Basketball
HOOP DREAM: The Story of New York's Dyckman League
This is the story of how New York’s legendary Dyckman League, which turns 30 this year, became the domain of rap gods and NBA stars and eventually transformed a neighborhood forever.
Back in the beginning — long before the arrival of Kevin Durant and Kemba Walker and the other transcendent talent from around the planet, and the big-time sponsorship deals and the movie cameras and rappers and the 100-plus teams playing on summer nights in front of hothouse crowds of 2,000 people, the arena so swollen with howling spectators spilling onto the court that it feels 10 degrees warmer and a hundred times louder than the next block over — before all that, there were just three friends.
Three buddies, a ball and a court.
Kenny Stevens and Omar Booth and Michael Jenkins grew up together there, in the Dyckman Houses of Inwood, right at the tip of the knobby finger protruding from the top of Manhattan. They had been friends for as long as anyone could remember, and so often in each other’s company that their moms fed and watched and disciplined each of them like their own. The three young men loved all sports, but the highlight each year was the Holcombe Rucker League, a citywide basketball tournament that used to be held there. But always, even after the tourney was gone, the painted concrete and hoops at what is officially known as Monsignor Kett Playground formed the nexus of their lives and friendships. It was the place that, even after they grew up and started to scatter, pulled them back together.
“The basketball court,” Stevens explains, “was home.”
Stevens was in college back then, in the late 1980s, playing ball at Kingsborough Community College while Booth played at West Virginia State and Jenkins worked a full-time job. But when the long summer days arrived and they all returned home, they naturally wanted to find a few guys and get a game and then buy a six-pack and sit around the park for hours afterward, laughing and trash-talking each other about this steal or that rejected layup.
Dyckman League
© ANDRE JONES
That was about the best you could hope for in Dyckman in those days, when the crack epidemic was ripping the neighborhood apart. “The crack era destroyed a lot of families,” Stevens recalls. “Our safe haven was playing sports.”
And sports for a lot of New York City kids meant streetball, a bruising, showboating kind of playground basketball that had blown up around the city, in Harlem’s Rucker Park and on West 4th Street in lower Manhattan in particular, drawing big, noisy crowds. Stevens, Booth and Jenkins decided it would be fun to round up a few friends, and ask those friends to bring a few other guys, and put on their own event — their own modest little streetball tournament.
If you're not going to play hard, don't get dressed. There's no coasting in Dyckman Park.
They scrounged together six teams, drew up a schedule. They assigned each team their own T-shirt color, each guy added a number to the back in marker or tape and the five-game season commenced.
What happened next was striking to the three young men: There were no crowds, but even though no one else was paying attention, the players took things pretty seriously anyway. They played hard, and while everybody stayed friendly enough, nobody wanted to lose. Stevens, Booth and Jenkins quickly determined that they needed referees, and each of the teams donated $50 to hire them for the remaining games, thus making the first modest investment in the Dyckman Basketball League. There was barely enough money left over for a trophy.“
Fifty dollars didn’t really go nowhere,” Stevens says now, laughing. “But we made it work.”
Kevin Durant
© ANDRE JONES
Things didn’t just happen overnight. The story of how Dyckman became the Dyckman now celebrating its 30th anniversary is the story of steady, measured steps made over endless hours in the heat and sun, intermingled with meteoric leaps forward.
The league generated a modest buzz, and the number of teams grew to 10 after the first year, then increased to 12 a couple of summers after that. By year six, the organizers added divisions incorporating players of a wider range of ages and abilities. Sets of bleachers were shoehorned into the setup, and soon an announcer began calling out the action over a PA system. Stevens and the others didn’t invent their format, which drew on the earlier success in Rucker Park and West 4th, but the area already had a proud heritage, having been the first hoops home to Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a generation earlier.
On the 10th anniversary, Converse signed on as a sponsor, with the league now attracting top-level Division I college talent. But Stevens made sure the neighborhood knew that this was its own event, created for Dyckman by people from Dyckman. This included the large incoming Dominican population who found a home in Inwood and elevated the whole clamorous, drum-banging courtside scene.
Word spread, and various basketball luminaries began making the trip to the top of Manhattan to partake of the physical games and highly spirited environs. Marcus Camby was the first NBA player to show up, in the late 1990s, when he played for the Knicks. That was the first time it occurred to Stevens that Dyckman was becoming something bigger than he could have imagined.
Chris McCullough and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson
© Andre Jones
Others soon followed. Ron Artest, a Queens native who played for several different NBA teams and won a title with the Lakers, began to make regular appearances. The announcer would playfully poke at him, reminding the crowd that they were watching the NBA’s reigning defensive player of the year — right after someone drove past Artest and scored. Longtime NBA player Michael Beasley showed up and drew headlines in 2011 for pushing a fan in the face during a verbal exchange. Kyrie Irving, Tyreke Evans, Brandon Jennings all played there. Regardless of their star power, the crowd always let them know if they weren’t putting in sufficient effort. “If you’re not going to play hard,” Stevens tells people, “don’t get dressed. There’s no coasting in Dyckman Park.”
NBA All-Star Kemba Walker, who grew up in the Bronx, started playing Dyckman in middle school. He still comes, year after year.
“There’s a magic to Dyckman,” says Bobbito Garcia, a streetball player and hip-hop/sneaker legend who has played in 43 countries and in Madison Square Garden. “The only time in my adult life I’ve ever been shook to play was my first game at Dyckman.”
He’d heard the credo of the place: “Bring your game, not your name.” But Garcia didn’t fully appreciate it until, instead of automatically applauding him for gracing the court, someone in the crowd starting calling him out for wearing the newest out-of-the-box low-top Adidas sneakers, which were deemed insufficient for the game. Next thing he knew, the entire section was laughing. “I went up to Dyckman, I was a nobody,” Garcia says, laughing. “It’s not a warm, welcoming environment.”
In streetball, that’s a high compliment. This is a crowd that booed Safaree out of Dyckman last summer because it didn’t appreciate the rapper’s performance.
Scouts and recruiters have naturally become part of the mix. One summer, a Toronto Raptors assistant coach was in attendance the night a local legend named Corey “Homicide” Williams torched an opposing team for 30 points in a half. Such exposure later won Williams a tryout with the team — unheard of for a guy banging around a city playground. Williams was the last man cut from the Raptors’ roster just before the following season, then hovered on the fringes of the league before going on to play pro ball in Australia, where he won an MVP award.
In July 2011, Dyckman was home to the game of the decade for New York City streetball, Team Nike versus Team Ooh Way, each roster packed with local legends. Three thousand people wedged into every crevice of space with any kind of view, including on top of tree branches. Cops had to shoo kids off of a nearby roof.
Stories got told and retold and passed into legend. People would talk about how some nights, the driver of the 1 train, the subway line that passed overhead, would linger at the Dyckman Street stop, holding up everyone on board so he could catch some of the game, then blast his horn in tribute before finally moving off into the night. Whether this really happened or whether there were just an unusually large number of people exiting the train those nights — that hardly seems to matter.
Referee Eric Weaver
© ANDRE JONES
You never know who’s coming. That’s the first thing about going to games at Dyckman. The day in 2011 that billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban showed up to watch the action, sending tremors through the crowd, no one had bothered to tell Sharon Bond, vice president of marketing for Dyckman, until mid-afternoon. Same with Floyd Mayweather’s appearance last summer. And same with megastars like Durant, who played in a game in 2011 and dropped by to watch the action and sign autographs in 2016 and ’18. “You never know who’s going to show up,” Bond says. “You just have to be there. We were viral before the word viral came out.”
The second thing to know is that no one in or around Dyckman cares which VIP might show up that night — they’re going to the park anyway. “The people who really, really, really make this happen are members of the community,” Bond says. “It’s like glue, the people that come every day and bring their energy. The NBA players and rappers — they come because of that energy that exists here.”
Driving by in the offseason, Stevens is always gratified to notice that no one tags or trashes the court or bleachers or lights like they did back in the ’80s. For kids growing up in the neighborhood today, that would be like vandalizing your own bedroom walls. “If you live in Washington Heights or Inwood, it’s an aspirational tournament,” Garcia says. “Kids there don’t dream about getting good enough to play in the NBA; they dream about getting good enough to play in Dyckman.”
Streetball legends
© Andre Jones
And for those who don’t possess elite skills, there are other entry points. About 125 youths get paid summer jobs with the league every summer in cooperation with a city program, providing an essential vitality when the heat and the demands of the schedule exhaust everyone else by week four. Other kids stay involved in different ways, some by participating in the year-round skills-and-drills program. All of this is one of Stevens’ proudest achievements as executive director of operations of Dyckman Basketball. “The inspiration of seeing these kids’ faces, knowing they don’t have any place to go — them being part of it every summer is priceless,” he says.
But what you really notice when you plug into Dyckman is how many people have a stake in it. The same neighborhood families whose kids are playing in the games help support themselves by selling sausages and shish kebabs and drinks from tables around the court. The regulars who have been around for years have de facto assigned seats, so that newcomers who try to take them get nudged toward the back. On the biggest nights, the crowd spills onto the court, and when the ball goes out of bounds, the players throw it back in from in front of the spectators, not from behind the actual lines.
A DJ amps up the mood
© ANDRE JONES
If you visit Monsignor Kett Playground at lunchtime any day this summer, there isn’t much more to see than the hoops and empty seats and some kids and a ball. The place looks neater and sharper than most city playgrounds, but otherwise it’s exactly like when Kenny and Omar and Michael started meeting at the courts when they were young, battling each other in pickup games.
But around 4 p.m., the mood changes. A setup process begins, and electricity starts to build. “You blink,” Bond says, “and it happens in a matter of seconds.”
By 6, as the day begins to shed the worst of its syrupy heat and the shadows stretch and bend, all 1,600 seats will fill, mostly by people who live around the neighborhood. A DJ begins pumping in music and announcers take their microphones. The teams gather for a jump ball at center court, and the night is off and running.
The fans
© Andre Jones
This transformation is remarkable except to anyone who’s lived around Dyckman and watched it happen for 30 years. It’s even more remarkable to anyone who watched that first homespun tournament. The idea that that became this is almost unfathomable.
Except that in all the most profound ways, what happens now at Monsignor Kett Playground is exactly what it was when the three friends started it: the same court, the same community and the same game, showcased in all of its grace and thunderous force, its ferocity and beauty.
For Stevens, who is still good friends with Booth and Jenkins and now coaches the sons of the ballplayers he coached when he was younger, Dyckman mirrors life itself. You can grow older and wiser, but you don’t have to fully grow up, because you always have the game.
“A lot has happened since then,” says Stevens with a soft laugh. “I don’t even realize it’s 30 years, because it still feels like yesterday.”
ALL BALL: 5 other NYC streetball classics
Entertainers Basketball Classic — Rucker Park, Harlem
This is the granddaddy of them all, with a lineage that dates back to 1950. The organizers slyly suggest that the game on these Harlem courts beats that of the NBA, but you don't build this kind of spectacle without a little ego. Anyway, there's plenty of pro wizardry on display, with the likes of Kyrie Irving and J.R. Smith roaming the court in front of VIP fans such as JAY-Z, former NBA commissioner David Stern and Denzel Washington. If you plan to wedge yourself among the 2,000 spectators, arrive early.
West 4th Street — Lower Manhattan
Inside "the Cage," the basketball is rugged, the crowd is loud and the game feels claustrophobic for good reason: The court is smaller than regulation, just 57 by 35 feet. The fact that three feet of out-of-bounds space separates the court and the chain-link fencing hasn't prevented NBA bruisers like Anthony Mason and Lloyd Daniels from bouncing bodies around this venerable locale, which recently celebrated its 40th year.
Hoops in the Sun — Orchard Beach, The Bronx
The sand-and-surf atmosphere — intended by founder Joe "Pops" Cruz and his sons Joe Jr. and Randy to evoke an East Coast version of Venice Beach — looks chill enough, but the action is anything but. Launched in 2000, the program now boasts 50-plus teams and encompasses women's and youth programs. You can catch the exploits of hoops royalty, which has included Tracy McGrady during his prime and present-day NBA All-Star Kemba Walker.
Nike Pro City — Baruch College, Manhattan
Question: If it's played in a gym, is it still street ball? Luminaries like Kevin Durant, Greg Monroe and Nate Robinson aren't going to quibble over terminology when they can plug into the scene at Baruch on Tuesday and Thursday nights. There's still the announcer calling the shots, a DJ adding propulsive beats and free, astronomically entertaining hoops.
Full Court 21 — Various New York City Bouroughs
If you want to play in a summer tournament in New York (or more than 20 cities around the world) but don't have an elite game, there's Bobbito Garcia's 1-on-5 tournament, which is open to anyone. As the name indicates, it features a 92-foot version of the popular playground game where you try to get to 21 points solo. "no teammates," the website indicates. "You against the world."