was published in 1976, several male authors have steeped themselves in the culture and used the game as a vehicle to muse about the socioeconomic dynamics of the inner city. Playing with the boys who want a ticket out also serves as a way for a transplanted narrator to gain self-knowledge.

Melissa King's new collection of basketball essays, "She's Got Next," is distinguished by her gender and the fact that no one she writes about is famous or aspires to be.

At 27, a restless King decides to leave her native Arkansas "for somewhere cold, expensive, and the setting for at least one violent television show," and she chooses Chicago's Near West Side.

Her job at a natural-foods company is secondary to her methodical exploration of the city through basketball. She joins a co-ed league, plays in open-gym sessions in a North Side park district complex and at the New City YMCA, and infiltrates the pickup scene at Eckhardt and Wicker Parks. While vacationing in Los Angeles, she works herself into games from Venice Beach to Inglewood.

King is drawn to people and places with rough edges, and she correctly reflects that her romance with urban pioneering borders on the reckless. But she has the requisite qualities for a successful hoops nomad: raw skill, adaptability and a high tolerance for the occasionally combustible mix of age, sex, race, talent and temperament on city courts.

An unwritten etiquette usually keeps everyone in bounds, and King insightfully identifies its universal elements, such as how much posturing is too much. "[Y]ou're not that great of a player if you're too excited about a good game, or not that smart of a person if you let yourself believe a day's grace is permanent," she writes after watching a player in Los Angeles overdo his celebration.

Children are constants in the games. King often befriends them and navigates the tricky shoals of involvement.

King thinks vaguely about being an intellectual mentor to 14-year-old Tina, a girl from the projects she meets at the "Y," but winds up doing more prosaic things like taking her shopping at K-Mart.

One day in middribble, Tina blurts out that she might be pregnant, and she later tells King she was raped. Then she announces she is gay. She vanishes from the gym and King's life overnight, leaving King to wonder how many of the girl's stories were true.

Ultimately it doesn't matter, King decides:

"I've learned to be a little less concerned with being taken advantage of, especially by a kid. . . . What bugs me now is, I should've taken her to the museum. . . . I should've taken her, on the outside chance it could've changed everything."

The watchful, self-conscious King also takes shots at relationships with men during her years in Chicago and recaps these forays somewhat tersely, including a passage about a near date rape. King eventually moves back to Arkansas to be with a man, a mistake that plunges her into a depression alleviated only when she picks up a ball again.

King's tone is conversational and self-deprecating, and although a few early phrases clank off the rim (she compares the interminable Chicago winter to an impacted wisdom tooth), the prose matures with her.

Later essays trace her gradual weaning from the immediacy of everyday play. King chronicles the toll of age: "I could still feel that missing first move in the moment it should have been there, shadowy and present and vaguely amputated."

Finally, in a natural progression, King becomes a volunteer coach for a 4th-grade girls team. Her attention to detail pays off in clear-eyed portraits of hovering parents and the girls themselves, vivid personalities who scrap one minute, hug the next and range from diligent to disinterested. Seeing King distill her accumulated street sense into lessons that benefit her pint-size athletes makes satisfying reading.

King concludes the book with a short epilogue in which she watches a game from the sidelines with her 2-year-old son. After readers have followed her halting progress through the world of adult relationships, it feels foreshortened not to know how she came to have a child and whether she has found a partner. But perhaps our closeness to her, like an alliance formed on the playground, is meant to be transient.

As she writes, "With pickup ball, it's always about the game, but sometimes it's also about the fleeting intimacies the game makes possible."