[URBAN NOTE] "The city’s game: Scenes from Toronto’s love affair with basketball"

[rfmcdonald]

I quite like Nick Faris' National Post photo essay explaining how, and why, Toronto is a basketball city.

The boy with the ball has a tousled nest of black hair; it bounds in the air as he dribbles and swivels and spins. He started walking at nine months old and dunked on a family friend’s toy hoop six months later. Today, he is a quicksilver point guard, a disciple of Allen Iverson’s crossover — “You can switch directions very quickly,” he says — and a student of basketball and its history: He counts Iverson, Wilt Chamberlain and “Pistol” Pete Maravich among his favourite players.

The boy, Delsin, is 11, and on this sunny fall afternoon in downtown Toronto, he has gone outdoors to shoot with a friend, Romello, his teammate on the major atom East York Eagles. The Eagles finished 20th in the province last year; with a new season around the corner, they have ambitions of placing higher, and maybe even winning it all. First, though, there are other opponents to conquer.

As the boys shoot on one basket — Delsin lobbing floaters on the run, Romello firing jumpers from the baseline — two teenaged boys stroll onto the court and commandeer the other hoop. They’re each a head taller than Romello, and at least two bigger than Delsin.

No matter. Delsin sidles across half-court and asks them to play.

“At first, I said two-on-two,” he said later, explaining why he instead recruited a third teammate, a boy of Romello’s height who had wandered over to the court alone: “They were kind of bigger and taller and everything.”

And how, given those circumstances, does he think his team fared?

“Pretty well.”