Basketball Never Ends
 At 72, Louie still got game. |
A couple Sundays ago, I went on down to Chinatown – no, not to get my dollar dumplings, a 50 cent massage, or to play in a New York Rockit tournament that Denny Lee was organizing (after all, it’s been real cold if you haven’t noticed outside), but rather to watch a group of men run in their regular Sunday morning pick-ups that they’ve been doing since 1969.
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Okay, first, get back in your chair, cause I know you just fell out of it.
No, ’69 is not a typo. 1969. Nixon was the president. Led Zeppelin released their first album. Apollo 9 returned safely from the moon. John Lennon married Yoko Ono. The Vietnam War was just reaching its midway point. The Brady Bunch came out. UCLA wins the NCAA title...
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Labels: chinese, pickup ball
4 Comments:
Reminds me of the ESPN piece Living and Dying for the Game, passed onto me in May 2006 by San Francisco Chinatown open gym "commish" Thomas Lee. We've got about 30 more years before we reach the level of the New York Chinatown posse.
Jerry Shih, 58 and uncle of a Bay Area dreamleaguer, chimed in to say that there's still space for his Sunday evening run at Irvington Community Center in Fremont.
It has become a mere numbers issue, as only 7 guys showed up the last two weeks, so young bucks are welcome. Email info@dreamleague.org if you're interested.
A few years ago, my dad was still running at a Chinese seniors' open gym in Sunnyvale. So we now know of at least 3 mostly-Chinese "masters" pickup ball going on somewhere in the U.S.
Weird how these things come in waves. Here's an NPR audio report dated 3/31/2007 about a group of 60-somethings currently in Portland...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9261627
Speaking of Louie Lu (who my dad says he remembers) and the Taiwanese national team, there's also a Job Hung, who in 1984 played in the Jones Cup for the Taiwan national team.
Coach Hung was recently seen playing with dreamleague's very own young CCAA AL-Elite squad in the Chinese Olympics in Silicon Valley. He runs the organization called CCAA...
http://ccaabasketball.org/media (scroll to the bottom to see vintage Hung pics)
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